Credit: Pixabay
Nowadays, equality is cool. Everyone is always going on about how women and men should get the same opportunities. In science, and hence, geodynamics, women are still a bit behind men for both historical (women only recently started graduating more in exact sciences) and unconscious-bias reasons. Therefore, there are lots of programs in order to stimulate women to go into science and, more importantly, stay there.
However, no one really considers the negatives of having more women in geodynamics. And that’s why I’m here. Let me present to you a very comprehensive and entirely unbiased list of reasons why there should not be more women in geodynamics:
- There would be a queue for the ladies toilet during coffee breaks at conferences.
- None of our male colleagues would be able to focus on work any more, because we are distractingly sexy.
- Ultimately, peer review would be less strict, because men would be afraid they might make us cry with their criticism.
- More posters would be pink or purple (so mine won’t stand out any more).
- The science would be better and there would be more discoveries, and who wants that, really?
And now the floor is yours: I hope I initiated a healthy discussion (without a weak seed! Or potato!) – surely you agree there shouldn’t be any more women in geodynamics, right? Leave a comment below!
PS: For those less trained in sarcasm or irony: I mean the complete opposite, of course – these are all silly reasons! I also wanted to highlight some recent comments on women in science that reached the media, to show that there still is a significant bias against women in science. There should be more women in geodynamics! Although I would be devastated about the toilet queue.
