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The new Nobel laureate in physics, Andrea Ghez, indirectly inspired an important test in science writing, the “Finkbeiner Test,” created to help reporters avoid gender bias. To pass this test….1/7
…an article about a female scientist cannot mention that she is a woman, her husband’s job, her childcare arrangements, how she nurtures underlings, how she was taken aback by the competitiveness of her field….2/7
…how she is a role model for other women, how she is the “first woman to…” The test was created by journalist Christie Aschwanden @cragcrest and inspired by an essay by my friend and mentor Ann Finkbeiner @AnnFinkbeiner which was about…3/7
…her effort to profile an astronomer—who happened to be Andrea Ghez—as an astronomer, and not as a female astronomer. https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/01/17/5266/.... “I’m going to be blindly…” 4/7
…aggressively, egregiously ignorant of her gender,” Finkbeiner wrote back then. The resulting profile of Ghez is lovely: https://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-star-tracker-1.12622 But, you ask, isn’t someone’s gender…5/7
…relevant, especially in physics where only 4 women have won out of 216 people awarded the Nobel Prize? As Ann Finkbeiner has pointed out, being the 1st or 1 of few women “says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her” https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/finkbeiner_test_gender_gap_fem.php ….6/7
… women are amazingly under-represented in the Nobels, and so far not a single black scientist has ever won a Nobel. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919116188/the-problem-with-the-nobel-prizes-in-science 7/7
