News

This “Women in Math” poster is everthing that is wrong with viral outrage culture

Normal Bates. Updated February 23rd, 2018

This “women in math” poster has gone viral and it’s easy to see why: why on earth promote an event with this name and fill it with men?

https://twitter.com/stephdriggs/status/966149009411751936

Seventy thousand retweets and likes and the comments asking for a better event than this:

And yet something else is actually happening. It’s basically a bad bit of poster design – it’s a group called “women in maths” a group for women and they’ve put on an event with some male speakers:

The club is led by two female faculty members, and three undergraduate students help with planning, including Balls-Barker. She said the goal of the event was to expose younger mathematics to the research within the department.

“Seeing as members of the club are already aware of research being done by the two female faculty involved, we chose other faculty members that have both been supportive of the group and are doing interesting research,” Balls-Barker said.

Balls-Barker recommended the speakers chosen due to prior experience working with each of them individually. She said all four of these professors are strong advocates for women in math.

The design for the poster was simple: the name of the club — Women in Math, pictures of the speakers and a description of the event.

Source: http://universe.byu.edu/2018/02/22/byu-math-department-students-respond-to-women-in-math-poster-ridicule/

The retraction gets (at time of writing) about 35 favs

Everything is broken isn’t it? Nothing is true.