The 60th Annual Grammy Awards, an award show that celebrates the best musicians and songwriters have to offer, occurred on January 28, 2018. Bruno Mars brought home the most awards, including the prestigious Album of the Year for “24k Magic” with Kendrick Lamar and five awards for his “DAMN” album. Other winners included Childish Gambino, Foo Fighters and Ed Sheeran. Another winner was our very own Queens College alum, Arturo O’Farrill, who came home with a fourth Grammy for his album “Three Revolutions.” Jay-Z, who released popular rap album “4:44,” won nothing, although he had the same number of nominations as Mars. While the show had many amazing aspects and…
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Challenging sexism in the scientific field
A survey released last month found just 13 percent of women are members at the National Academy of Sciences, a private, non-profit founded in 1863. Throughout the world, less than one-eighth of women are members of scientific academies. Dorothy Ngila, a researcher who worked on the study, said scientific bodies should reflect the diverse amount of people in the world. “They should make sure their panels and reports are reflective of the diversity of our world,” Ngila said. “You cannot provide advice to government using only half the team.” At Queens College, women interested in the hard sciences face a field where the lack of diversity may cause problems, such…
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Panel stresses need and support of women in STEM fields
The Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding hosted an event titled Women and the Sciences March 11. A panel of women including CUNY students and professors discussed the challenges women face in STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, career fields. “The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is not only the competitive nature of the field, but the societal pressures women face,” Shoshana Wodinsky, Queens College neuroscience major, said. Wodinsky said she came from a very religious family that stressed a traditional life for her and noted the same ideals can be found in society. “You’ll more likely see an actress on television playing a mother than…
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Sexism runs rampant on Ratemyprofessors.com
Using an interactive tool with data derived from ratemyprofessors.com, the reviews describing male and female professors showed gender bias depending on the word searched. Benjamin Schmidt, assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, aggregated 14 million reviews from ratemyprofessors.com and created a search engine to see how words compared between professors depending on field and gender, concluding that certain positive words were descriptive of males more than females. One of the most surprising results was the “spectrum from smart to brilliant to genius, where each one of those is more strongly gendered male than the previous one was,” Schmidt told the New York Times. Schmidt provided a list of words overrepresented in gender bias on his…
