I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy.

These charges are certainly not unfounded. SI has seven regular columnists who appear in every issue of the bimonthly publication—not a single one of whom is a woman. This is despite the fact that SI’s two newest columnists were fairly recently brought on–one in 2009 and the other in 2010. The Center for Inquiry (CFI), CSI’s parent organization, has just a single female member on its board of directors—and she was added relatively recently in May of 2010. These two facts alone were a major motivator in my founding the blog We Are SkeptiXX.

However, I am pleased to announce that although SI has a long way yet to go, its gender-equality gauge is slowly but surely making its way toward the middle from its initial zero position. The most recent issue, January/February 2012, is a stellar example of SI’s progress toward evening up the gender ratio of its contributors. 

The cover feature, “Measuring Mythology: Startling Concepts in NCCAM Grants” is authored by Eugenie Mielczarek and Brian Engler♣. I think it is going to make a big splash. I have already received one phone call from a man in Sen. Bernie Sanders’s district in Vermont who wants to meet with Sanders, who is a huge proponent of alt med, and his staff to discuss the article. I immediately popped five more copies of the issue in the mail to him and am eager to hear how it works out.

And the Mielczarek/Engler article is just the oh-so-tasty chocolate cupcake part. The frosting part is the inclusion in the January/February issue of the final installment of the thrilling three-part series refuting the “documentary” Lost Civilizations of North America. The concluding part’s lead author, Deborah A. Bolnick, along with coauthors Kenneth L. Feder, Bradley T. Lepper, and Terry A. Barnhart, uses DNA evidence to tell those “documentary” makers what’s really what. “You think these people were from Israel? NOT SO FAST! Just LOOK at these haplogroup X forms!”♠  (The first installment of the series was the cover feature of SI’s September/October 2011 issue, meaning that two of the past three cover features of SI have been cooauthored by women.)

Can you even believe that that is still not all?! The sprinkles on top of the frosting on top of the oh-so-tasty chocolate cupcake is yet another feature article authored by a woman. “Information Literacy and Conspiracy Theories” by Kristin E. Harley♦ is well written and fun to read. Lost files! It’s a conspiracy! Yeah, not so much, Hurley assures us. Her article was pretty perfect for a word nerd like me.

And don’t change that channel just yet because there’s another very special cherry on top in the January/February 2012 Skeptical Inquirer: a commentary promoting use of the HPV vaccine by Shobha S. Krishnan. This is a cause very dear to SI Editor Ken Frazier’s heart. His daughter, Michele Baldwin, just returned over Thanksgiving from spending a month stand up paddleboarding down the Ganga River in India. Michele has inoperable cervical cancer, and after years of chemo and surgery the doctors have told her there is nothing else they can do for her and she has about six months left. Now if I were in Michele’s shoes I’d probably hide under a rock and sob myself to death. But she decided to take a month to paddleboard down the Ganga for cervical cancer  and HPV vaccine awareness. Take a look at her website and be sure to read the blog entries written by her and Ruth Frazier (Michele’s mom, Ken’s wife). I dare you not to be amazed and inspired.

Oh, and don’t forget to read Wendy M. Grossman‘s review of Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion even though I have run out of cupcake metaphors. It’s fascinating stuff, and Reitman’s book is now firmly affixed to my (ever too long) “to read” list.

So yes, I will be the first to admit that Skeptical Inquirer needs to get some female columnists STAT. But I give kudos to the magazine for having come a long way since every single contributor had a penis. Keep up the good work, Ken. We’re on the right track!

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♣  I met Brian for the first time at CSIcon 2011. He is one of the warmest, genuinely nice people you could ask to have in the secular humanist/skeptics movement.

♠ Bolnick does not actually say this because she is much too profesh for that. But I like to imagine she said it aloud while writing her outline for the article.

♦ Looking for a site of hers to link, I noticed that she is often listed as “Kristine Harley.” This threw me into a panic, because I know we definitely published her byline as “Kristin E. Harley.” I had let a HUGE typo go into indelible print! Still feeling that jolt of adrenaline from this horrible realization, I checked the original author-submitted word doc on the editorial server. PHEW! Kristin (sans “E”—Anne Shirley would be so disappointed) was there in black and white. PHEW! AGAIN!

This post originally appeared on We Are SkeptiXX. 

In summary: Kristen, a woman who works as a shift manager for Gamestop, recently witnessed a father trying to bully his son, age 10–12, out of buying a purple game controller along with a game with a female protagonist. Luckily, the boy’s elder brother, a high school wrestler,  stepped in and stood up to the man. Kristen also comforted the boy by assuring him that “There’s nothing wrong with what you like. Even if it’s different than what people think you should.”

Kudos to the big brother for not only standing up to his bully of a father but encouraging his younger brother to be himself. And of course Kristen, who is already challenging gender stereotypes simply by working in such a male-dominated environment, deserves praise for being brave enough to give comfort to a kid who needed it despite the fact that the child’s father had shown himself to have anger issues and violent tendencies. I have seen many kids being treated poorly by their parents in my years working retail and waiting tables. It is all too easy to look the other way for fear of pissing off the customer and getting in trouble.

Last but not least of all, a big hug and hearty pat on the back to the victim of the gender bullying himself. Not many 10-year-olds have the courage to say simply, “This is what I want, ok?” while being bullied, especially when the person doing the bullying is an authority figure threatening violence.

Given the recent back-and-forth over the Riley Maida video, I thought sharing a post where the victim of the gender bullying is male would help illustrate that we who support Riley and her argument are fighting for more than just a toy aisle that has colors besides just pink in it. We’re fighting to stop what those segregated aisle’s often lead to: gender stereotyping and bullying.

This post originally appeared on We Are SkeptiXX.