I’ve recently connected with a group starting a women’s bike collective in Montreal! This is exciting for a number of reasons, including women, bicycles and collectives.

Empowering women to take care of their bikes is an important issue for me. My trusty steed is not a complicated contraption, and I don’t need someone else to take care of it for me, but I do need a place to learn how, particularly a space that doesn’t make me feel like I am infringing on other peoples (mens) turf.

Also, people look at me like I am crazy for biking in the city, particularly in the winter, and keep offering the excuses of it being so hard, and how I must be so in shape, and how they could never do that. But the truth is that it’s not that hard, and I would have been a regular urban cyclist way earlier if I had felt like I knew what I was doing with this thing between my legs. I admit that doing the cycling all the time has impacted my lifestyle, but there is plenty of room between occasional recreational biking and hardcore every-outfit-I-own-includes-bike-grease cycling for those less extreme.

I want to support cyclists in the city. It’s not always a easy ride between the potholes and the aggressive traffic, and it won’t get easier without more people on the roads with two wheels instead of four. To give more people the option of bicycling by making it less weird or scary, and to bolster those that need some encouragement, some sharing and awareness raising is in order.

I hope this project becomes a vehicle for change in transportation issues, womens issues and the cycling scene in Montreal.

Finn

(ha! ha! get it? transportation, vehicle…. sorry)

Considering how long I’ve been trying to develop this particular set of ideas, it’s somehow hilarious that in the space of a week I’ve finished an article draft, presented at a colloquium on some of my more “alternative” analytic approaches, and submitted an abstract to a conference. Years of holding my research close to my chest have come to an end, at least for a first time, with this spurt of knowledge sharing.

I hope everything goes as well as todays talk. It wasn’t perfect, particularly considering Keynote somehow refused to give me the presenter view, but there was discussion afterwards which gave me hope that I might not be barking up the wrong tree.

Finn

Oh boy.You may recall, back in 2005, some controversial statements from Harvard’s President Laurence Summers on the issue of the underrepresentation of women among the faculty of hard science and mathematics departments in top tier research and higher education institutions. Most of the responses to this event were underinformed on the current social science evaluation of factors as well as facts, but one exception to this trend was a debate held at Harvard on The Science of Gender and Science between the cognitive scientists Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Fortunately for me, and maybe you, they filmed and transcribed this event, so feel free to catch up if you have a couple of hours before reading my responses.

They spend most of their time debating mathematical aptitude and gender differences, a subject that is near and dear to my mathematically sensitive heart. Both parties agree that there are statistical differences (i.e. trends, not absolute binaries) between the sexes that have biological bases. The conflict in the debate lies in how we can measure mathematical ability, and what impact is made by implicit descrimination.

As a mathematically inclined female with experience, at least as an undergraduate, in the field of mathematics, I was surprised at both the conclusions of the studies they cited and at their assumptions about success in mathematics, and hard science, in higher education and academia.
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