Discrimination: positive or otherwise
You can’t help wondering what direction your life might have taken, had things been different.
I still wonder sometimes, even after all these years.
I also wonder how history is recorded.
The current occasion that caused me to wonder is the image of a woman scientist posing in her drysuit in Antarctica.
Search as I may, I can’t find any reference as to when women were allowed to work as equals among men with the British Antarctic Survey. Up until well into the nineties, ads for research positions which were permanently based in the Antarctic stipulated that applicants must be male and physically fit (and—so the joke went—must have a beard).
My entire cohort was denied the opportunity to work in the Antarctic, at least with BAS. I remember that one of the scientists at the Millport marine lab had to start up a collaboration with the Australian Antarctic Survey so that he could allow his female PhD candidate to carry out essential fieldwork there.
And yet, look at the BAS website or at wiki entries and you find no reference that such discrimination ever existed. I can understand that they don’t want to bang on about it, but I believe that my generation of Zoologists is owed an explanation, and an apology. I think that current and future generations are owed the same if they are ever to make sense of their own history.
Whitewashing isn’t the answer and ‘positive discrimination’ is right out. Discrimination, no matter what motives lie behind it, is never positive.
Tags: Antarctica, BAS, Neither here nor there, research, Tag Index
Denni