{"id":2357,"date":"2012-05-31T15:04:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T15:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=2357"},"modified":"2013-01-05T08:34:27","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T08:34:27","slug":"who-are-you-calling-a-geek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2012\/05\/31\/who-are-you-calling-a-geek\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are You Calling a Geek?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post<\/a>, I threw out the fact that I didn\u2019t feel the word \u2018geek\u2019 was necessarily going to encourage young girls to see science\/engineering as a career for them, a point that was picked up both by my fellow OT blogger Sylvia McLain over at Girl Interrupting<\/a>, and also by some (female) commenters on Twitter. My previous post was written around Easter-time for Fabiana<\/a>, so well before publication of the Geek Manifesto<\/a> put the term Geek into even more prominence. Like Sylvia, and as I discussed in an earlier post<\/a> with a rather different emphasis, I remain nervous about how the word is being used and diffused, although not specifically because of its origin as a (circus) freak. It is, as Alice Roberts<\/a> has said<\/a>, divisive, splitting \u2018us\u2019 off from \u2018them\u2019, which is particularly dangerous when trying to convince the teenage girl that she wants to be both normal\/conformist and<\/span> a scientist. We should do nothing to make her think she has to make a choice between the two. I may be wrong, but I think the connotation for adolescent males is nothing like as prone to raise internal conflict as it is for females. I also think this is why all those who I\u2019ve spotted currently expressing anxiety about the use of the word are women.<\/p>\n

Mark Henderson<\/a> used the term, in the title of his book, as a badge of pride to include both scientists and non-scientists who care about the scientific method and applying this method to evidence-based policy. In that approach he uses it as a call to arms for those of us already well within the fold, who, broadly speaking, are beyond the stage of trying to work out who we are and what motivates and interests us. That association seems to me legitimate and, although I would not go out of my way to label myself as a geek, if others want to it\u2019s not going to cause me any problems.<\/p>\n

However, for individuals – male or female \u2013 who are at that critical stage at school of trying to work out subject choices and career aspirations, if they raise their heads and consider what labels go with different options and how they feel about these labels, the word geek may set off alarm bells. If I turn to the Daily Mail as a typical bellwether of public mood, what stories hold the word geek in their headlines in the past few weeks? Here are a handful:<\/p>\n