Twister (1996) is a time capsule from the early days of diversity in STEM
That’s right, it’s another Twister post, I’m sure my mutuals must love me. I mentioned in my first Twister post that the movie, for as excellent a film as it is, has a serious lack of representation. This is objectively true.
For one, this movie only barely passes the Bechdel test: a rudimentary test for whether or not a movie has meaningful women characters with a shockingly high failure rate. There are multiple women in this movie, and some of them even have names - the four are Jo, Melissa, Aunt Meg, and Patty Haynes (she sings Oklahoma in the beginning chase scene). There are only three brief scenes where any of these characters talk about something other than Bill, with Melissa and Jo having a short exchange about the Dorothy system, Melissa thanking Aunt Meg in a charmingly awkward scene that arguably has a lot of subtext about how Meg feels about Jo and Bill, and Jo telling Meg to go to the hospital. Aside from that, every time a woman talks to a woman it is about Bill.
Now we get to the constant killer of movies made before 2000: race. From my recollection, there is a single black person in this movie. We see him briefly on Aunt Meg’s TV when the protagonists are rolling out to chase their third tornado of the day. I could go on, but its easier to say he’s an extra.
What does this mean for Twister?
Well, nothing bad if that’s what you were worrying about. It’s always worrying to see a purely white ensemble cast in any American movie, but that’s a modern perspective. Nowadays it is unrealistic for there to be one person of color between two teams of scientists and storm chasers (totaling around 20 people). But if you look back to the 1990s, that’s almost exactly what you would expect. The thing is, that statistic hasn’t even changed all that much, with about the same share of degrees accounting for a group that makes up 13% of the American population.
The story with women is far different though, and puts in perspective that maybe Twister was a little man heavy. In environmental life sciences (a generalization that includes meteorology), women made up about a third of the workforce at the time the movie was released, and they now occupy almost a whole half of the jobs in the field. So maybe we should have seen more than just Jo and Patty as the only women in Oklahoma willing to chase a tornado for science :/
So what do we do now that we have all of this information and context? There’s nothing to do really, save for think conscientiously when you enjoy your favorite tornado-action-flick about how the world looked back then and how it looks now. Think about how while it looks like it’s terribly whitewashed, it’s actually terrifyingly accurate and points to a larger systemic problem.
How would I make Twister more diverse if I were making it today? The funny thing about a movie as ensemble-heavy as this is that the endlessly wonderful cast of storm chasers can be anyone. They don’t have a complicated narrative driven by experiences as black, Asian, or Hispanic Americans, so you could change anyone and hold the story constant. But is that the right thing to do? Usually, no. Diversity for the sake of diversity oftentimes isn’t meaningful. So it wouldn’t be wise to just make Beltzer a woman of color and call it a day, but it would be wise to give her interactions and scenes that show, even in the background like many of the ensemble’s scenes are, the experiences of a scientist of color.
“Twister isn’t political” well neither is race or gender. Not every meaningful scene has to be a woman defending her intelligence as at the bear minimum equal to a man’s, not does it have to be a person of color facing off with law enforcement or belligerent racists. It can be cultural, it can be nuanced. As a white man it’s absolutely not my place to make a movie more diverse or to say what should be included, so at the end of the day it’s best to take example and inspiration from the modern films that are doing just that: being casually inclusive like we should have been all along.
This went a little off the rails so I guess,,,
tl;dr - Twister (1996) disproportionately represents men in STEM over women, and accurately shows the racial disparity in science that has been persistent in America between the 1990s and now (not to mention, ya know, every point before that). If it were to be more accurate it would need more meaningful representation of women and people of color, and I am not the person who decides how that gets done.
Current efforts to make research more accessible and transparent can reinforce inequality within STEM professions.
“There are many valid reasons not to participate in an all-or-nothing approach to open science. Factors such as a scientist’s career stage, employment stability, financial circumstances, country of origin or residence, and cultural context (including their race, gender identity, and ethnicity) may all create barriers to specific aspects of open science.”
This is a really important read. Open science isn’t a bad idea, but we need to consider how something we are pushing forward as a moral good might negatively impact underrepresented groups in STEM. That will actually push us backward as a field.
Wanna hear an awesomely inspirational story about Latina high school girls using STEM to make the world a better place? Sure you do!
Smart Girls: the amazingly practical high tech portable shelter
For the last year, the DIY Girls have been working on their idea to help the increasing number of homeless people in their community. In 2016, this team of 12 predominantly Latina girls from San Fernando High School Math/ Science/ Technology Magnet became the only all-female contingent of the 15 teams selected to participate in the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam program, where each group receives a $10,000 grant to use their STEM skills to develop an invention to address a real-world problem.
The girls were concerned about the soaring number of homeless people in the Los Angeles area. In 2016, there was a 36% increase in homelessness in the San Fernando Valley, and they wanted to see if they could use technology to make a difference in the lives of people who were out on the streets. They came up with the ingenious idea of a portable, solar-powered shelter that could be set up quickly, secured from inside, and easily packed up into a backpack when not in use.
In addition to a chance to put into practice the STEM skills they're learning in class, they're also getting valuable hands-on experience in the invention process, working as a team, and promoting their project. The girls have organized themselves into different teams -- a structure team, a materials team, and a solar panel team -- each tasked with a different aspect of the project. As part of their design and feedback process, the girls recently presented their prototype to their school, members of their local MIT chapter, and several of their state representatives, and received resounding praise for its inventiveness.
Their tent is made of durable, insulating material, and features integrated solar panels and a battery pack that can power its various electrical devices including a small fan to provide circulation, a phone charger, white LED lighting, and UV lighting to disinfect and sanitize the tent. The goal is to create something inexpensive to manufacture, easy to distribute, self-cleaning, and portable would improve the lives of displaced people by giving them an alternative to sleeping on the streets. If successful, it's easy to imagine these tents also being used to provide temporary shelter to refugees and immigrants around the world.
Check out DIY Girls to learn more about their team
Check out their GoFundMe page to help them raise funds for a trip to MIT later this year
Watch a local news video featuring the girls
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when u started taking concepts of mathematics (first discrete math course), i listened. i listened as you cried about them - the shitty TAs that you would ask questions to, and then they would condescend, be passive-aggressive, try to imply that you were dumb. that’s not true. that’s never true. nobody is fucking dumb. nobody isn’t dumb. nobody is stupid. nobody is incapable. how dare they jump to conclusions. no, not everyone goes to good schools, in well-off school districts, or better yet, not everyone goes to those cushy private schools. no, not everyone has cookie cutter suburbanite brains that function exactly the same. so what if a student doesn't know what a proof is. so what if a student doesn’t know what a power set is. so what if the student doesn’t know .period. how fucking dare they. they don’t know your circumstances. it’s your job to learn and their job to educate and that’s fucking it.
A lot of my students right now are in their first year of college, and may not have thought about why I keep advertising/announcing summer research opportunities. Here is a great essay discussing that!
I’m on the email list for the Women’s Policy Institute, which operates here in Washington, DC. I was able to attend their networking/job fair in 2015, and was thrilled at the number of opportunities and connections possible for all people interested in STEM, and the support for people who represent historically underrepresented groups in science. They just sent out an invitation to one of their upcoming events.
From the invitation email:
We cordially invite you to celebrate the impact of women in the 114th Congress and women Senators and Members of Congress retiring from public service at the Women's Policy, Inc. 2016 congressional gala on Wednesday, February 24, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. Please click here to view the invitation.
Are you interested in exploring a science writing career? Apply for a travel fellowship to attend thehttp://ScienceWriters2015.org conference (October 9-13; Cambridge, MA): http://nasw.DiverseScholar.org
Science Careers, a part of the journal Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the leading resource for job listings and career advice in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Science Careers
I am really glad that I feel like I work in a diverse department. It’s still an odd thing to notice when you fit into a category that makes you the only one (or one of two or three) in a room, though. (Especially given intersectionality! Sometimes it’s inherited wealth or language or something, not heritage, culture, or ethnicity.)
