Vicky Vásquez is a Moss Landing Marine Labs graduate student under the Pacific Shark Research Center. Her Master’s thesis focuses on the soupfin shark population of San Francisco Bay. Before beginning her graduate program, Vicky worked in marine education for over 7 years with groups like the Ocean Discovery Institute and the Marine Science Institute. This work has fostered Vicky’s passion in outreach education with a special interest in working with at-risk students and under-served communities. She has continued this work as the founding Deputy Director of a new non-profit in San Francisco Bay, the Ocean Research Foundation (ORF). You can follow Vicky on Twitter @VickyV_TeamORF and get updates about ORF through their Facebook Page.
Was anybody else bothered by Shark Week’s King of Summer campaign? I wasn’t at first. I thought it was hilarious! I found this light-hearted commercial of a guy riding two sharks to be on par with the ridiculousness of SyFy shark movies like Sharknado or Ghost Shark. It’s just too silly to take seriously. More so, I was just relieved they finally moved away from their Snuffy the Seal theme which vilified and eventually killed a shark for eating its natural prey of seal. However, after watching the subsequent versions which include Bob the Shark and Rob Lowe, I couldn’t help but get a annoyed. What is with that freaking mermaid?!
So men are kings and women are mermaids?
Perhaps some of you may think I’m spoiling the fun of Shark Week by bringing this up, but the Be the King of Summer promotion reflects my point. People were asked to insert their own faces into this add. Although women did participate, they most commonly posted their faces as the mermaid at the King’s knees. I understand that this is all in good fun and obviously those women did too. However, very similar to this mermaid persona, is the growing number of women whose shark conservation work has been recognized for their sole approach of being sexy while swimming with large sharks. Despite that sounding like a jab against them, it really is not. My concern is that there is an equal number, if not more, women who are protecting sharks through research. For instance, there were 60 female scientists that presented research at the 2014 Sharks International Conference. Nevertheless, Shark Week predominantly features white male hosts and researchers despite the slowly growing number of women (as well as people of color) in the science and engineering fields. I therefore can’t help but wonder, where are they on TV?
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