Sexism in Vaccines by Savannah Sisk

The debate concerning vaccines rages endlessly. Some remain unvaccinated, choosing to put themselves and others at risk in order to uphold ideals of personal freedom. According to the ACLU, those who "refused vaccination" claim that vaccine mandates violate civil liberties. Conversely others argue that vaccine mandates increase individual freedoms. The ACLU also states that because vaccination protects the disabled, the immunocompromised, and children, becoming vaccinated is an admirable undertaking as it increases the freedoms of oneself and others. (You can't go to the grocery store if you have a fever, etc.) This reflects the beliefs of most who fall on the pro-vaccination side of the scale: that vaccination is a wonderful innovation of modern science. However, what both of these arguments fail to acknowledge is that vaccinations are not, in fact, equally safe for everyone.

While instances of death or serious illness resulting from vaccination are rare, they do in fact occur- in one demographic more so than others. A study conducted by the National Library of Medicine found “an increase in cardiac death in women after a first dose of non-mRNA vaccines.” Yes- shockingly, inequity in the medical field has led to what DW calls “a trend throughout the history of vaccination.” DW explains that because “women tend to produce more antibodies when they are vaccinated. . . they also tend to have more side effects.”

While data on this phenomenon is upsettingly (yet predictably) sparse, another study also from the National Library of Medicine spanning from 1990 to 2016 “found that women accounted for 80% of adult anaphylactic reactions to vaccines.” Such reactions occur simply because, according to the National Library of Health in an article entitled “Sex and Gender in COVID-19 Vaccine Research: Substantial Evidence Gaps Remain,” women and men were not equally recruited and represented in vaccine research. (The whole situation is eerily similar to one in which, according to Newsweek, menstrual products were not tested using real menstrual blood until the year twenty twenty-three. Don’t ask what they used instead of menstrual blood- we cannot hope to know.)

If sexism in medicine has led women to be disproportionately affected by vaccines, then women deserve to at least be aware of the unfair lot they have been dealt. I was entirely unaware of this issue until recently; many women in my family were blissfully ignorant until I informed them. While remaining unaware of this issue may seem preferable (it is exhausting, always discovering fun new cogs in the machine of oppression), it is my opinion that women deserve to know that as a result of severe negligence, vaccines may cause health problems for women.

Women deserve greater respect in the medical field. Women deserve vaccines that do not cause worse side effects as a result of their gender. Perhaps, if vaccines were developed with women in mind as well as men, this lofty dream may someday be achieved. For now, we can only dream of a world in which clinical trials are rife with women, of a fantasyland in which women do not always receive the lesser experience when it comes to healthcare. For now, we must make do with a world wherein the health of countless women is endangered because women are underrepresented in clinical trials.

While this issue may seem small and insignificant, it is only one of the many millions of microaggressions against women that communicate a single message: you are lesser. In the United States alone, women are already underpaid, underestimated, and lacking in fundamental human rights. We deserve equality in medicine. It is a fully ridiculous request, one that no human should ever need to make. And yet, here we are.

References:

Cole, D., & Mach, D. (2021, September 2). Civil Liberties and Vaccine Mandates: Here's

Our  Take. ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/civil-liberties-and-vaccine-mandates-heres-our-take

Nafilyan, V., Bermingham, C. R., Ward, I. L., Morgan, J., Zaccardi, F., Khunti, K., Stanborough,  J., Banerjee, A., & Doidge, J. C. (2023, March 27). Risk of death following COVID-19  vaccination or positive SARS-CoV-2 test in young people in England. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10043280/

Shield, C. (2021, July 12). COVID: Women left out of research. DW.

https://www.dw.com/en/women-men-intersex-trans-non-binary-covid-vaccine-side-effects/a-58236846

Su, J. R., Moro, P. L., Ng, C. S., Lewis, P. W., Said, M. A., & Cano, M. V. (2019, January 14).

Anaphylaxis after vaccination reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 1990-2016. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6580415/

Thomson, J. (2023, August 16). Period Product Absorbency Test Uses Blood for the First Time.  

Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/period-products-tested-using-blood-first-time- 1819895

Vassallo, A., Shajahan, S., Harris, K., Hallam, L., Hockham, C., Womersley, K., Woodward, M., & Sheel, M. (2021, November 1). Sex and Gender in COVID-19 Vaccine Research: Substantial Evidence Gaps Remain. National Library of Medicine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34816252/

The Shady Truth & Dark Promise of AI in the Workplace

Book Review by Geri Lipschultz

The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted and Why We Need to Fight Back Now Book by Hilke Schellmann Published by Hachette January 2024

The Algorithm is a deeply researched investigation into the powerful and already widely entrenched systems of A.I. upon the workplace. In clear, clean, unassuming but well-documented and meticulously ordered prose, Hilke Schellmann tells the story both from the point of view of companies looking for employees and from the job seekers, themselves. Schellmann describes technology whose purpose is both to analyze and determine the viability of those seeking positions, thereby providing a great service to businesses overwhelmed by the sheer number of applicants for relatively few positions. Where one might suppose there is more objectivity in the calculations of a machine than in the judgment of humans, Schellmann’s stories suggest otherwise. Those most vulnerable, Schellmann shows, are the usual suspects: females, non-whites, those who are disabled, and their intersections. She writes: “We need to talk about how we hire, promote, monitor, and fire human beings….to talk about how to change the incentives inside companies…. And we need to talk about how we want to treat humans in an AI-driven world.”

Schellmann’s is a story about machines and their power, the power we endow them with, the power we give up to our technology.

The companies themselves, she writes, do not adequately test technologies—and there have been cases of lawsuits by individuals protesting their methods. But this is cost-prohibitive for both. Problems exist where correlation is considered causation, when the various contrivances of these systems do not measure what they intend to measure; the consequence is paid by the employee who is fired, for example, because a surveillance machine has determined they are not producing adequately, or they failed an interview by a robot; it's paid by a potentially fully qualified applicant whose facial readings signified they were a risk, or whose gaming techniques were not considered top notch. But we're not talking of one or two people--we're talking of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, of people—and more—because of the large search engines (such as Indeed and Monster) HR departments use in hiring. Companies might receive thousands of applications for one or two positions and need to find ways of filtering applicants. Schellmann investigates the use of surveillance materials where, for example, companies may easily track their employees’ or potential employees’ social media accounts, pore through them, deduce matters of mental health or make character judgments—with or without the employees knowing.  She asks for more transparency, she questions the ethics, and she cites issues of privacy.

Schellmann writes: “It’s a dark outlook—a system in which algorithms define who we are…. What if the algorithms get it wrong?” She describes systems that determine our emotions and character by movements of the face, systems that determine our intelligence by IQ-like tests, systems where humans seeking jobs are interviewed by machines that “decide” whether or not they get the job. She investigates systems that do, albeit unintentionally, make biased decisions against gender and disability and race, and she questions, not whether or not that is the intention of the creators of the system, but if they test sufficiently to correct the mistake. She not only asks what if the algorithms get it wrong, she shows where they do—and how grave the consequences are—and she is not without suggestions about how to begin to solve the problems.

The warning given here, more than once, is that unless laws are made, regulations are put into effect, this practice of submitting to the technology will have dangerous repercussions—that you cannot walk back.

Namely, it will be out of our hands. It will be too late.

Some of this is quite literal, when you consider that in one case Schellmann writes about, “productivity rates” were set by an algorithm, and “terminations were not initiated by human managers but by algorithms.”

She also asks, “What if the algorithms take away human variability?”

And then questions whether we should “build and use such technology?”

Schellmann interviews Annette Bernhardt, director of the Technology and Work Program at the University of California, who says: “It’s so invisible, and now these systems are a black box to workers and to policy makers alike.”

To which Schellmann adds that “the public is seeing only the tip of the iceberg.”

It would seem the use of this technology is only increasing, according to the research of analyst, Brian Westfall: “…more than three hundred HR leaders in mostly midsize companies, and 98 percent of them said that they would rely on algorithms, HR software, and AI if they needed to make layoff decisions in 2023.”

One wonders whether if it might already be too late. 

Among the forefathers of computer science, along with Alan Turing (now well known for the “Turing Test”), John McCarthy (who came up with the phrase “artificial intelligence”), Mark Minsky (who said that the human “brain is merely a meat machine”) was Joseph Weizenbaum, who in the 1970s expressed serious concerns about the repercussions of the technology upon human civilization. Pertinent here, he wrote about the need for accountability among those who profit by its use. As a scientist, he warned about the unknown ramifications, including the power given by its creators. The idea that algorithms are doing the work of managers and “the HR folks” is reminiscent of the concerns of Weizenbaum, who some might say was a bit of a prophet. He constructed the first chatbot, by the name of ELIZA. A few important discoveries he made that concerned him, namely that those who interacted with his machine developed an unsettling relationship with it: there was a transference that occurred, and a number of psychologists advocated for this machine to relieve them of some of their work—they could reduce their hours, that a conversation with the machine could replicate for the client what happened in therapy.

Weizenbaum rejected this notion on a number of grounds, among them, the dehumanizing effect upon a human being. He raised the question of intelligence itself, citing the danger of comparing human intelligence to the information compiled by the computer. Among his fears: that humans would sublimate themselves to the machine, that humans would objectify themselves, that scientism would be seen as an end rather than as a means.

To that end, Schellmann speaks of the neuroscience that will eventually be able to “record the electrical activity in our brain and measure focus or mind wandering.”

Of course, I imagine that Weizenbaum might call this “mind wandering” something else, might find it a productive occupation in ways the workforce or even the neuroscientist would never be able to determine, no matter what tool they have at hand.

Weizenbaum also reflected upon the sheer impossibility to project the ramifications of a machine dedicated to replicating human intelligence—and the subsequent unknown dangers. Like Schellmann—and decades earlier, he, too asked whether we should build and use such technology.

Schellmann offers the thoughts of Nita Farahany, Duke professor of philosophy and law: “With our growing capabilities in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we may soon know a lot more of what’s happening in the human brain…. But wasn’t the brain the one area that you thought that you had some mental reprieve, the last bastion of freedom, the place that you thought you could have ideas and creativity, fantasize about something, have an absurd idea, have a brilliant idea. Is that the one space that you thought would always be secure?”

Schellmann’s approach is compelling, well-structured, and full of stories. She has traveled to many conferences, attended meetings, interviewed hundreds of people, the vendors, the companies using the systems, as well as experts in psychology, sociology, and computer science, and she herself has undergone the numerous and various tests that are used to determine worthy hiring candidates. She manages to weave a mountain of material into a fascinating exposé that lays out very clearly what the issues are—and there are many.

Cited in the New York Times as one of the five best books on Artificial Intelligence, this—her first—book represents a labor of at least five years, during which time Schellmann has done podcasts and published a number of articles for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and MIT Technology Review, to name a few. A young and extremely accomplished writer and documentarian, Schellmann won an Emmy for her PBS Frontline film Outlawed in Pakistan—one of many awards honoring her thorough and ground-breaking investigative work. She is also a professor of journalism at NYU and the mother of a toddler, a little girl, to whom she has dedicated this book.

To the extent that Schellmann's research uncovers serious inequities in the way (what she calls) "these tools" are currently being used, Schellmann is a whistleblower, a Cassandra, someone who is looking to make those who profit accountable—but she’s not a complete naysayer by any stretch; she accepts that A.I. is here to stay, and in this book she tries to suggest methods of making it safe, making it reliable, making it do the work it sets out to do. She is well aware that current hiring procedures are laced with issues of bias, and that there is hope for what she calls the potential “magic” of this technology, but more work needs to be done to capture the more subtle configurations of biased selection.

What is particularly remarkable about this book is its readability.

Hilke Schellmann does not want her daughter to grow up in a world where she—and every other human being—is “quantified.”

 Author Photo & Bio:

Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, the Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was awarded a CAPS grant from New York State for her fiction, and her one-woman show (titled ‘Once Upon the Present Time’) was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel will be published by Dark Winter Press in September 2025.

Tap Dancing On Everest, an Interview with Mimi Zieman

Dr. Mimi Zieman pictured above

By Jacey LaComb

Mimi Zieman is a OB-GYN doctor, adventurer, and now author. In her debut memoir, Tap Dancing On Everest, Zieman writes a tale of perseverance, inspiration and adventure. She details her life from New York City to Nepal, including a harrowing Everest expedition, as well as her adventures (and misadventures) in between. Zieman shows what is possible with enough strength and spark.

In a story that’s equal parts travelog and coming of age story, Zieman describes  her girlhood in New York City, her awkward moments as a young medical student, and her amazing moments from the top of the world. I had the pleasure of speaking with Zieman over Zoom about Everest, and her inspiration for writing. The interview has been edited for grammar and clarity.

Jacey LaComb: Your expedition to Everest is the focal point of this memoir, but I think the meat of the memoir  is all the changes and adventures that you had to take before you got there.  Half the journey is getting there. How did you come to the idea of telling all these stories together?

Mimi Zieman: Great question. So when I got back from the expedition at age 25, I wanted to write. Oh my gosh, what happened? I wanted to write the expedition story because it felt very thrilling. But I was never able to get around to it, you know, with the medical school and medical training. So when I came back to the story now. At my age I found it interesting to look at how and why I got to the mountain at age 25 from being raised as a city girl. To parents that weren't hikers or outdoors people. So I wanted to really tell both stories. The how and why I ended up there and then the adventure once we were there

JL: As for Everest itself, your expedition is equal parts inspirational and harrowing. Still, with all the frightening moments you experienced, you have a great appreciation for the experience. You still found the beauty of being on top of the world like that. In a couple words, how would you put it? 

MZ: I would say that the beauty is the whole reason I was there. So I think that's why I appreciate it. I wasn't there as a climber to climb the highest mountain. And going there took a lot of risk on my part in terms of stretching outside of my comfort zone to provide medical care and also leaving medical school. And what was really driving me was how good I felt in the mountains and how much I appreciated the splendor and the majesty.

JL: Another moment I found really powerful was when you describe mountains as a sort of home for you, somewhere you return to, comparing it to the places your family return to: Germany, Israel, Latvia. I really like how your place is something less concrete than a country, it’s more about the thrill and awe you get going to the mountains. You mention you’ve never returned to Everest, but do you still return to the mountains, in some way?

MZ: 100%  my dream is still to live in the mountains someday. I haven't gotten to do that yet; I live in Atlanta. My family is still in New York City, so I go there a lot. But I try to hike and be in the mountains as much as possible, because when I go to the mountains, it's like a switch turns on and I'm instantly happier. It just feels like I'm in my place in the world. I guess some people feel that at the beach and with the ocean. It's a spiritual feeling.

JL: Back to your story, the mountains are where there’s a big turning point in the story, when you’re at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) and you have to help an injured hiking partner. It’s here where you start thinking again about becoming a doctor. You connect it to the first time you’d considered a medical career, after a horrible OBGYN experience. You wrote “So many physicians trace their interest in medicine to interacting with a kind doctor or an experience with illness or a sense of altruism. My spark was ignited by indignation. Five years later, my experience with John made me consider medicine again.” And I really think it’s astounding how just one or two little experiences can be what changes or makes our lives. Do you think you are still carried by that spark of indignation that started this all, or have all your other experiences created more meaning and inspiration for you?

MZ: Indignation still motivates me in today's world where women aren't getting the access to health care that they deserve.

JL: Absolutely.

MZ: So I spend a lot of my time on reproductive rights advocacy and that's all spurned on by indignation. But when I'm in the clinic, seeing patients, what I'm feeling is compassion and feeling really grateful that I can be useful helping someone. So all of those more altruistic things you associate with it. I would say both are true.

JL: That's cool. They've sort of built up together.

MZ: You know, I was motivated by feminism from a really young age because of my mother and grandmother and being single mothers, both of them being divorced, you know, supporting themselves and their kids. I was always drawn to wanna help women. So OBGYN fulfilled that too.

JL: Speaking of sparks and getting things started, how did this memoir come to be? You mention in it that you’d always wanted to write about your experience on Everest, but life made it too busy. Once you finally found the time to write, was it difficult to get going on it, or did you have to take some time to sort of gather yourself and remember some of the harder memories?

MZ: It really was a process that happened intermittently over time. I was not thinking about writing this book for most of my life. I've kind of tucked it neatly away, went on, had my career, raised 3 children. And then a few things happened that eventually made me return to writing. The first was I read the book Wild by Cheryl Strade, which is a hiking book that's actually about grief and her transforming as a person and when I read it for some reason I had the thought maybe it's not too late to tell my story.  I think because she had a hiking memoir, it sort of made me think that. But I still didn't do anything. A couple of years later I had a lull in work and I took out my Everest journal and I transcribed it into a computer file.  But then I put it away and didn't do anything with it for many, many more years. Then I was in a pretty intense job for a couple years, that I just left. One day, things just came to a head. I resigned one day in January 2019.  The next morning, I went to my home office and I just started typing. And the book started coming out of me. And I just devoted everything to writing, to learning the craft of writing, to taking courses, to reading books on it.

JL: That’s wonderful. I’d like to talk a bit about the book. You alternate writing  about your experiences during your college years and young adulthood with stories from when you were growing up, rather than going through a perfect chronological order. I think that really emphasizes how our pasts give us reflections for the present. Was this something you had intended for this memoir?

MZ:  Yeah, so first of all that day I started writing all this stuff about my family came out. I would never plan to write that. And then I had to figure out how to tell these two stories together. My family, about as we talked, the how and why I got to the mountain and then the mountain adventure. And some of those early track chapters I tried to be more thematic than chronological. There's this fear when you're telling family history or backstory that you know “am I boring the reader?” and stuff so I tried to figure out a way to make it relevant.

JL: Yeah, I think you did a really good job about that. It's a very thematic book.

MZ: Thank you.

JL: You mention in your memoir about how you were always inspired by heroines in the books you read, including Harriet from Harriet the Spy. I also found Harriet the Spy inspirational when I was young. I find it very interesting how you even found literary inspiration that carried into your inspiration to go to the Himalayas. Who do you currently consider to be an inspirational character?

MZ: Well, I still consider those people inspirational. I  mean, I think I feel inspired by most books I read. So I do think literature is a way to learn about other people. It could be fictional or nonfictional. But a lot of people are drawn to true stories, and I think we are drawn to learn about other people and want to relate to their experiences and see how it relates to us.

JL: And one last question about Everest. You touch on it a bit in the memoir, but Everest climbing and its history have become quite contentious over the years, especially now with more and more climbers visiting. People have a lot more questions about colonialism’s effect on the region and specifically the disrespect some climbers have shown towards Everest, which is such an important mountain to Tibetians because it is a holy place.. You, however, are always so respectful of the cultures you visit. What do you think is the key to being a respectful traveler and enjoying other cultures without causing harm?

MZ: I think it's really tricky and I mentioned that a little bit in the book. It was tricky for us.  So I think it's a really delicate balance. At the end of the day, you'd have to respect the people living there and try to be respectful. Sometimes there are, you know, cultural -what's the word I'm looking for?- Not clash, but when things don't line up.  I mean, sometimes our goals aren't gonna line up exactly and you know, they rely on tourism, so they want visitors and we want to go to those places. So I think it's an ongoing process to try to do the best by them.

JL: I like that. Do the best by them.

Bio: Jacey LaComb is a student at SUNY Oswego, studying for a bachelors in journalism and an associates in creative writing. She lives with her family in her hometown of Carthage, New York.