Got my paper on self-confidence and gender in CS107 at Stanford (distilled from my thesis) accepted to SIGCSE (ACM Symposium for Computer Science Education) today!!

I went to a talk at the Stanford Humanities Center tonight by Anne Fausto-Sterling called "The Bare Bones of Sex."

If I have her right (and I did nod off for about 10 minutes :-/ because I'd been at school for 10 hours at that point), she advocates for a move away from the standard paradigm of nature/nurture - sex/gender, at least in biology, where sex is bleeding out to encompass all manner of difference. By this, I think she means to take on sociobiologists who use a static notion of sex as a program that is set at birth and plays out in the world. Instead, she calls for an understanding of biological questions (she uses osteoporosis as her main example) through an analysis of a system of interconnected subsystems that feedback into each other through someone's life. Sex, gender, and culture are the context in which this system operates, along with race, class, and many other factors. But the systems-approach, as a model, frames questions in terms of understanding of how many variables interact to affect the resulting phenomenon. This is in opposition to the traditional multi-variate analysis methods that lead to a proliferation of "knowledge" about risk factors (basically correlations) but don't get to the core of how the system works.

She said that medical feminism now is where academic feminism was 30 years ago. By this, I took her to mean that academic feminism is coming around to acknowledging that gender is only one of many cultural identities taken on by an individual and it may not even be the most important one. Furthermore, the importance of identities vary over time. But medical feminism still very much looks for sex differences in pathologies without accounting for the complexity of factors that might instead explain the sex difference found in the population studied.

As an example, she described some difference between white men and women in incidences of bone fractures. These differences, however, did not exist between african-american men and women, suggesting that other systematic factors may have been at work.

In long, I thought her talk was interesting. Her take on understanding systems is actually very natural to me, partially coming out of an engineering background and partially in my leanings towards qualitative research to explicate systems and quantitative research to give a reality check and testing ground for resultant models. I should read more.