Lessons from sport for science

Two of my interests recently intersected on ABC’s The Science Show.

As regular readers might know, I have been fascinated with the creation and ongoing development of the women’s competition of Australian Rules Football (AFL). (I am a card-carrying supporter of the Melbourne Football Club’s women’s team!) When I lived in Australia, it was clear that there were women who loved the game, but as spectators. The game was very much seen as being for blokes. I don’t think I ever heard about women playing in the time I was there.

Fast forward to a women’s league that is growing and making international waves, and that is expanding the audience for this sport significantly. The brilliant picture of the atheleticism of Tayla Harris (shown) and her subsequent poor treatment over it made news in the US. That was the first time I think I ever heard AFL on the news since moving here.

Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel talks about how this new league teaches us a lot about how creating opportunities makes a difference for people. And that science could learn from this (my emphasis).

So let’s go back and think about women’s AFL in the year 2000. (A year I lived in Australia! - ZF) If you were a schoolgirl in Victoria, you couldn’t play in an AFL competition once you hit the age of 14. Why not? Because there was no competition open to teenage girls. You had to wait until you were 18 to join the senior women’s league, and that league was a community competition, without sponsors, played on the worst sports grounds, in your spare time, at your own expense.

On the other hand, your twin brother with the same innate ability would be nurtured every step of the way. And by the time he turned 18, he could easily be on a cereal box and pulling a six-figure salary. Very few people in the AFL hierarchy seem to regard this as a problem. ...

(N)ow when a teenage girl has a talent for football in 2019, she has got role models on TV, she’s got mentors in her local clubs, she’s got teachers and friends who say it’s okay for a girl to like football. In fact it’s great for a girl to like football. She’s not weird, she's not an alien, she is a star. You can see that virtuous cycle starting to form: the standard of the competition rises, it attracts more women and girls, the standard of the competition rises. And we wonder why it took us so long to see what now seems so obvious: second class status for women in sport is not acceptable.

Second class status for women in science isn’t acceptable, either.

External links

Science should emulate sport in supporting women

This week on The TapRoot podcast...

I had the great fun of talking to Ivan Baxer and Liz Haswell for The TapRoot podcast!

We chatted about my two most recent contributions: a paper on authorship disputes, and my letter to Science about grad programs dropping the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). When I wrote those two articles, I didn’t have any connecting thread between them, but I found one for this roundtable:

(N)othing in academia makes sense except in light of assessment and how awful it is.

(And yes, I’m channeling Theodosius Dobzhansky via Randy Olsen.)

Confession time: I had never listened to Taproot until Ivan contacted me about being on the show. To prepare, I listened to a bunch of episodes. I became increasingly excited about the prospect of being one of the guests. Because The Taproot a damn good podcast. The discussion is great and the production values are excellent.

If you are a scientist, I recommend subscribing to The TapRoot – and not just because I’m on it! It’s on all the usual subscription services.

The recording process was not easy, though. Because I was mostly working at home at the time, we tried a test run of recording using my home wifi. Horrible. Awful delays, choppy audio, and just generally unusable audio.

Then I went to my university and used that wifi. You would think an institutional signal in the middle of summer with low use would be better, but nope. It seemed to be an issue with my particular laptop.

We finally solved the problem by using a LAN cable. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a physical cable to connect to the internet, but the old tech still works!

The screenshot is from audio editor JuniperKiss, who did a great job of making me sound more articulate than I am.

Please give the pod a listen or a read, since there’s a full transcript available!

P.S.—I mentioned in this interview that my department wanted to move away from using the GRE. That was no initiated by me, since I stepped down as our graduate program coordinator a while ago.

Dropping the GRE was the plan. I learned after this episode was recorded that our department’s attempt to drop the GRE as an admissions requirement was blocked by administrators up the chain. I think, but an not sure, that it was the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. As I understood it, they wanted data to show that the GRE was not predictive of success in our program.

I was surprised, because there are no shortage of peer-reviewed papers on this, some of which I cited in my #GRExit letter in Science. BUt I maybe should not have been surprised, since the Coordinating Board had required some master’s programs in my university add the GRE a few years ago.

I wonder why there is this desire to keep the GRE at the state level.

P.P.S.—I’m sorry I said “guys” as a generic for people.

External links

Taproot S4E2: The GRExit and how we choose who goes to grad school

Taproot Season 4, Episode 2 transcript

The TapRoot on Stitcher

The TapRoot on iTunes

Destination Mars

You too can send your name to Mars!

Interstellate goes international

Caitlyn Vander Wheele showcased the latest iteration of her Interstellate magazine project today! It is featured in the French magazine L’ADN, the their theme issue, “Game of Neurones.”

(Americans will not fully appreciate this pun, because Americans say the name of brain cells as “neuron,” with a short “o” – rhymes with “brawn.” Europeans have tended to favour pronouncing the name of brain cells as “neurone,” with a long “o” – rhymes with, yes, “throne.”

I couldn’t be more pleased that somehow, my contribution from Volume 1 snuck into the issue! You can see the abdominal fast flexor motor neurons of Louisiana red swamp crayfish in the upper left.

Merci, L’ADN! Je suis très heureux d’être dans votre magazine!

External links

Interstellate, Volume 1
Interstellate, Volume 2