Ableism in the Age of the Coronavirus Pandemic

What is Ableism?

“Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior.” Ableism rears its ugly head in our society every day through large discriminatory practices such as the eugenics movement as well as minor ableism that is utilized when assuming someone’s disability must be visible for it to be a disability. On a day-to-day basis people with disabilities (or disabled people as some in the community prefer to use identity-first language) endure ableism and now during the COVID-19 pandemic they are facing ableist rationing practices.

Triage and It’s Ableist Undercurrents

Disability activists have been speaking up about how many of the guidelines and criteria for triage during the COVID-19 pandemic are proving to be ableist. As Elliot Kukla puts it, “This is not an unusual triage decision to make in wartime or pandemics; our lives are considered, quite literally, more disposable.” Various states are under fire for their ableist triaging policies, with many of them receiving federal complaints from a coalition of national disability advocates including the Center for Public Representation, The Arc of the United States, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos. In Alabama, the state’s policy (which has since been retracted following retaliation from disability advocates) conceded that “individuals may be excluded under Tier 1 with … functional domains include cognitive, neurological, and psychosocial. For example, persons with severe mental retardation, advanced dementia or severe traumatic brain injury may be poor candidates for ventilator support.” In New York, where the virus hit the hardest in the U.S., a doctor made the decision to take a non-COVID and terminally ill patient off a ventilator to save another patient with COVID. This disregards the fact that many disabled people are already living with the use of a ventilator. 

Statements and Solutions from the Disability Community

In an op-ed from The New York Times, disability rights activist and author Ari Ne’eman says that, “While many disabled people need ongoing medical care, many doctors view life with certain disabilities as unworthy of living. Disabled people who require ongoing ventilator care and other forms of expensive lifelong assistance are used to being asked by medical professionals if they would rather abandon life-sustaining treatment — often with the clear implication that ‘yes’ is the right answer.” These experiences are not an anomaly among the disabled community, as disability activist Alice Wong argues that, “Eugenics isn’t a relic from World War II; it’s alive today, embedded in our culture, policies, and practices. It is imperative that experts and decision-makers include and collaborate with communities disproportionately impacted by systemic medical racism, ageism and ableism, among other biases.” 

Others such as Joseph Stramondo, a philosophy professor at San Diego State University, are focusing on creating a paradigm shift in the way professional bioethicists respond to the coronavirus pandemic. He advises against using deeply biased quality of life judgment due to there being “a significant body of empirical evidence showing that there is a substantial gap between a disabled person’s self-assessment and how their quality of life is judged by folks that have never experienced their disability.” He furthers the discourse by highlighting Shelley Tremain, a feminist philosopher who studies disabilities and hopes to push the conversation away from just fixing triaging protocols. “The primary object of our analysis seems to sanction the idea that these hard choices are inevitabilities,” Tremain writes of triage practices. Instead, bioethicists “should be putting our energy behind efforts to reduce the need to make such choices at all.” 

Hanna Ditinsky

is a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is majoring in English and minoring in Economics. She was born and raised in New York City and is passionate about human rights and the future of progressivism.

Why Don’t More Women Win Science Nobels?

All of the 2019 Nobel Prizes in science were awarded to men. 

That’s a return to business as usual, after biochemical engineer Frances Arnold won in 2018, for chemistry, and Donna Strickland received the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics. 

Strickland was only the third female physicist to get a Nobel, following Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer 60 years later. When asked how that felt, she noted that at first it was surprising to realize so few women had won the award: “But, I mean, I do live in a world of mostly men, so seeing mostly men doesn’t really ever surprise me either.”

The rarity of female Nobel laureates raises questions about women’s exclusion from education and careers in science. Female researchers have come a long way over the past century. But there’s overwhelming evidence that women remain underrepresented in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Studies have shown those who persist in these careers face explicit and implicit barriers to advancement. Bias is most intense in fields that are predominantly male, where women lack a critical mass of representation and are often viewed as tokens or outsiders.

When women achieve at the highest levels of sports, politics, medicine and science, they serve as role models for everyone – especially for girls and other women. 

As things are getting better in terms of equal representation, what still holds women back in the lab, in leadership and as award winners?

Good news at the start of the pipeline

Traditional stereotypes hold that women “don’t like math” and “aren’t good at science.” Both men and women report these viewpoints, but researchers have empirically disputed them. Studies show that girls and women avoid STEM education not because of cognitive inability, but because of early exposure and experience with STEM, educational policy, cultural context, stereotypes and a lack of exposure to role models. 

For the past several decades, efforts to improve the representation of women in STEM fields have focused on countering these stereotypes with educational reforms and individual programs that can increase the number of girls entering and staying in what’s been called the STEM pipeline – the path from K-12 to college to postgraduate training.

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators Report Get the data

These approaches are working. Women are increasingly likely to express an interest in STEM careers and pursue STEM majors in college. Women now make up half or more of workers in psychology and social sciences and are increasingly represented in the scientific workforce, though computer and mathematical sciences are an exception. 

According to the American Institute of Physics, women earn about 20% of bachelor’s degrees and 18% of Ph.D.s in physics, an increase from 1975 when women earned 10% of bachelor’s degrees and 5% of Ph.D.s in physics.

More women are graduating with STEM Ph.D.s and earning faculty positions. But they encounter glass cliffs and ceilings as they advance through their academic careers.

What’s not working for women

Women face a number of structural and institutional barriers in academic STEM careers.

In addition to issues related to the gender pay gap, the structure of academic science often makes it difficult for women to get ahead in the workplace and to balance work and life commitments. Bench science can require years of dedicated time in a laboratory. The strictures of the tenure-track process can make maintaining work-life balance, responding to family obligations and having children or taking family leave difficult, if not impossible.

Additionally, working in male-dominated workplaces can leave women feeling isolated, perceived as tokens and susceptible to harassment. Women often are excluded from networking opportunities and social events, left to feel they’re outside the culture of the lab, the academic department and the field.

When women lack a critical mass in a workplace – making up about 15% or more of workers – they are less empowered to advocate for themselves and more likely to be perceived as a minority group and an exception. When in this minority position, women are more likely to be pressured to take on extra service as tokens on committees or mentors to female graduate students.

With fewer female colleagues, women are less likely to build relationships with female collaborators and support and advice networks. This isolation can be exacerbated when women are unable to participate in work events or attend conferences because of family or child care responsibilities and an inability to use research funds to reimburse child care.

Universities, professional associations and federal funders have worked to address a variety of these structural barriers. Efforts include creating family-friendly policies, increasing transparency in salary reporting, enforcing Title IX protections, providing mentoring and support programs for women scientists, protecting research time for women scientists and targeting women for hiring, research support and advancement. These programs have mixed results. 

For example, research indicates that family-friendly policies such as leave and onsite child care can exacerbate gender inequity, resulting in increased research productivity for men and increased teaching and service obligations for women.

People haven’t really updated their mental images of what a scientist looks like since Wilhelm Roentgen won the first physics Nobel in 1901. Wellcome Collection, CC BY

Implicit biases about who does science

All of us – the general public, the media, university employees, students and professors – have ideas of what a scientist and a Nobel Prize winner looks like. That image is predominantly male, white and older – which makes sense given 97% of the science Nobel Prize winners have been men.

This is an example of an implicit bias: one of the unconscious, involuntary, natural, unavoidable assumptions that all of us – men and women – form about the world. People make decisions based on subconscious assumptions, preferences and stereotypes– sometimes even when they are counter to their explicitly held beliefs.

Research shows that an implicit bias against women as experts and academic scientists is pervasive. It manifests itself by valuing, acknowledging and rewarding men’s scholarship over women’s scholarship. 

Implicit bias can work against women’s hiring, advancement and recognition of their work. For instance, women seeking academic jobs are more likely to be viewed and judged based on personal information and physical appearance. Letters of recommendation for women are more likely to raise doubts and use language that results in negative career outcomes.

Implicit bias can affect women’s ability to publish research findings and gain recognition for that work. Men cite their own papers 56% more than women do. Known as the “Matilda Effect,” there is a gender gap in recognition, award-winning and citations. 

Women’s research is less likely to be cited by others, and their ideas are more likely to be attributed to men. Women’s solo-authored research takes twice as long to move through the review process. Women are underrepresented in journal editorships, as senior scholars and lead authors and as peer reviewers. This marginalization in research gatekeeping positions works against the promotion of women’s research.

When a woman becomes a world-class scientist, implicit bias works against the likelihood that she will be invited as a keynote or guest speaker to share her research findings, thus lowering her visibility in the field and the likelihood that she will be nominated for awards. This gender imbalance is notable in how infrequently women experts are quoted in news stories on most topics.

Donna Strickland, outside her lab at the University of Waterloo, won her Nobel in 2018 as an associate professor.Reuters/Peter Power

Women scientists are afforded less of the respect and recognition that should come with their accomplishments. Research shows that when people talk about male scientists and experts, they’re more likely to use their surnames and more likely to refer to women by their first names. 

Why does this matter? Because experiments show that individuals referred to by their surnames are more likely to be viewed as famous and eminent. In fact, one study found that calling scientists by their last names led people to consider them 14% more deserving of a National Science Foundation career award.

Seeing mostly men has been the history of science. Addressing structural and implicit bias in STEM will hopefully prevent another half-century wait before the next woman is acknowledged with a Nobel Prize for her contribution to physics. I look forward to the day when a woman receiving the most prestigious award in science is newsworthy only for her science and not her gender.

Mary K. Feeney is a Professor and Lincoln Professor of Ethics in Public Affairs and Associate Director of the Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Studies, Arizona State University

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION