Is there a difference in academic writing styles between engineering and women's studies?

Question

Coming from engineering, when you write a paper, the goal is to be objective and analytical. We use references and try to define terms for a clear understanding. The goal at least is to provide facts that support a hypothesis in as unbiased a way as possible. I think there may be some difficulty in always remaining unbiased, but recently I came across an article that seems to be written like an opinion piece more than a piece of academic work. After going through it I looked up the author, who is a professor of women's studies. She writes about robotics being sexist. Does women's studies have different goals in academic writing than engineering?

To be specific, it is these types of sentences that confuse me on the intent of the academic writing in women's studies:

Enter HRP-4C, a new-generation gynoid that was unveiled in the spring of 2009 as a body double of and for (or to replace?) the average human female.

Why would a journal allow the publication of the unsupported rhetorical question "or to replace"?

The android wears his maker's unfashionable beige shirt, dark trousers and black windbreaker jacket."

Is it professional to call a world-famous robotics researcher "unfashionable", and why is it necessary?

. . . exact body consists of silver and black plastic molded to resemble a Barbarella-like custome, which accentuates her ample breasts and shapely, naturalistic buttocks."

There is no supporting information of how the square, minutely curved metal is purposefully making the visual the author interprets. But what I don't understand with this is instead of referring to the robot by its name or the paper, the author continues to refer to it as "robo-Barbarella."

Did I just happen to come across a unique piece of writing, or are there very different styles of writing in academic disciplines?

Answer 1

Many academic fields work on the premise that you examine the evidence and present an unbiased analysis of that evidence. There are fields (e.g., creative writing and the arts) that take a very different approach. That said, many fields that take an objective unbiased approach to the analysis focus on the readability much more than in the sciences. For example, the use of "robo-Barbarella" seems much more informative that the clinical/objective HRP-4C. Had the original creators of HRP-4C called it robo-Barbarella, there would presumably be no issue. In terms of the fashion comment, I am not sure "maker" refers to the actually person who did the welding, soldering, and programming, but rather the stereotypical fashion sense (or lack thereof) of CS people in general.

Answer 2

CS and WS are each concerned with a different kinds of questions, and the language their respective practitioners use simply reflects this difference.

This is familiar to me, given that I've been on both sides of the divide (English Lit as an undergrad minor, cognitive science for my PhD). I got a glimpse of why it exists many years ago when I was in a course with a bunch of Lit Crit majors and we were discussing a certain poem by a certain contemporary poet. The Lit Crit people where pointing at a specific part of the poem and going "Is this an allegory for his lost love? Is this a metaphor for the senselessness of war?", and so on. Then, in a youthful display of naivety, I said "hey, the guy who wrote this poem is still alive, why don't we try to get in contact with him and ask him what he means?". The lecturer leading the discussion looked at me very sternly and said "that is not the point".

That was very illuminating, I think. I'm sure that the poet in question had something specific in mind when he wrote the poem (and we'll never know what it was because he's dead by now), but the Lit Crit guys don't care about that. The intended meaning of the poem is irrelevant to them, what they care about is the meaning(s) that others might extract from the poem. In the same way, in the passages you quoted, the author doesn't care about the android in and of itself, but rather about how others feel about the existence and characteristics of the android, and how these feelings affect other feelings and beliefs we might have about related issues. That is what allows him/her to make judgments about fashion and other things.

In comparison, people in the sciences care about "objective truth" (for lack of a better term), not about how other people feel about stuff. If I write in a paper "stimulus A caused neurological response B (p < 0.01)", asking about the Marxist/feminist/whatever interpretation of this finding is about as pointless as trying to get to the "objective truth" underlying a piece of poetry.

Answer 3

Yes there are differences in writing style between Women's studies and Engineering, just as there are between Engineering and Science, Science and Mathematics, Law and History, and so on. The purpose and objectives of each department are different, as well as their intended audience. It would be more surprising if there were very similar writing styles between different departments.

You do not say where the article was published but this also affects the style. More narrowly focused journals will normally restrict themselves to papers written in a certain style. So technical engineering journals would normally publish technical papers, while such papers would not be accepted for a Women's studies journal, or a general science journal.

Answer 4

I'm going to write the answer that the OP is surely hinting at and that a substantial number of readers are thinking (minority or majority is hard to say).

Yes, engineering and women's studies have different writing styles because they have different aims. The goal of engineering is to build new technologies and thereby benefit mankind. Objectivity is highly valued because nature itself is objective. You can't trick nature. The goal of women's studies, on the other hand is about identity politics. Its aim is to further the power wielded by a subset of the population. Power is determined by people and people can be manipulated. As has been confirmed in numerous psychological studies, people respond to emotion far better than reason. Hence, the most efficient way to further its goals is naturally through subjective persuasion rather than objective analysis.

I find it ironic that someone would write about a roboticist being sexist while throwing out sentences like: "The android wears his maker's unfashionable beige shirt, dark trousers and black windbreaker jacket." But it isn't surprising if you keep in mind that the goal isn't objectivity, but rather to promulgate dogma, since the success of the field is entirely determined by how many people buy into its core edicts.

One of those core edicts, incidentally, seems to be that men and women have exactly the same distribution of innate intelligence (mean, variance, probably all higher moments). There is not any room for discussion on this point even though it seems self-evident to me that this should be a purely empirical fact, and that especially now with full genome sequencing, biology would have a lot to say about this issue. How you respond to this answer likely correlates heavily to your view of the following incident in the math community:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/on-the-recently-removed-paper-from-the-new-york-journal-of-mathematics/