Idea Lab Noteworthy
Moshe Reuveni
The Science Byline Counting Project found that 81 percent of features in Scientific American are written by men.
Mind the Gap: Gender Imbalance in Science Journalism by N’dea Yancey-Bragg
Where are the women? That is the question a team of volunteers sought to answer when they began the Science Byline Counting Project last year. A small team of counters tracked 11 major publications over eight months to see just how many women were writing for the most popular forums in science journalism.
While there is certainly room for improvement, the data revealed a surprising level of gender equity. In total, female authors wrote 855 articles while male authors wrote 867. Women’s bylines outnumbered men’s in six of the publications studied. Among the other five, the largest disparities were in The Atlantic and Wired, where men wrote 71.4 percent and 63.6 percent of pieces respectively. Disparities emerged more clearly when the articles were categorized by length or topic. In all but two
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publications, women wrote the most short (less than 500 words) pieces. However, in longer works and feature stories, the gap was either slim or stark. In six of the publications there was near-perfect gender balance, while in the other five, men accounted for at least 70 percent of the pieces. Harper’s Magazine, for example, had a 50/50 ratio, while men wrote 81 percent of the features in Scientific American. When organized by category, female authors contribute more or almost equally compared to their
Idea Lab Noteworthy
Alisdare Hickson
A demonstration against air strikes on Syria in London November 2015. The ISD warns that women vulnerable to ISIS recruitment show further signs of radicalization as a result of Western bombing campaigns.
male counterparts in four out of seven categories, including environmental journalism, healthcare, and social sciences. Men lead by only a slim margin in the other categories. So, where are the women? It seems they are publishing in certain outlets much more frequently than others. Publications seem either en route to a balanced gender ratio or very far off. In The New York Times’ Tuesday Science section for example, women dominated bylines in features and long pieces, a trend not observed elsewhere. Discover and Popular Science also boasted much narrower gender gaps and featured more women writers overall. The Atlantic, Scientific American, and the Smithsonian, however, published
significantly more men than women across the board. The study’s data has its limits, as its co-chairs admitted in the report. It cannot explain the reasons behind the gender disparity it observed, and the volunteers only accounted for print publications, thus excluding popular online-only forums like Buzzfeed and Nautilus. These numbers also should not exist in a vacuum; it would be useful to see if these numbers are an improvement on the past or merely maintenance of the status quo. Hopefully, the study will challenge the publications that fared the worst to be more proactive in including women’s voices in the future.
Stemming the Flow of Female Migrants to ISIS Territory by Kendall Bousquet
Men raised in the West who have travelled to ISIS-controlled territories in order to fight have received their share of media coverage, especially following the release of ISIS video tapes featuring Western-accented ISIS soldiers. Less discussed are the stories of the women who leave their homes in the West in order to live under ISIS. Dozens of these women and girls—known as muhajirat, or female migrants in Arabic—have documented their lives pre- and post-migration to ISIS-held lands on
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Idea Lab Noteworthy social media websites such as Tumblr, Twitter, and ASKfm. The ways in which these women use the site, what insight it gives us into their reasoning, and the ways in which social media is used as a recruiting tool for ISIS have been documented in a report released by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) entitled “Becoming Mulan?: Western Female Migrants to ISIS.” The ISD issues a number of recommendations in the report on how policymakers, politicians, and the family of these muhajirat might respond to the crisis. Most of the muhajirat document on social media their alienation with the West and their feelings that Islam is under attack by American imperialism. In justifying the cause for which they are willing to leave home, they must make the case to themselves and then to other muhajirat that the threat facing Muslims is greater than the pain of leaving their homes and families behind. The ISD recommends that policy makers be aware that these women show further signs of radicalization as a result of Western bombing campaigns, and that such interventions may lead the women to pose a larger threat. The ISD also argues for counter-narratives to be developed by governments and families alike to act as a positive counter-influence for high risk young women found to be participating in these online communities.
New Driving App Helps You Save the Planet by Scott Osberg and Rebecca Hinch
Increasingly, Americans are waking up and realizing that climate change is a huge problem and that it is not going away. However, it is so big that many people think that there is not much that one person can do. Until now.
A new app can help drivers reduce emissions by as much as 25 percent, no matter what kind of vehicle they drive. On top of protecting the environment, drivers can also save money on gas and demonstrate their good driving skills to friends and family. The Green Driving Challenge makes the serious job of reducing carbon footprints fun and easy. The makers of the game describe it as a “Fitbit for your car—by keeping your car’s health in check and changing your driving style, you can also improve the health of the environment.” The Green Driving Challenge is easy and safe to use. Users simply download the app onto an Android device, plug in an onboard diagnostics scanner, and then do their best to eco-drive. Once a trip is finished, the driver can check his or her results on key eco-driving benchmarks. While some “smart” cars can help drivers improve their fuel economy, the Green Driving Challenge provides even more personalized information that can guide and teach eco-driving skills. A team of eco-driving experts evaluate each trip’s results and advise drivers on how to get the best fuel economy for their vehicles. The Green Driving Challenge makes learning to eco-drive fun, allowing drivers to compete with themselves or other like-minded drivers. Its benefits to the environment make it endlessly rewarding. Join the eco-revolution of improving the way you drive. Help save the planet, one trip at a time—and, enjoy the ride. Learn more about the Green Driving Challenge and download the game at https://www.greendriving challenge.com/.
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The Green Driving Challenge
The Green Driving Challenge app helps drivers to improve their eco-driving skills.
#SayHerName: Women and the Black Lives Matter Movement by Kendall Bousquet
The public spotlight on the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers in the United States has shifted the issue of police brutality against black communities to a level of public acknowledgement not seen since the days of the first televised civil rights marches in the 1960s. Black Lives Matter, an activist movement founded by three black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—has precipitated this public recognition. However, in the national conversation surrounding police brutality, the lives of black women taken by police brutality are rarely discussed. #SayHerName is a movement attempting to highlight police violence against black women. The death of Sandra Bland, which received more media attention than any other black female victim of police brutality, set off the spark from which the #SayHerName movement began. At protests following the discovery of her body hanging in a Texas jail cell after her arrest during a routine traffic stop, protestors chanted “#SayHerName,” invoking the need
Idea Lab Noteworthy for acknowledgement of black female victims of police brutality. A policy brief issued by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) after the movement was birthed explicitly calls for a way to “ensure that Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice, policy responses to police violence, and media representations of victims and survivors of police brutality.” According to The Guardian, 16 black women have been killed by police since the beginning
of 2015, compared to 321 Black men, but the AAPF states that there is no readily available database of police killings since, remarkably, there are no such records published by the US government. Recommendations by the organization include representation of the names and faces of black women alongside those of black men, acknowledgement of the high proportion of black transsexual women that have been murdered, and the need to conceptualize violence against black
women and girls within the context of systems like the school-to-prison pipeline and exponentially higher suspension rates for black girls in school when compared to their peers. Until names like Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Jones, Yvette Smith, and those of other black women killed by police are acknowledged and justice for their deaths served, the #SayHerName movement serves as an urgent reminder that the lives of black women and girls matter, too.
Otto Yamamoto
A vigil in remembrance of black women and girls killed by the police in the Bronx, NY in May 2015. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | May-June 2016 | Solutions | 11