Monthly Archives: August 2015

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Nature’s Nether Regions, by Menno Schilthuizen, reviewed

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Jewelwing Love

Jewelwing damselflies (Calopteryx maculata) mating. (Flickr: Lisa Brown)

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, I’ve posted a long-overdue review of a terrific little book about naughty parts. Genitals. Junk. It’s called Nature’s Nether Regions, by evolutionary biologist and entomologist Menno Schilthuizen, and it puts the weird world of (animal) reproductive anatomy on full display, while avoiding the cliches and pitfalls into which so many popular accounts of sex and evolution fall.

The book’s subtitle What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves, might be a bit ominous to a reader familiar with the many hazards of evolutionary hypothesizing about human behavior, but Schlithuizen’s chatty tour of animals’ sexual anatomy dodges them all. He does this, in large part, by devoting far more time and attention to the “evolution” and “biodiversity” than to “ourselves,” putting the rather pedestrian reproductive arrangements of Homo sapiens in their place amidst the baroque diversity of appendages, receptacles, secretions, and behaviors other animals employ to multiply their kinds.

Go read the whole review, which includes some sampling of the natural history Schilthuizen covers, and then check out the book itself.

Queer in STEM survey of LGBTQ science professionals now published

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The first peer-reviewed paper from the Queer in STEM survey of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer scientists, engineers, and research professionals is now online ahead of print in the Journal of Homosexuality. It’s the first big, nationwide study of LGBTQ career experiences in the sciences — a potentially important resource to inform the policies of scientific employers and professional organizations.

Some of the most important points in the paper, which I wrote with collaborator Allison Mattheis, are

  • There are a lot of LGBTQ folks working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) — we had more than 1400 responses from STEM professionals across the United States, and in several other countries. (Edited to add: Does this mean LGBTQ folks are well represented, as a proportion of everyone working in STEM? We can’t tell from this dataset — but that’s something we hope to work on in a follow-up study.)
  • Most survey participants reported being completely open about their LGBTQ identity with their friends and family, but a large subset of them were not open at all with their colleagues or coworkers. (This is similar to the results of a survey of U.S. workers released by the Human Rights Campaign last year.)
  • Participants were more likely to be open to their colleagues or coworkers if they described their workplace as safe and welcoming.
  • Participants were more likely to be open to their colleagues or coworkers if they worked in a STEM field with better representation of women (see the figure below). This suggests that in fields with poor gender balance, the climate may be less comfortable for anyone who fails to conform to a straight male gender presentation.
Queer in STEM participants were more likely to be open to colleagues if they worked in STEM fields with better representation of women, as estimated from the U.S. National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) report. Regression with all STEM fields (solid line), p = 0.31; with Psychology excluded (dashed line), p = 0.02.

Queer in STEM participants were more likely to be open to colleagues if they worked in STEM fields with better representation of women, as estimated from the U.S. National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) report. Regression with all STEM fields (solid line), p = 0.31;
with Psychology excluded (dashed line), p = 0.02.

You can find the full paper on the website of the Journal of Homosexuality, or download an easier-to-read PDF copy of the manuscript here.