This is definitely a self-tell. They will see an article or comments that only refers to her as a "scientist" with no gender and assume the article or person is referring to them as male because that's what they think when they see "scientist".
For context, there is a trend of correcting people saying scientists to "white man", because articles frame discoveries as "scientists discover x" when "x" had been widely known by the local population since that population got there.
However, this argument is fucking stupid because science has, famously, not categorized and described everything that exists, even if non scientists already know about it.
Yes, they discovered that it was a new species. If I had a rock on my desk for 20 years then one day ran a test that discovered it was a new element, I could say I discovered a new element even though I knew the rock existed.
That's kind of self-referential gaslighting. How can you tell if society is progressing in awareness (which it is) if every time you see "scientist" you think "white man" and justify it as assuming they were racist enough to put that? (Not you, the person we are talking about.)
That idea that "scientists discover x" being a substitute is correct, but is well-known today because it is a historical trend that was described by modern academics. Not a rampant current issue (despite single examples one might be able to find).
All I'm saying is that progress starts with the institution and the reader and should meet somewhere in the middle. The reader assuming this is what articles mean downright perpetuates the problem.
I simply do not accept people waste calories trying to gender titles that are irrelevant to the article or when the scientist's name is easily looked up. This reads as strawman ragebait and it's exhausting.
yeah I don't think I've heard of anyone confusing who the scientist is. I also don't get why anyone would think an event happening in Bolivia would include white people
Besides, afaik, they only decided it's a new species after an extensive genetic test, so the fact that locals called it something doesn't mean that even locals knew it was different from similar cats. It feels more like naming a new cat species 'cat' in local language
My only point was that many people wouldn't think twice about the gender of a person because of a hyphenated last name. It's not even necessarily that common with married women tbh.
You're right. I suspect the numbers are very similar for all genders, and most people wouldn't make any gendered assumptions based on it.
But of those who do make an assumption, I would expect it to favor women due to the way last names are traditionally chosen and how that's changing culturally in western countries.
In this case I would assume that Bolivia uses a system for last names similar to that of Spain, children get a hyphenated last name consisting of the first last name of the father and the first last name of the mother.
I didn’t either. I kinda assumed it was them having a group of already identified cats and then doing science-y stuff and saying “wait! This one’s different!” And poof, new species.
That's kinda exactly what happened. There were 4 known species. One cat ended up in a shelter that was not exactly like any of those, so they decided to take DNA from 35 cats from the 4 (now 5) species and showed the 5th was a separate species.
but what is the source of the "white guy" controversy? where are people reading about this new cat and commenting on the race and gender of the discoverer?
Some people online have started to either seriously or jokingly equate headlines saying "Scientists discovered" with "white guys found out something the natives have known about for years"
This is a specific type of callout post with justifiable ire about that, but to the tone of "for fucks sake not all scientists are white guys. Behold; the scientist who discovered the new cat."
People were assuming that the biologist that discovered the new cat species was a white guy. She's a Bolivian biologist who is decidedly not a white guy.
Just your average casual sexism weaving it's way through social media as usual.
I can dig up examples just as well as you can, but I’m not at my desk at the moment.
you should have done that before posting this screenshot out of context. If you're not willing to verify something is true, then don't repost it on social media.
I saw the article before but didn't read the details, if I had seen the name ending with an -a I would have thought a woman. But that's also probably because I knew a guy named Paolo.
There is absolutely sexism as well as racism still lurking around in the average person's assumptions. Seems a connected world hasn't (yet) fixed that. Might take more time.
on tumblr especially, there is a belief that science is essentially only a thing white european/american men do and they impose their vision of the world onto everyone, hence "discovering" a new cat species (which was actually known to locals since forever)
it’s an understandable belief, given the very imperialist and colonialist history of science and the legacy that this leaves behind. but it also completely erases the many contributions to science from other people, like here, where the tilcayo was first formally described by a Bolivian woman, and named after the name local Indigenous people give to the cat
For context on the original Tumblr post, which I know I reblogged but can't seem to find, was discourse surrounding the headlines saying we've "discovered" something that already existed, which in turn led to users generalizing these scientists as old white guys who don't respect where these discoveries are made.
This other post I could find says it better than I.
Not only did I not assume that but this is also the first time I've stooped so low as to waste time discussing whether or not we think a scientist is a white guy based on their name.
P.S. Has anybody ever in their life met a white guy named Paola?
I am normally pretty pessimistic, but can't imagine this either, like someone would say "did you hear about that new cat they found?" not "hey, did you hear about that new cat some white, straight, Christian guy found?"
I think the cat ended up in a shelter (I don't know the reason though) and then they discovered it didn't match the other cat species known about. So it happened the other way around.
It was apparently found as a kitten by someone who thought it was a standard cat, then after a year of what I can only assume was murder kitty behaviour, they took it to a shelter
Ive heard stories about people taking in bobcat kittens before realizing. But the story that takes the cake is someone raising a dog for years before realizing it was a fucking bear.
"That super famous lady whose name I can't seem to remember" is probably not the best way to defend your post about women being dismissed in science. Marie Curie was a badass, and her husband, who was also a scientist and notable in his field, was lucky to have her. I unironically couldn't remember his name. I just checked, thinking it might be Pierre but dismissing that as too stereotypical, and it is.
I was going of the context that I was saying not everyone is a white guy so I assumed bolivian people don't get counted as white even though she looked it
What if she's not a woman? or white? or real? Maybe she's trans. Not transgender... transdimensional.
Maybe they exist in a space that occupies your mind but not on this physical plane? What if all we see of them is but a piece of the knowable whole and our perceptions give it the shape of what we think it should be? Like an iceberg breaching through dimensional surface, forced into focus by our rules of reality.
How else could they discover that which was unknown?
People from Hispania (you know where the word HIspanic derives from) aka Spain are considered white. To me it's weird that the label Hispanic automatically means not white.
I think there's added confusion because Caucasian ≠ White either. Indians are caucasians (look up pictures of albino Indian people and they just look like white Europeans).
I've always chuckled at African American = Black too. My wife went to school with a kid whose parents were African immigrants. Kid entered an African American art contest, won, then had his award taken away because he was white.
Elon Musk is African-American. I went to high school with a guy who was a Muslim from Africa. Guess what, also white and from South Africa.
(Yeah I know white South Africans are anthropologically generally more recently from Europe than Africa; this is just a criticism of the term "African-American".)
The term Caucasian is utterly meaningless and comes from the ancient Three Great Races theory. You know, the three great races of which every other race is a subtype: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid.
Here's a helpful map so you can tell who is Caucasian and who isn't:
As for your question: You can see Southern Indians are not yet categorized for certain. Only North Western Indians are certainly Caucasian. Maybe in the future we will learn more about these mysterious people.
I mean, the French are named after a Germanic tribe but they're not Germanic, Bulgarians are Slavs even though they're named after a Turkic tribe, and Macedonians are Slavs who are named after an ancient Greek kingdom.
Names have weird histories and shouldn't be treated literally.
You are just not racist enough. Let's hear it from Ben Franklin (emphasis mine, on top delusion).
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth
Then there's me, knowing about Mary Somerville, confused, because the word was invented to include women. The term before was 'man of science' and it so seemed inappropriate a term for Mary. Hence: 'scientist'.
I'm not saying that my mind doesn't default to a specific gender for some roles, like ballet dancer or lumberjack. Even some that are clearly relatively mixed but skewed gendered roles like nurse or police officer. But I don't think of a "scientist" as a specific gender.
I think it’s great so many of you have apparently never had to consider racism or sexism in science.
I was just reminded that as recently as 60 years ago women were legally prohibited from opening a bank account in many places in America. As an example of sexism in society.
Everyone woman I know personally or have had the privilege to talk to about this topic has been raped and sexually assaulted including my mother, my grandmother, my wife, and my daughters.
One was taken in in 2016, then taken to a sanctuary. Then they studied it, did genetic testing, looked for and studied them in the wild. The new thing is the official designation and the publication of the research from the last ten years.
127 replies
I don't know a lot of people who assume the name Paola is male. This feels like a strawman argument.
This is definitely a self-tell. They will see an article or comments that only refers to her as a "scientist" with no gender and assume the article or person is referring to them as male because that's what they think when they see "scientist".
For context, there is a trend of correcting people saying scientists to "white man", because articles frame discoveries as "scientists discover x" when "x" had been widely known by the local population since that population got there.
However, this argument is fucking stupid because science has, famously, not categorized and described everything that exists, even if non scientists already know about it.
And most importantly, major publications are specifically not framing this as a discovery, but as a documentation.
Yes, they discovered that it was a new species. If I had a rock on my desk for 20 years then one day ran a test that discovered it was a new element, I could say I discovered a new element even though I knew the rock existed.
That's kind of self-referential gaslighting. How can you tell if society is progressing in awareness (which it is) if every time you see "scientist" you think "white man" and justify it as assuming they were racist enough to put that? (Not you, the person we are talking about.)
That idea that "scientists discover x" being a substitute is correct, but is well-known today because it is a historical trend that was described by modern academics. Not a rampant current issue (despite single examples one might be able to find).
All I'm saying is that progress starts with the institution and the reader and should meet somewhere in the middle. The reader assuming this is what articles mean downright perpetuates the problem.
I simply do not accept people waste calories trying to gender titles that are irrelevant to the article or when the scientist's name is easily looked up. This reads as strawman ragebait and it's exhausting.
yeah I don't think I've heard of anyone confusing who the scientist is. I also don't get why anyone would think an event happening in Bolivia would include white people
It's about the story: scientists discovered a new cat species and named it Tilcayo, after the name the locals call it.
Reactions were:
Second type of reaction is probably what caused OPs post
Besides, afaik, they only decided it's a new species after an extensive genetic test, so the fact that locals called it something doesn't mean that even locals knew it was different from similar cats. It feels more like naming a new cat species 'cat' in local language
I don't care to speculate on how people are racially classified as it's an irrelevant concept, but she may consider herself white.
https://explorers.nationalgeographic.org/directory/paola-m-nogales-ascarrunz
I don't know anyone who would see a hyphenated last name and assume it's a male.
There are many cultures where having two last names or a hyphenated last name is pretty normal for any gender.
Yes, but people are bad at making assumptions that are globally accurate
My only point was that many people wouldn't think twice about the gender of a person because of a hyphenated last name. It's not even necessarily that common with married women tbh.
You're right. I suspect the numbers are very similar for all genders, and most people wouldn't make any gendered assumptions based on it.
But of those who do make an assumption, I would expect it to favor women due to the way last names are traditionally chosen and how that's changing culturally in western countries.
In this case I would assume that Bolivia uses a system for last names similar to that of Spain, children get a hyphenated last name consisting of the first last name of the father and the first last name of the mother.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs
It happens to kids who are given both surnames by their parents.
In the UK they are referred to as “double-barrelled” surnames… and they have a reputation for poshness. They are not uncommon.
I did not, I actually did not think about the scientist at all. I was distracted by the tiny cat. CAT!
The tiny super cute cat.
so cute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo#/media/File:Leopardus_tilcayo_(5x3_cropped).jpg
Look at this tiny house cat in a leopard costume
I didn’t either. I kinda assumed it was them having a group of already identified cats and then doing science-y stuff and saying “wait! This one’s different!” And poof, new species.
That's kinda exactly what happened. There were 4 known species. One cat ended up in a shelter that was not exactly like any of those, so they decided to take DNA from 35 cats from the 4 (now 5) species and showed the 5th was a separate species.
what's... what's going on here?
New type of cat just dropped
Did it land on its feet?
Most under-rated question. Purrfect.
but what is the source of the "white guy" controversy? where are people reading about this new cat and commenting on the race and gender of the discoverer?
Some people online have started to either seriously or jokingly equate headlines saying "Scientists discovered" with "white guys found out something the natives have known about for years"
This is a specific type of callout post with justifiable ire about that, but to the tone of "for fucks sake not all scientists are white guys. Behold; the scientist who discovered the new cat."
Female Bolivian scientist to be precise
I feel like this isn't about a cat
People were assuming that the biologist that discovered the new cat species was a white guy. She's a Bolivian biologist who is decidedly not a white guy.
Just your average casual sexism weaving it's way through social media as usual.
where?
I’m answering what the OG post is talking about. I can dig up examples just as well as you can, but I’m not at my desk at the moment.
The OP says “this site” and it looks like maybe Tumblr?
So why is tumblr's issue our problem?
If you didn’t assume she was a white guy, then this isn’t targeting you. You can put your pitchfork down.
you should have done that before posting this screenshot out of context. If you're not willing to verify something is true, then don't repost it on social media.
I didn't post the screenshot
I'm not the OP
Oh. Well, if that's the whole story, then this is a pretty weak science meme
Eh there’s value in calling out sexist assumptions.
I guess so, it just would be nice to see two people verbally sparring, instead of a one-person narrative about a supposed firestorm
It’s an old trope that people assume any scientist is a white man.
I saw the article before but didn't read the details, if I had seen the name ending with an -a I would have thought a woman. But that's also probably because I knew a guy named Paolo.
There is absolutely sexism as well as racism still lurking around in the average person's assumptions. Seems a connected world hasn't (yet) fixed that. Might take more time.
https://lemmy.ca/post/71094265
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/tilcayo-tiger-cat-new-species-9.7349140
yes but what's all the "white guy" stuff?
It's in response to an assumption that's described here, but not included here.
There’s a running assumption that the scientist that discovered this new cat species is a white guy. It’s not.
on tumblr especially, there is a belief that science is essentially only a thing white european/american men do and they impose their vision of the world onto everyone, hence "discovering" a new cat species (which was actually known to locals since forever)
it’s an understandable belief, given the very imperialist and colonialist history of science and the legacy that this leaves behind. but it also completely erases the many contributions to science from other people, like here, where the tilcayo was first formally described by a Bolivian woman, and named after the name local Indigenous people give to the cat
Well explained.
citation needed
If you read the comment section, someone already did:
https://sh.itjust.works/post/67172616/27558882
this is no different than OP, another accusation.
What did I do?
At no point did I think of the scientists gender. I don’t think I ever have considered the gender of a scientist.
Hell another cat could’ve discovered this cat and I’d never know until someone mentioned it.
For context on the original Tumblr post, which I know I reblogged but can't seem to find, was discourse surrounding the headlines saying we've "discovered" something that already existed, which in turn led to users generalizing these scientists as old white guys who don't respect where these discoveries are made.
This other post I could find says it better than I.
Yes thank you
Holy fucking strawman
And here I was imagining a diverse group of scientists, because science is rarely done by just one person anyway.
Not only did I not assume that but this is also the first time I've stooped so low as to waste time discussing whether or not we think a scientist is a white guy based on their name.
P.S. Has anybody ever in their life met a white guy named Paola?
https://xkcd.com/2071/
The name is Paola not Paolo so that should have been a hint right there.
Have people been assuming they're a white guy?
I can't even really think of a context when discussing the cat when the scientists gender and especially race would come up?
I am normally pretty pessimistic, but can't imagine this either, like someone would say "did you hear about that new cat they found?" not "hey, did you hear about that new cat some white, straight, Christian guy found?"
It appears to be a US American thing.
Thank you to those who tried to translate for the contextually bereft.
I just thought it was cool to see a picure of the person who identified our new Babu.
I want to snuggle with the kitty.
Pspspspspspspspspspspspsps
If only Black MESA had hired differently. Tragedy, really.
"Extreamly weird how many people I've seen assume she is a white guy"
I thought she was a cat. That's what we were talking about. White? She is more of a yellow orange with tan to brown spots.
/s
We discover a new species. what's the first thing we do? We put it in a cage.
Humanity in a nutshell.
I think the cat ended up in a shelter (I don't know the reason though) and then they discovered it didn't match the other cat species known about. So it happened the other way around.
It was apparently found as a kitten by someone who thought it was a standard cat, then after a year of what I can only assume was murder kitty behaviour, they took it to a shelter
It really is peak cat when it takes a full year with a wild, feral animal to notice it's behaviour isn't just cat being cat.
Ive heard stories about people taking in bobcat kittens before realizing. But the story that takes the cake is someone raising a dog for years before realizing it was a fucking bear.
https://abc11.com/pets-animals/woman-unknowingly-rescues-bobcat-thinking-it-was-kitten/5570293/
https://people.com/pets/pet-dog-is-bear-not-tibetan-mastiff/
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/262/280/bfb.jpg
What kind of white guy has a feminine Latina name?
I'm trying, but where do I accent Ascarrunz? AscarRUnz or AscARrunz?
As-CARR-unz if it's pronounced as in Spanish
Most biologist are women if I recall correctly.
If someone talks me about a discovery in biology I think my mind would automatically picture a woman as the author.
That’s awesome.
Jane Goodall? Isn’t she well known.
She didn’t identify the cat. She is pretty famous, tho. Also that woman who’s all radioactive.
"That super famous lady whose name I can't seem to remember" is probably not the best way to defend your post about women being dismissed in science. Marie Curie was a badass, and her husband, who was also a scientist and notable in his field, was lucky to have her. I unironically couldn't remember his name. I just checked, thinking it might be Pierre but dismissing that as too stereotypical, and it is.
thatsthejoke.jpg
Guess I need one of these...
✈️
*Marie Skłodowska Curie. People often shorten her name (and I'll be honest, "Marie Curie" is fun to say) but she used both surnames.
Hey some of us can't tell races easily, she just looks like any white woman
That's because her being Bolivian doesn't mean anything about her race. She could very well just be a white woman.
I was going of the context that I was saying not everyone is a white guy so I assumed bolivian people don't get counted as white even though she looked it
What if she's not a woman? or white? or real? Maybe she's trans. Not transgender... transdimensional.
Maybe they exist in a space that occupies your mind but not on this physical plane? What if all we see of them is but a piece of the knowable whole and our perceptions give it the shape of what we think it should be? Like an iceberg breaching through dimensional surface, forced into focus by our rules of reality.
How else could they discover that which was unknown?
You got your HRT, and then you got your SMRT (Spice Melange Replacement Therapy)
Time to . . . Par-tee-down?
She's Bolivian. That doesn't say anything about the color of her skin.
She doesn't look white to me. She looks hispanic to me.
A person being not black doesn't make them white.
There's still disagreement on whether Hispanic means white or not.
People from Hispania (you know where the word HIspanic derives from) aka Spain are considered white. To me it's weird that the label Hispanic automatically means not white.
I think there's added confusion because Caucasian ≠ White either. Indians are caucasians (look up pictures of albino Indian people and they just look like white Europeans).
I've always chuckled at African American = Black too. My wife went to school with a kid whose parents were African immigrants. Kid entered an African American art contest, won, then had his award taken away because he was white.
Elon Musk is African-American. I went to high school with a guy who was a Muslim from Africa. Guess what, also white and from South Africa.
(Yeah I know white South Africans are anthropologically generally more recently from Europe than Africa; this is just a criticism of the term "African-American".)
The term Caucasian is utterly meaningless and comes from the ancient Three Great Races theory. You know, the three great races of which every other race is a subtype: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid.
Here's a helpful map so you can tell who is Caucasian and who isn't:
As for your question: You can see Southern Indians are not yet categorized for certain. Only North Western Indians are certainly Caucasian. Maybe in the future we will learn more about these mysterious people.
Hungarians are Mongoloids by the way.
I mean, the French are named after a Germanic tribe but they're not Germanic, Bulgarians are Slavs even though they're named after a Turkic tribe, and Macedonians are Slavs who are named after an ancient Greek kingdom.
Names have weird histories and shouldn't be treated literally.
Who is considered white changes depending on the attitudes of the day.
Ask the Irish!
You are just not racist enough. Let's hear it from Ben Franklin (emphasis mine, on top delusion).
So he excluded everyone but himself and his buddies?
I forget where but I saw a meme of a geogueser type thing that goes based off of race of people, I don't think I'd do well with that one
Then there's me, knowing about Mary Somerville, confused, because the word was invented to include women. The term before was 'man of science' and it so seemed inappropriate a term for Mary. Hence: 'scientist'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville
Ooh, Kitteh!!
If this turns out to be AI generated, I will be so upset!
I'm not saying that my mind doesn't default to a specific gender for some roles, like ballet dancer or lumberjack. Even some that are clearly relatively mixed but skewed gendered roles like nurse or police officer. But I don't think of a "scientist" as a specific gender.
Blame the news for conflating "new to science" as being "new to everyone"
I think it’s great so many of you have apparently never had to consider racism or sexism in science.
I was just reminded that as recently as 60 years ago women were legally prohibited from opening a bank account in many places in America. As an example of sexism in society.
So, y’know. Progress. Eventually.
Everyone woman I know personally or have had the privilege to talk to about this topic has been raped and sexually assaulted including my mother, my grandmother, my wife, and my daughters.
I am not sure there really is progress anymore.
Wasn't this cat discovered a year ago?
One was taken in in 2016, then taken to a sanctuary. Then they studied it, did genetic testing, looked for and studied them in the wild. The new thing is the official designation and the publication of the research from the last ten years.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-adorable-and-tiny-tilcayo-the-first-brand-new-cat-species-identified-in-more-than-a-century-180989528/
OK because I knew I heard about it before and was wondering why its just now blowing up.
A quick search says it was just this month.
I'm not just going to assume that they are not a white guy just because the don't like like a white guy to me.
I don't know how they identify. I would need to hear this person directly say "I am not a white guy".
Anyways I think that they seem pretty fly regardless of how they identify.