I could not disagree more with almost all claims made by Scherr and Robertson in their paper “Unveiling Privilege to Broaden Participation.”1 I will focus here for brevity on just three particularly unsuccessful claims: (1) “[P]hysics strongly values male-socialized traits such as independence, competition, and individual victories. Objectivity and rationality themselves, the foundations of scientific ideology, are also male-socialized traits.” (2) “[C]onceptualizing Nature as governed by laws can suggest that it is ruled by a lawmaker, who is often implicitly conceptualized as a male authority.” (3) “[W]e need to open up the space of what counts as physics.”
Claim (1) should be highly insulting for women. The authors view women as having less independence, as being less objective, and as being less rational than men. I had to read this claim several times to remove my initial suspicion that perhaps the authors meant to say that some might view...