Saturday, October 20, 2012

Tumblr of the Week: Mansplaining in Academia


Academic Men Explain Things to Me. The blog asks women students and faculty to share their experiences when "a man tried to explain your field or topic to you, on the assumption that he must inevitably know more about it than you do."

A sample:

Mansplaining of Unread Paper

I am a senior postdoctoral researcher in Physics, with 8 years experience. In our weekly paper meeting, I was presenting a paper by another group working in my field.

“Unfortunately”, I said “the paper is flawed because they used method xyz, which is not appropriate here because of reasons a and b.”

“What!” A male PhD student, who had just started his thesis 2 months ago and who had not read the paper exclaimed. “They used method xyz despite reason a and b?! This cannot be true.”

“Yes, it is”, I replied, irritated. “They clearly say they use method xyz.”

“You must have read the paper wrong”, he concluded.

1 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Wouldn't it be more parsimonious to attribute this to the "first year graduate student syndrome" than to any gender politics?