The city of Boston is staging its annual marathon. Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to officially run the race 45 years ago, despite stewards trying to physically force the 20-year-old off the road. Here she recalls how a female runner caused such a fuss.

Anything long like 800m, or even longer, God forbid, was considered dangerous, de-sexing and de-feminising for a woman.

[It was thought] that their uterus might fall out and their legs would get big, and maybe they would grow hair on their chests.

Running made me feel free and powerful. It was what I wanted to do, so I did it.

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Kathrine Switzer


Has run 35 marathons
Won 1974 New York City Marathon
Campaigned for the women's marathon to be included in the Olympic Games, which happened in 1984
I asked my coach, Arnie Briggs: "Do you think I'll be welcome at Boston? Maybe it's against the rules."

We got out the rule book, but there was nothing about women being forbidden in the marathon.

It was just assumed that no woman in her right mind would want to run a marathon and they wouldn't be capable anyway. So Arnie said: "Fill out the form".

We were milling around together doing our warm up exercises, so all the guys saw that I was a woman. But obviously the officials didn't.

I was nervous and anticipatory going into the race, but I was confident I could do the distance because I had just done a 31 mile (50km) run [in training]. But like any marathoner, you worry about things you can't control - like the weather or getting blisters.

The gun went off and down the street we went. At the start of a marathon you are so relieved. You have done all these months of training, it's like going to Mecca. At last, you're the pilgrim, you're making your voyage, so I felt wonderful.

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Kathrine Switzer was interviewed on the BBC World Service programme, Sporting Witness

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Two miles (3km) into the race, a truck came along packed with timers, scorers and officials. Behind that was the press truck which was loaded with photographers - and they went crazy seeing a woman in the race!

Then all of sudden I heard a scraping noise of shoes running faster than mine.

I turned around and I saw the angriest face I had ever seen. It was a race official, Jock Semple. He grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me back, and screamed: "Get the hell out of my race".

He started trying to rip off my bib numbers.

With that Arnie jumped in and said: "Leave her alone. She's OK, I've trained her. You stay out of this."

He [Jock Semple] came back and grabbed me again. He had me by the sweatshirt and I was trying to get away from him.

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Boston Marathon


The oldest annual marathon in the world
Began in 1897, one year after the first modern Olympic Games
Like all marathons, it is 26 miles and 385 yards (42km)
Held on the third Monday of April each year - locals refer to it as Marathon Monday
The first woman to unofficially complete the race was Roberta Gibb in 1966. She did not have a race number and hid in the bushes before the start
Women were officially allowed to enter in 1972
The first major marathon to include a wheelchair division in 1975
Source: Boston Athletic Association
He was pulling me back when all of sudden, my boyfriend, Tom Miller, came running full tilt and hit this race official with the most beautiful cross-body block you could ever imagine, and sent him flying through the air.

Arnie's eyes got huge. He said: "Run like hell," and down the street we went.

I was crying, I was so terrified that my boyfriend had hit this official. I was embarrassed and really, really scared.

I realised at that moment that everything had changed. Suddenly it became a contest of proving that women could do it.

The official was trying to throw me out of the race simply because I was a woman. He didn't believe I was serious or that I was entitled to be there.

He had shamed me so much in front of the whole world. And then that turned to anger and I was so determined that nothing was going to stop me.

I thought: "I deserve to be here. If I can do the distance then why not? It's a public road."

[But] I was very afraid because this official had got up off the pavement, got back on the bus, and about half a mile later cursed at us loudly again.

By that point all the guys were on my side, so you can imagine what they said to him.

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I started the Boston Marathon as a young girl, and came out the other end a grown woman”

I just thought he was a man out of control, but he was also a man of his time.

In 1967 women were not supposed to be going out in public and doing these kinds of things.

I grew up during the race. I started the Boston Marathon as a young girl, and came out the other end a grown woman.

About 20 miles (32km) into the race, I came to the conclusion that when I finished, I was going to try to be a better athlete and try to create opportunities for women so they would experience the same sense of power, strength and freedom that I had.

When I crossed the finish line, it wasn't like "Wow! I did it - I did my first marathon". It was like "Wow! I've got a life plan!"

Kathrine Switzer was interviewed on the BBC World Service programme, Sporting Witness. You can download a podcast of the programme or browse the archive.

The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week — took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.

Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.

Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.

Remember, part of the defense against the racism theory is that the applicants are already skewed before any selection is done. Once again, this sounds like something you can only throw your hands up about: if it’s not a problem with innate differences, it must be a problem with our education system or some other “pipeline” problem.

So let’s take a look at this problem, too.

I once spent time with a promising entrepreneur who was not a white man. Because their startup sold a product that a lot of tech entrepreneurs buy, many of their customers were graduates of Y Combinator. So I asked if they were planning to apply. Their response: “oh, no, it’s a waste of time. Y Combinator doesn’t accept people like me.” Where did they get that idea? Surely not from YC’s partners, who as far as I can tell are scrupulously fair in their dealings with entrepreneurs. Rather, they got that impression by inferring that there is probably implicit bias in YC’s  admissions process, and that they’d be better off spending their time doing something else other than applying to YC.

We all know there is a huge gender gap in computer science. But that gap means that women receive only about 30% of degrees in CS. But 30% is a lot larger than 4% – and that’s a big math problem for advocates of the pipeline theory.

The various Becker models can be played with to produce differing predictions. But they all suffer from that perfect information assumption. Information about people's actual productivity is not freely available. If it was, no firm would ever hire someone unsuitable or subject new workers to trial periods and such. Indeed, if everybody knew everything else life would be very different from how it actually is.

More realistic models allow for missing information about the true productivity of workers, at least in the short-run. What takes its place? One possibility is statistical discrimination.

Suppose that Jane has applied for a job, gotten an interview, and now walks into the firm's human resources office, clad in a neat suit, carefully made-up and carrying her resume. How will the representative of the firm on the other side of the desk assess her likely productivity?

One possibility is that the interviewer will use both the information in Jane's resume, the information produced in the interview and the interviewer's own ideas about how people who "look like" Jane have fared in the past. Or how that person regards them in general. That Jane is female is part of that information.

This might mean that the way the interviewer sees women in general could affect the way Jane is viewed. If the company has never hired women before, Jane presents it with a risk. If the interviewer doesn't think much of women's abilities in the advertised job opening, Jane may be rated lower than an equally qualified applicant who just happens to be called Joe.

THE DATA BEHIND THE WALMART GENDER DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT
by Lisa Wade, 8 hours ago at 11:00 am
Today the U.S. Supreme Court has announced that the female employees of  Walmart will not be allowed to bring a class action lawsuit against the company, arguing that it has not been shown that they are a class.  It would have been the largest employment discrimination suit in history.

It seems timely, then, to re-post our summary of some of the evidence against Walmart.  Women are, on average, paid less, are less likely to be salaried, and hold lower-ranked positions than men.  This is true even though there is less turnover among women, meaning that the average female employee has been working at Walmart significantly longer than the average male employee.

Boundary violations are acts of dominance, of control. With or without conscious intention, they broadcast that we must accept our assumed and assigned place in the social hierarchy. Where the violation is explained as a “compliment”, here’s the usually unspoken message: a higher-status person has decided to acknowledge your existence and such attention has lifted you up from your otherwise-intractable invisibility. You can now express your thanks for graduating into full humanity, at least for now. In our own society, these things are all unspoken and their reality is vehemently denied. Should we protest or refuse our role, we are branded as too sensitive, too emotional, irrational, angry… all code words for “uppity”, for “who-does-she-think-she-is”, since those of lower status are not permitted to express anger, or a full range of emotion, to the same extent as those in the upper echelons. They are denied the dance of dominance. This is how society perpetuates inequalities at the most basic and subtle level, no matter what the public discourse is concerning our rights. It’s much harder to fight internalized assumptions that are so deeply rooted they are either invisible or taken for granted as “nothing to get excited about”.

Physical space and contact are not, of course, the only examples of boundary violations. Whenever someone interrupts, ignores or misinterprets another, or invalidates someone’s opinions and feelings by ridiculing or minimizing them, these tactics are also methods of erasing the integrity of those perceived as less-than. Though women are accused of being voluble, men interrupt us far more often than we do them. This is because of their assumption that they have higher social status.

At the top level of math abilities, where boys are overrepresented, the report found that the gender gap is rapidly shrinking. Among mathematically precocious youth — sixth and seventh graders who score more than 700 on the math SAT — 30 years ago boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1, but only about 3 to 1 now.

“That’s not biology at play, it doesn’t change so fast,” Ms. Hill said. “Even if there are biological factors in boys outnumbering girls, they’re clearly not the whole story.
...
Even if male math geniuses outnumbered female geniuses 3 to 1, Dr. Hopkins said, it would be reasonable to expect one female math professor for every three male professors at places like Harvard and M.I.T. “But in fact, Harvard just tenured its first female, after 375 years,” said Dr. Hopkins, who, famously, walked out of the room after Mr. Summers made his controversial remarks.
... Mae C. Jemison, . "But when a white boy would ask the very same question, they’d say ‘astute observation.’ ”

Equal Pay Day 2010
Use the map below to download an equal pay fact sheet for your state.

Identifying and understanding the distinct patterns of gender bias is the first step towards ensuring that bias does not derail your career.

The Center for WorkLife Law, with support from a NSF ADVANCE leadership grant, has developed this on-line gender bias training that teaches you to identify the four basic patterns of gender bias:

Prove it Again!
The Double Bind
The Maternal Wall
Gender Wars
This training also provides survival strategies for handling each type of bias, as well as:

A series of animated video scenarios illustrating each pattern
Video clips from interviews with gender bias experts
A pop quiz to help you test your knowledge
An on-line game—Gender Bias Bingo
Although gender bias is a serious topic with professionally damaging consequences, WorkLife Law’s gender bias training website offers a zany, brainy approach that allows you to learn what you need to know, share your experiences, and have fun in the process.

I decided to inoculate my daughter against this cultural stereotype by mentioning casually every now and then that I thought girls were naturally better at math. She is now pursuing a Ph.D. in applied math at Brown.
....
In response to real and perceived obstacles in connection with their doctoral studies, women appeared to experience a longer-lasting and more severe erosion of their self-confidence than men.

Difficulty collaborating with their male peers left some women less socially integrated within their departments. Women have also been discouraged from advancing
...
When we asked on our Web site, www.genderbiasbingo.com, for examples of gender bias in science and engineering, we were swamped with more than 400 e-mail messages in three days.

about the vital role of religion in providing a foundation for – or correcting – the global scourge of discrimination and violence against women.

Without really thinking much about it, I tried an experiment when I chose my new pseudonym:

I became a man (in name only)

Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

Where Summers sees innate differences, Barres sees discrimination. As a young woman - Barbara - he said he was discouraged from setting his sights on MIT, where he ended up receiving his bachelor's degree. Once there, he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister's work."

(01-15) 19:33 PST OAKLAND -- Oakland intends to fire 11 police officers for allegedly lying to obtain search warrants in drug cases, officials said Thursday.

Oakland City Attorney's statement.

one of the fired officers, Karla Rush, sued the city last week, claiming that she was terminated, and the others were not, because of her gender. She said she was the de facto secretary of an all-male squad who ended up writing more search warrant affidavits than the others because she was the only officer who could type.

“I will say something — and I don’t think I’m a confused speaker — and it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” Justice Ginsburg said.

This is the thread that Angel and Womanist Musings get so agitated on.

The casual dehumanization of children is one of my research interests as a master's candidate in history; it is something I am both fascinated with as an historical and political phenomenon, and passionately opposed to in practice. Children are people. As someone who is opposed to hatred and fear of any group of people based on innate characteristics (skin color, ethnic background, sexual orientation, gender) it appalls me how acceptable adults find it to express hatred and fear of children based solely on their age, or for behaviors that can be traced back to their developmental abilities. I see this among a wide range of adult populations, from feminists to Christian fundamentalists -- it's a form of bigotry that is in evidence across the political spectrum.

The evidence shows that if math ability were solely a function of sex, there would be roughly double the number of women in math-intensive careers compared to what exists now, assuming a 2:1 male-female ratio at the top 1 percent in math ability, Ceci said. "Women would comprise 33 percent of the professorships in math-intensive fields if it was based solely on being in the top 1 percent of math ability, but they currently comprise less than 10 percent."

Several large surveys examined in the analysis found that lifestyle choice had the largest influence on career preferences. In a survey of 2,000 33-year-old academic professionals in science careers who were in the top 1 percent of their high school math classes, the men devoted more time to their current job and said they would devote even more time in their dream job compared to the women, suggesting that this could lead to more productivity and promotions.

We found persistent and statistically significant racial disparities in policing that raise grave concerns that African-Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are, as we put it in the report, “over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.” After controlling for violent crime rates and property crime rates in specific neighborhoods, as well as a host of other variables, we found the following:

For every 10,000 residents, about 3,400 more black people are stopped than whites, and 360 more Latinos are stopped than whites. Stopped blacks are 127 percent more likely to be frisked, and stopped Latinos are 43 percent more likely to be frisked than stopped whites.

Since 1974, tiny Bulgaria has had nine female competitors in the elite International Mathematical Olympiad. East Germany/Germany has had 10, and the USSR/Russia, 13. Over that same time, the United States has had three.
...
Turns out that Larry is also partly to blame for the financial woes that our country finds itself in.

The New York Times reported this week that back in 1998, Chairwoman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley E. Born, warned Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers of the risks inherent in not regulating derivatives. The unregulated derivatives market ultimately would a big part of the unraveling of the U.S. economy.

In the 1800s, the Irish (whether in Ireland, Britain, or the U.S.) were often very negatively stereotyped. In many cases the same negative characteristics attributed to Africans and African Americans (sloth, immorality, destructiveness) were often also associated with the Irish. In fact, some scientists believed the Irish were, like Africans, more closely related to apes than to other Europeans, and in some cases in the U.S., Irish immigrants were classified as Blacks, not Whites.