Now PC brigade says museums with male exhibits are ‘sexist’
Science Correspondent A UNIVERSITY academic has come under fire for saying natural history museums are sexist and colonialist.
In the week popular TV advertisements faced bans because of their ‘harmful gender stereotypes’ and the Bank of England said it might drop its ‘Old Lady’ nickname for similar reasons, Jack Ashby said museum collections were dominated by male animals with ‘flashy’ antlers and ‘showy’ feathers. This left females, often described as ‘mothers’, in the minority, complained Mr Ashby, the manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London.
He added that the displays were dominated by animals from countries formerly part of the British Empire, such as Australia and India.
Australian species dwarf those from China in British museums, he said, adding: ‘Collecting is part of the act of colonialism.’
But Mr Ashby’s comments were challenged by Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham, who said: ‘Sexism and colonialism are in the eye of the beholder. It has become too fashionable to search these out wherever there might be some hint of a difference.
‘I suspect males are over-represented because they are less intelligent and more likely to get caught. When it comes to colonialism, these were the countries most often explored. Why attempt to create a problem where there is none?’
Mr Ashby added: ‘Historically, in many cases, particularly where males and females were different, and males had big horns, antlers, tusks or particularly showy plumage like a peacock, this created a bias in what was collected.’
He spoke out following a University of Manchester study which found one museum’s mammal collection was 71 per cent male. Two-thirds of birds in the same institution were male.
Mr Ashby said he was not being critical of museums, and noted that the large blue whale skeleton newly installed in London’s Natural History Museum was female.
He said: ‘There are 1.5 million species described in the natural world and you can’t have one of everything on display. I just want to describe that museums are a product of their own history.’
Mr Ashby said the Manchester University study found that female animals were usually described as ‘mothers’, while the males are discussed as hunters or in a role separate to parenthood.
‘We have to wonder what messages this might give museum visitors about the role of the female,’ he said. ‘If we look closely we can see there are human biases in the way nature is represented. The vast majority of these are harmless foibles, but not all.’