Women in SET

Sometimes things just get to me. Media Planet published a supplement in the Guardian back on 30 October 2008 titled Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: the Problems and the Solutions. The supplement appears to have been commissioned by the Institute of Physics, who are prominent on the cover proclaiming, "Good practice benefits all". The cover is a mess of a design, but I will focus on the 3x3 grid of pictures which makes up about three quarters of the page. In this there are only two photographs of women: one a pair of smiling Asian graduates in mortarboards and gowns holding scrolls (who knows what discipline, or even if they are anything other than models in a PR stock photo). Now, where else have I seen this picture? Oh yes: http://buyessay.org/how-it-works/ That'll get quality graduates into SET.


Another pic is of a young blonde amongst skyscrapers interrogating a mobile phone or similar portable device. There is a picture of three very young girls each of a different racial type marveling at a hand pipetting a substance into test tubes. There is a photo of people of indeterminate gender in full white cleanroom or decontamination coveralls. There are two abstract images, one of molecules and the other of a glowing green binary bitstream. And, there are three pictures of military hardware: an ICBM labelled "United States", a jet fighter displaying the white star in blue roundel of the US Air Force, and what looks like a filthy great flamethrower, or a static rocket test, or a gas-air burst weapon; anyway, an exhibition of hideously inefficient combustion with billowing clouds of black smoke above a torrid fire stream.

Inside the supplement, big (very big) engineering, military technology and physics are conflated. The adverts tell the story: Atomic Weapons Establishment (full page) with a cubist abstraction of a woman's face made of various arty-techy mini images, Defence Engineering and Science Group (full page) with a besuited babe beside a Eurofighter loaded for bear, BAE Systems: Submarine Solutions, with a wireframe submarine (double half-page spread); Halcrow (full page) boasting what can only be described as terraforming megalomaniacal projects.

Sad, really.