My three-year old daughter is now doing ‘science’ in pre-school. It’s all neat contrasts: stuff that floats vs. stuff that doesn’t; stuff that is magnetic vs. stuff that isn’t; stuff that is soluble vs. stuff that is “in-soluble, Daddy”.

Hopefully one day she will be inspired to be a ‘woman in science’. Like these people, famously:

(Personally, I much prefer the parody version produced by appalled PhD students at the University of Bristol.)

The European Union reacted to the worldwide backlash of ridicule that followed the above video by replacing it with one where the girls wear white coats, tinker with test tubes, and overall behave less like, well, sexual predators.

Nonetheless, the EU’s insistence on using a pop ditty to seduce these lasses into the lab still seems a bit patronising to me:

“Come on girls, it’s a call to action/What we need is a chain reaction” still doesn’t convey to me how empiricism represents a sound way to resolve uncertainties.

Also, the pink ‘hug-the-world’ stuff like this on their website isn’t helping:

What next, flowers?

Oh…

Basically, the EU have stopped trying to coax women into science by appealing to their sex drives and fashion senses, and have instead decided they must be spoken to as if they had the brains of toddlers.

So long as they’ve come to their senses inside the next fifteen years or so, I suppose…

Brian Hughes

Brian Hughes is an academic psychologist and university professor in Galway, Ireland, specialising in stress, health, and the application of psychology to social issues. He writes widely on the psychology of empiricism and of empirically disputable claims, especially as they pertain to science, health, medicine, and politics.