23 Comments

Hi !

We re-posted your article on DiaNuke.org, which is basically a platform for discussions/resources on things nuclear, and also on its facebook community page – http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_206743832698557&ap=1

This has evoked some passionate responses. You can see some comments on the facebook community page and a round up responses that can be now found here on Ace Hoffman’s blog – http://acehoffman.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/is-the-gender-of-nuclear-disaster-a-biased-article/

As a matter of policy, we do not generally moderate or respond to discussions, we only facilitate the debates.

It would be great if you could respond to these questions.

Thanks.

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> I am not engaging in male-bashing here.

Yeah, and I’m not a racist, but…

People like you who bash their own sex make me sick.

Here’s a hint for you. Japan is heavily populated and there are few to no wide open empty spaces with good access to water to put power stations. The reactor was 40 years old.

Nuclear power is far safer than the alternatives. Coal kills tens of thousands every year and other forms of power are just as bad or worse. How many people have died fighting for oil?

Have a look around you and take away all the work and inventions by men and what is left? We would be back in the stone age if it had been left to women.

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I applaud Bob Drago for his being straightfoward and sensible in this exchange. When the the discussion moved to coal versus nuclear power it headed in yet another useful direction. There, resides a genuine quagmire, perhaps related to gender differences from another angle. Today, more and more people are in expanding capitalist nations, which will mean growing numbers are being bombarded with a choir of screeching voices about how their lives will be useless without a mountain of consumer goods. However, the planet won’t allow for such an expansion, of which comes daily evidence from global warning, if you need evidence. For a fine discussion of this process and its problems, I recommend John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book, The Affluent Society, in which he prediced with precision our circumstances: too many consumer goods, not enough public infrastructure to clean up the mess. Whatever energy sourcs we come up with, supply will be swamped by the vaste horde of cnsumers, many of them literally growling for more, more, more! Thus,as I see this debate, the main question is not about coal versus nuclear power, but concerns how many of us can learn to live a simple, sustainable life. There’s room for debate here, and it could be an intersting one. Some will see the problem in “women shoppers,” others will see it as the fatal attraction men have for expensive war making, and others will have a different view. But, I do think it is a key question here, and it is surely related in complex ways to gender. In any case, thanks, Bob, for your provocative posting.

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Bob – Could it be that women lean to being more deontological (rules-governed) in their philosophical outlook, while men lean more to a utilitarian calculus(greatest good of the greatest number)? John

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MEN CAUSE ALL PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD.

IT’S TRUE THEY BUILT THE NUCLEAR REACTORS THAT HAVEN’T KILLED ANYONE AND ALSO POWER THE SERVER THIS WEBSITE RUNS ON.

MEN ARE BAD. NUCLEAR ENERGY IS BAD.

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I was going to point out some stats on how pretty much everything you said is erroneous, but it seems that you’ve already had your ass handed to you by previous comments.

You need to step the fuck back, open your eyes, and really consider how you view things. Your blatant idiocy and sexism harms us all.

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According to this (http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html) nuclear energy is less dangerous than coal for the energy it produces.

So, are women just being silly and irrational by not looking a the statistics and realizing that nuclear is less dangerous. No, it would not be fair to level such an accusation, and I personally don’t believe it.

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Robert Drago Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 6:31 pm

@altmehere, Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I was not defending coal, and wouldn’t. But if nuclear power is now so safe, then why won’t a single producer operate without a guarantee that our government is 100% liable for the results of any accident? (I understand this is true in both the U.S. and Japan.) Suppose we did the same with agricultural products; would you trust our food supply if producers and processers were guaranteed of no financial penalty if they sell tainted or contaminated food?

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Chillyinithaca Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 10:09 pm

@altmehere, The survey Drago referenced neither asked men and women to provide their analysis of the global energy crisis, nor to choose either coal or nuclear energy. Your point is valid but moot regarding this article.

Drago highlights two indisputable facts here; firstly, women are more risk-adverse where as men are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Even a brief academic investigation confirms that in general, women are more risk-averse than men. Stating this does not make Drago sexist. Confronting the issues often requires the examination of statistics that make us uncomfortable.

Secondly, women often bear the brunt of aforementioned risky behavior. This holds true not only during times of war or natural disaster, but even in times of relative peace. Drago simply states that women do the majority of carework during both of these situations.

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Crioca Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 10:17 pm

@Chillyinithaca,

“Drago simply states that women do the majority of carework during both of these situations.”

And men just do the dying.

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“I am not engaging in male-bashing here.”
If you have to say it…

In any case, I *am* a pro-nuclear, far left, twenty three year old Australian male and I’ll tell you that building new, modern nuclear power plants is far from an act of lunacy.

Literally thousands, going into the tens of thousands, of people (overwhelmingly men) die every year from coal mining incidents ALONE. That’s just from the mining, the number of premature deaths attributed to the burning of coal is estimated to be 15,000 annually in just the US. It’s far, FAR more deadly than nuclear power, has a greater cost to the environment, is destructive and wasteful.

Nuclear power is safe: The Fukushima reactor was literally a few WEEKS away from being retired after forty years of steadily producing nuclear power. How much has nuclear technology and engineering moved on from the 1970′s?
Nuclear power is clean: Modern reactors generate electricity from what twenty years ago would have been considered nuclear waste. And they’re becoming more efficient and cleaner every year. What nuclear waste is produced can be safely stored for a number of decades until it’s no longer a threat. The environmental impact of coal is much larger and it’s legacy far greater.

And the biggest problem about inspiring fear about nuclear energy? It means that existing, older plants, like the one at Fukushima get run for longer than they should of because no one wants new ones built. All this anti nuclear panic does is ensure that there really IS something to panic about.

Now the reality is that nuclear energy is NOT ideal. Why? Because it’s not renewable. Clean, safe, renewable energy is what we need and it’s where we’re headed, but we’re not getting there tomorrow and climate change is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Until we can create enough renewable energy sources to power the world, we need to rely on non-renewable sources. There HAS to be something to bridge the gap, anything else is a fantasy.

Now you tell me; what makes more sense? Mining and burning coal at the expense of our atmosphere, HUGE devastation to our environment and ecosystems, and tens of thousands of lives every year while pressing aging nuclear plants into continued service?

Or dismantling the old nuclear plants and building compact, modern nuclear power plants in their place? Plants that produce little waste, are VERY safe*, and have little impact on the environment?

The potential dangers of nuclear power are big, strange and very highly publicized. But the real, every day dangers of coal are mundane, ubiquitous, and invisible.

*Think about it; just three major events in half a century of nuclear power, and none of which have involved a modern reactor. They’ve all been reactors built when a computer the size of an apartment had a fraction of the computing power that your smartphone has.

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Maybe men are more logical/rational and understand there is a huge difference between reactors built in the 70′s and graphite pebble bed reactors or other modern day reactors.

Maybe men understand better that energy has to come from somewhere and that until renewable energy is a viable alternative we are left with a host of not so great options. I’m sure you would see similar polling results regarding offshore drilling.

The fact is it’s risky behavior that has built the civilizations of this world and cities to their current state and if things were left up to women we’d still be living in grass huts hunting and gathering.

Go ahead and call me a misogynist now. I’m sure many will say how it’s because of the patriarchy that we don’t see more female engineers trying to build civilization and that it’s because men kept them down throughout history or some crap even though in todays rather equal world we still see very small percentages of women going into the engineering fields.

BTW, how many of the workers sacrificing their lives trying to stop the fukushima nuclear disaster do you think are women, I bet not many if any. If we ever have quotas in the boardroom or government then we should have quotas in disaster response where women have to sacrifice/risk their lives equally as men.

25 men, 25 women working to avert disaster. I say that’s fair. After all a women’s life isn’t worth more than a man’s. We are all equal right?

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Robert Drago Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 6:19 pm

@anon, You lost me at the grass hut comment… Resolving the Irish civil war did not involve risky behavior in the same sense that these power plants do.

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Chillyinithaca Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 9:56 pm

@anon, The entirety of your post negates your suggestion that we exist in “today’s rather equal world”. Even in the United States, allegedly the world’s dominant, most progressive superpower, women earn a mere 78 cents for each dollar a male earned; were the tables turned, and your female counterparts at work earned 22% more than you, would you still believe we live in an equal world?

Regarding the gender equality amongst rescue volunteers, I suggest you do a bit of research on Drago’s apt citation of Florence Nightingale, who continued a long tradition of females as rescue workers. Your insinuation that women are not working to aid Japanese victims is incredibly insulting to the millions of women who are mobilizing both globally and in Japan to avert the crisis.

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anon Reply:
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:09 am

@Chillyinithaca,

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anon Reply:
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:20 am

“Even in the United States, allegedly the world’s dominant, most progressive superpower, women earn a mere 78 cents for each dollar a male earned”

No they don not. That figure is thrown around everywhere yet has been debunked hundreds of times. It is based on raw unadjusted data. No where else except in the feminist world is raw unadjusted data accepted as statistically valid. Any statistician worth their education would laugh at such a process but the feminists groups eat it up because lying is the only way they can show discrimination

If I compare my salary to my female boss’ and there is a difference does that mean i’m being discriminated against? NO. That difference is easily explained when you account for life choices, education, years of experience and so on. The 78 cents figure is based on raw data that doesn’t account for different life choices, different job choices, education, etc. etc.

When adjusted for those things it shows that women in the same job as men, that have the same years experience and the same education and who work the same hours often make a very similar wage. So much so that the difference is statistically insignificant. And in the younger under 30 crowd women are often out earning men.

if you want to educate yourself you can read this:
http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf

From the introduction/’Forward’:

Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

I have no doubt though that you will completely ignore that and continue to go around saying that women make 22% less than men.

Also never said that women aren’t involved or working to aid japanese victims. I said the ones who are putting their lives severly at risk are for the most part men. Again, I’m sure there are plenty of female people passing out food, water, treating patients, acting as doctors or nurses and so on. But the ones who are digging people out of rubble, doing the heavy work and the ones who were working in the power plant are for the most part men.

Anita Reply:
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:37 pm

“The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”

No one is ignoring this. Indeed, our analysis seeks to probe even more deeply– instead of attributing the wage gap simply to the superficial reason of “individual choices,” we seek to clarify the *contexts* in which those choices are made. Some of those larger contexts include our current laws, corporate policies, and cultural expectations.

As a pediatrician, engineer AND mom, I am surprised by the tone of this piece. For what it is worth I am not pro-nuclear.

However I take issue with the “Women as nice gentle Florence Nightingales helping the suffering vs Men as big bad wolf risk takers.”

The premise is simplistic and offensive. The issue deserves a more detailed analysis. And I would like to see how that women vs men re nuclear power plants stratifies according to race, class and regional location.

MomsRising I know you can do better!

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Robert Drago Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 6:16 pm

@Pierrette Poinsett MD, I explain the stark differences in the numbers with responsibilities for and the performance of caregiving, and conclude that men are increasingly moving in this direction as well. Given polling is done randomly, appealing to race, class or region won’t solve the puzzle.

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m Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 8:38 pm

@Robert Drago,

The fact that there are stark differences between the responsibilities and performance of caregiving shouldered by men and women doesn’t mean that there is a causal relationship between caregiving and support for nuclear power.

More detailed demographics for both caregiving and support for nuclear power might actually support (or undermine) your hypothesis that caregiving leads to a particular stance on nuclear energy. IF, for example, wealthier Americans (male and female) were less likely to be responsible for or perform caregiving (which seems likely) and were also less likely to support nuclear power (I honestly don’t know how that one trends), that might strengthen your claims that they are associated.

But even then, correlation =/= causation. As many commenters above have noted, your “simple and obvious” explanation for the correlation between caretaking and opposing nuclear power seems to be based entirely on an alarmingly essentialist attitude about gender. Claiming that men “apparently love” reckless behavior is a form of male-bashing, whether you want to admit it or not. Just like the claim that “women apparently hate risk-taking” would be an essentialist, woman-bashing argument.

I’m especially alarmed that you apparently represent a prominent feminist policy research organization. Are these the views of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research on nuclear power or merely your own, personal opinion on the matter?

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Chillyinithaca Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 10:24 pm

@m, Statistics regarding male versus female risk aversion tendencies reveal gender differences which may unfortunately stem in part from the fact that we live in a sexist society; however, simply citing such statistics is not a sexist act. Solutions cannot be found without examining problems. A more in-depth poll may reveal greater intricacies, but given the parameters of the study I find Drago’s analysis appropriate and enlightened. On a side note, great to see that men are thinking about the gendered effects of natural disaster.

Robert Drago Reply:
March 21st, 2011 at 11:28 pm

@m, These are my views, although the original post was vetted by the organization, perhaps because they knew it had been 3 decades since I had been accused of essentialism (back when I was in graduate school). Let’s go back to the science of what we know, do not know, and think plausible. One-third of the men oppose, and one-third of the women support building new nuclear power plants in the U.S., while over one-half of the men support, and over one-half of the women oppose building the plants (check the poll link). Women skew older than men in the U.S., but not by enough to explain this, even if we hypothesized that people tend to reject nuclear power as they age. Women and men could be polarized within a single race/ethnic group, but the differences would have to be astronomical within the Black or Latina/Latino community to generate the difference, and there is no literature suggesting that White women and men polarize more heavily along these lines due to race. The poll reports (incorrectly, I’m guessing) that more educated people are more favorable towards the plants, but young women are far more educated than men, so that won’t work, and it reports that Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to oppose the plants. We know that Democratic voters are more often women, but that begs the question of why. We could appeal to biology, but when it comes to peoples’ ability to make judgement calls, these appeals usually boil down to people with privilege threatened making last-ditch efforts to maintain it (e.g., see the history of the IQ test). So we are left with women opposing nuclear power plants in relation to continued economic inequality, the effects of taking responsibility for and performing day-to-day caregiving, or perhaps women more often being subject to sexual harrasment and domestic violence. Of the three, the one that makes the most sense to me is the effect of caregiving, in part because the men I know who take on this work seem to have similar attitudes. It could be that they are born sissies, sharing some genetic predisposition for opposing nuclear power with women, but that seems like quite a stretch. I hypothesized that caregiving changes one’s political views. I’m happy to have that tested. In the meantime, it makes sense. Thanks, Bob

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