General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Study: Everyone hates environmentalists and feminists [View all]MADem
(135,425 posts)"activist" areas (the other one being environmentalism) and I don't think they were focusing exclusively on the "female" issue.
People are reading a lot into this study that just isn't there. No doubt the off-the-cuff and entirely unimportant editorializing on the part of the poster of the article have managed to completely put people off the good work of this team. A pity, that. I think they've uncovered an inconvenient--but useful, in the big picture--truth.
If folks want to effect change, the smart people figure out what works to actually effect that change. That's what these researchers are teasing out of this research. You don't keep banging your head against a brick wall because that's the way you've always done it and to do it any other way is to condescend to "the man" or what-have-you.
Is the goal to yell and be negative, or is the goal to change minds? If the goal is to yell and be negative, that sounds like Primal Scream Therapy to me. If the goal is to change minds, that sounds like the Civil Rights movement. I'd rather spend my time on a change-effecting project that resembled the latter, but that's just me I suppose.
These are four of the five researchers, the fifth is a woman who is not at a university now but working environmental issues:
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/spa/faculty/chasteen.php
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/spa/faculty/lockwood.php
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/spa/students/bashir.php
http://uwaterloo.academia.edu/DanielNadolny
Their CVs don't read like they are a bunch of dismissive, sexist lightweights to me.