At 8:58am on Friday 29th December 2018, gxj and I were waiting outside the roller shutters at costco to open. We were surrounded by a group of uncles, aunts, grandparents and grandparents who were over 50 years old, also waiting for Costco to open the door.
gxj said: The elderly get up early. When I went to the gym in the morning, there were only grandparents in the locker room.
Me: where is the gym? Next to home or caltech?
gxj: caltech's, oh no, only grandpa.
Me: That's because in their day, women were discriminated against for teaching positions, and there was a general belief that women weren't enough for higher research institutions. In order to make up for the mistakes of the past, the current academic world gives women "special" preferential treatment.
gxj: nonononono, that's because the granny is in the female locker room.
I, who are sensitive to equality like a hedgehog, are not unknown teachers.
Frances Arnold, a female professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, failed tenure-track peer review in the early 1990s, which was tantamount to expulsion for a tenure track assistant professor. The teacher, who took employer Caltech to court for sex discrimination, won, took the court's ruling and got tenure in academia. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018.
(I didn't find any google search support for the above information, but I choose to trust gxj's sources.)
Lynn Conway, a tenured professor at the University of Michigan and a former senior employee of Darpa (how do you translate this institution, the Department of Defense Research Institute?), 80-year-old when she appeared at the Darpa annual meeting in Washington, D.C. A homage to a legend in the field of electrical engineering. She was already an industry leader in the early 1960s, but she was fired from her employer IBM for choosing to be transgender without resorting to the law. Incognito found another job, gave up everything in the past, and became a leader again.
Ben Barres, Stanford School of Medicine and nervous system tenured professor in 1995, ready to begin the process of degeneration to a colleague wrote the letter mentioned in
“Even though I was already tenured and so did not have to worry about being fired — a frequent outcome for transgender people in other professions at the time (in many states, transgender people are still not legally protected from being fired) — there was much to consider.
I did not know of any successful transgender scientists, and I worried whether, if I transitioned, I would be able to get any more grants (it was already nearly impossible). Would new students or postdocs wish to join my lab? Would my colleagues reject me? Would I still be invited to meetings and so forth? Reading about the experiences of other folks in other professions who had transitioned, I strongly feared that a transition would end my career.”
California's Silicon Valley has been at the forefront of technological innovation and liberal (or leftist) thinking for half a century, and perhaps Ben Barres didn't suffer the negative effects he feared above in the latter half of his academic career. But if in 1995 a Californian academic celebrity was so concerned, I'm not at all curious why Lynn Conway chose to leave his country when he was fired from IBM in 1968.
And I don't want to speculate on the reason why Ben Barres changed from female to male. In theory, gender dysphobia should be a congenital decision and has nothing to do with social external influences, but after all, he has a twin sister who is not like this. In fact, when she was an undergraduate student at MIT, she was indeed the only person who solved the additional problem after being questioned by the professor that it was her boyfriend who helped her. And when he went to attend an academic conference to give a poster after his transition, some people who didn't know what to do came to chat up and say "Ben, you did much better research than your sister Barbara".
Of course this is a make-or-break hero world. The above minority characters, if not for their success in their careers, no one would know the struggles behind them about gender. In fact, these struggles happen to thousands of ordinary people who have not succeeded. Without the former, would this struggle be meaningful?
Looking back, I think that the film was actually not well done. Although I haven't read countless movies over the years, I still have some basic concepts about how a director should tell a story, control the rhythm, and the language of the shots. The rhythm of this movie has the same problem with "Transformers 5", that is, there is no climax and no urgency, so that the audience always has a bad feeling of "Why is it not over?" and "This is the end?".
But this script couldn't be born with a golden spoon. This is simply a story of lying and winning. Thanks to Trump, it was fished out of the script blacklist (presumably because the selection angle was too narrow and not dramatic). It's a pity that I saw Ginsberg's frustration as a woman, and her generous speeches on social revolution in court, but not her technical speculative skills and forbearance (not as good as this plain text ). This movie looks like a story of the perfect husband standing by a successful woman. But about her, Ginsberg's own appeal was not fully reflected. When Clinton nominated her, she said that this lady has a "big heart". Abandoning the honor of her life, I just think of a sister who lost her in a baby, a mother who lost her mother when she was a young girl, and her husband who suffered from cancer when she was a young woman. She raised the burden of the whole family, raised two children, and defeated three types of cancer in 30 years. The life of an 85-year-old grandmother who worked full-time was almost brought to tears.
Why do I say this is a lie-win story? Before 2016, nine members of the Supreme Court had kept libral, four conservatives, and four conservatives for about ten years (since Alito replaced Oconnor in 2006). In 2016, Justice Scalia passed away unexpectedly and vacated a conservative seat. But the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, took the lead in rejecting Obama's nominee for the judge, Merrick Garland, so that Trump, who unexpectedly took office, forced Neil Gorsuch's appointment by abolishing filibuster, and the balance of nine was maintained. The sudden resignation of another justice in 2018 gave Trump one more chance to make an appointment, and it comes at a sensitive time on the eve of the US midterm elections and when the Republican Party maintains a narrow Senate advantage. I won't say much about how gripping the appointment process for Brett Kavanaugh was. Anyway, the fact now is that the balance of the nine members of the Supreme Court has become five conservative and four libral, and the eldest of the four, Ginsburg, who has the most worrying physical condition, has suddenly become a social hotspot and was pushed When she came to the forefront, although she has been a cultural idol for more than 20 years, it was just self-entertainment for literary and artistic youth.
Originally, the judiciary and politics should be independent. Twenty years ago, regardless of the composition of the Senate, most of the qualified candidates were appointed by a ratio of 90 to a few or unanimous votes. Unfortunately, many original things have become "original". At the beginning of 2018, the documentary "RBG" was released, and "Gender Based " was released at the end of the year. The physical exhibition "The Times and Life of Ginsburg" is on tour at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. People then look back at social issues like sexism, egalitarianism, etc., but I don't think it's enough. When Ginsburg no longer shines because of being tied down by politics, when all the women/minority figures I mentioned above no longer expose the hardships behind their success, when a movie shows a story of a man instead of a woman s story. Then, as one of them, I am willing to shake my arms and shout "Fee at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last!"
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