Bad Science and Sexism

Let’s get started with a quick warning:

Science is a tool, and it can be used to do wonderful (or terrible) things, but in itself isn’t “good” or “evil”. So when I say bad science I mean bad as in badly made, not bad as in malevolent or unethical.

Scientists have their own beliefs, because scientists are still humans. So while perfect objectivity is impossible, it doesn’t mean that science is just as biased as every other potential source of information. Science improves over time, and as new discoveries are made old knowledge is revised, and while we’ll never get a perfect understanding of everything  we’re getting closer to it every day.

Unless bad science happens.

In an ideal world, a scientist would design an experiment which eliminates as much bias a possible, and then correctly carry out and then interpret the results using statistics and their scientific training. Next, the article would be peer reviewed by other scientists from the same field, who would look for errors that the original scientist might have made. In the real world, scientists design bad experiments, which might leave variables unaccounted for or just be based off of a bad premise, or, worse, are sometimes actively trying to influence the results for their own gain. For an example of the first one,  we have this, which, among other things, neglected to use a control group. Go read about it. Go on, Ben Goldacre’s writing is great. For an example of active malevolence, we have the MMR (measles mumps and rubella) vaccine scare (MMR ARTICLE). Basically, a scientist patented separate vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella, and then published an article with falsified data so that it showed that the MMR vaccines caused autism. Now we have outbreaks of rubella and measles in the USA for the first time in 50 years. Normally peer review should catch these studies, but because of flaws in journal publishing sometimes bad articles slip through the cracks, and sometimes the journal itself has ulterior motives.

Generally speaking, studies that use extremely small sample sizes, especially in anything biology related, such as psychology or medicine, need to have a large sample size to try to reflect the variation that exists in the population they’re studying. The experiment also needs to be designed in such a way that the researcher does not unintentionally influence the results.

Bad science reporting happens when a good study is misrepresented by reporters, or reporters take a bad  study and write articles about it. Bad science reporting can be caused by a reporter looking for a sensational article (see the MMR scare above), or a reporter not understanding the study. This is how such gems as “NINTY PERCENT OF YOUR DNA IS JUNK DNA” and “YOU ONLY USE A THIRD OF YOUR BRAIN” end up embedded in pop culture. Somewhere along the line, someone misinterpreted “Only 10% of your DNA is coding” and someone else misinterpreted “Only a third of your brain is involved in conscious thought”.  Journalists also tend to like articles that
So what does this have to do with feminism? Bad science and bad journalism tend to reinforce the biases that people have, such as suspicion of the medical industry and the belief that there is some magical untapped potential all humans posses.

But the biases people like to see confirmed the most are the ones that tell them it’s okay  to stereotype other people. In the 1800s bad science was used to attempt to prove that women weren’t as intelligent as men- using only the measurements of a tiny, tiny sample of skulls from men and women who lived and died in vastly different circumstances- or that women were naturally more irrational, or somehow magically predisposition to homemaking.

We still haven’t gotten over using bad science to confirms sexism, it’s is constantly showing up in the media, and people use it to justify doing very, very bad things, like denying rape victims emergency contraception or reporting that women tend to buy more "sexy" clothing and makeup , presumably to attract men to take care of them, which reinforce sexist stereotypes of women being gold diggers who can’t make it through hardships on their own.

Science education might help alleviate these problems, but it needs to be worked on from both the scientific and activism ends for progress to be made. Science can’t do anything to help people if the general population outright rejects it because it doesn’t fit into their world view, and activism needs fact to back up their arguments and expose harmful biases for what they are.

-Andrea Fontaine