Here at CV we occasionally pat ourselves on the back at the high quality of some of our comment threads. So it’s only fair that we acknowledge our dismay at the depressingly consistent character of the discussions about women in science; posts by Clifford and me being just the most recent examples. What a depressing exercise to poke a finger into the turgid world of pseudo-scientific rationalizations for inequality that people will believe so that they can feel better about themselves. Among other things, it makes it nearly impossible to have a fruitful discussion about what we could realistically do about the problem; it’s as if Columbus were trying to equip his ships to voyage to the Indies and a hundred voices kept interrupting to point out that the world was flat.
There’s no question: a lot of people out there truly believe that there isn’t any significant discrimination against women in science, that existing disparities are simply a reflection of innate differences, and — best of all — that they themselves treat men and women with a rigorous equality befitting a true egalitarian. A professor I knew, who would never in a million years have admitted to any bias in his view of male and female students, once expressed an honest astonishment that the women in his class had done better than the men on the last problem set. Not that he would ever treat men and women differently, you understand — they just were different, and it was somewhat discomfiting to see them do well on something that wasn’t supposed to be part of their skill set. And he was a young guy, not an old fogey.
Who are these people? A lot of physicists grew up as socially awkward adolescents — not exactly the captain of the football team, if you know what I mean — and have found that as scientists they can suddenly be the powerful bullies in the room, and their delight in this role helps to forge a strangely macho and exclusionary culture out of what should be a joyful pursuit of the secrets of the universe. An extremely common characteristic of the sexist male scientist is their insistence that they can’t possibly be biased against women, because they think that women are really beautiful — as if that were evidence of anything. If they see other men saying anything in support of women’s rights, they figure it must be because those men are just trying to impress the babes. They see women, to put it mildly, as something other than equal partners in the scholarly enterprise.
These are the same people who used to argue that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, that African slaves couldn’t be taught to read and write, that Jews are genetically programmed to be sneaky and miserly. It’s a deeply conservative attitude in the truest sense, in which people see a world in which their own group is sitting at the top and declare it to be the natural order of things. They are repeating a mistake that has been made time and time again over the years, but think that this time it’s really different. When it comes to discrimination in science, you can point to all the empirical evidence you like, and their convictions will not be shaken. They have faith.
The good news is that they are on the losing side of history, as surely as the slaveholders were in the Civil War. Not because of any natural progression towards greater freedom and equality, but because a lot of committed people are working hard to removing existing barriers, and a lot of strong women will fight through the biases to succeed in spite of them. It’s happening already.
Get used to it, boys.
Well said Sean! We’re all in this together, things are going to continue to change, and physics and physicists will be better off for it.
One interesting thing about the NSF astronomy and astrophysics fellowships, at whose symposium Mark was very gracious to speak, is the high percentage of female recipients (11 out of 23 current fellows). This may have to do with the fact that:
1. Proposals are judged based solely on scientific merit, with no letters of recommendation allowed.
2. Education and public outreach must make up a significant part of the proposal.
3. In theory, some form of bias may exist in the judging panel, although I haven’t heard of any complaints from anyone yet.
Assuming that either parts 1 or 2 have some sort of influence on helping to even out the numbers, they indicate that there may very well be systemic problems in the field that cause a gender (and one could suspect ethnic) bias to persist, even if those in charge of decision making are not intentionally biased themselves. It’s certainly food for thought that at least one peer-reviewd program exists in astronomy where male and female recipients have relatively equal numbers, based as much as I can tell on merit alone.
Thanks Sean. I can’t tell you the relief I feel every time someone who is not female or minority actually seems willing to take on some of this particular fight.
Excellent post, Sean!
Q.
Thanks from me, too. You’ve thoughtfully summed up the sorry (but improving) situation. Efforts such as these on CV are in the interest not only of women, but of Physics (and related disciplines) as well.
Your graph is interesting because in 1970, I was an undergraduate at Caltech when the first females were finally accepted as freshman. At the time it was quite a cultural adjustment to the decidedly “Male” house system. But the point here is that wasn’t that long ago. (at least it doesn’t seem that long ago to me) I think everyone takes stuff like this for granted but pause for a moment to consider that a female high school graduate from my class in 1969 did NOT have the option of applying to Caltech. Things have changed
Elliot
Not to be too much of a picker of nits in a right-on post, but shouldn’t the caption to that graph read “percentage of physics degrees awarded to women”? Presumably it comes straight from the AIP, so there’s not much short of a crop job you could do to fix it. The world would be a very different place if even 1 out of every 5 people were getting degrees in physics.
& re: Elliot’s caltech comment, it would perhaps be interesting to compare Caltech, which is now maybe 70:30 male/female (and was 80:20 or so in 1989 when I was looking at colleges), to other colleges that went coed at about the same time which I would guess evened out in M/F ratio much more rapidly, but I am not sure where to find (& too lazy to look for) the details and it would probably depend quite a bit on how actively a give institution sought to increase enrollment by women.
I’ll post this here since it would get lost in the other thread (124 comments and counting). What I’m interested to know is the following. Does anyone really have an objection to testing Lawrence Summers’ hypothesis about the proportion of women in the hard sciences being directly related to innate differences between the male and female brains?
That the furore over Summers’ comments still continues is baffling to me. There is a clear divide between those who agree with his comments and those who disagree, but I have yet to see anyone come out and say “Summers be damned, let’s actually study this question in detail and come up with an answer.” I’d appreciate Sean and Clifford coming out and saying that this idea should actually be put to the test and that they disagree with those who dismiss it out of hand, as well as those who accept without the question the idea that men are more suited to mathematics than women.
Here’s a little homework assignment. Go back through the many posts I have made on this topic. Count up the number of times I have said that we should not actually study the question. While you’re at it, count up the number of times I have pointed to the many studies that have already been done about the question, including the post on which you are commenting. Compare and contrast.
Julianne, Sean’s just trying to impress the babes. 😉
All right, let’s go through “all the empirical evidence” offered by Sean:
1) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/XIEWOM.html
A book, “Women in Science”, which concludes that ” the gender gap in parenting responsibilities is a critical barrier to the further advancement of women in science”. Sounds reasonable – but wait for point (5) below.
2) http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~georgi/women/backpage.htm
An opinion piece by Howard Georgi describing a hyopthesis of his about “unconscious discrimination against women”, backed y no empirical data at all. No idea what this is doing in Sean’s list of empirical evidence.
3) http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html
“A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT”, based on interviews with 15 women faculty. Even disregarding the smallness of the sample, the report immediately raises a question about discrimination of young women in physics:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/01/14/women-in-physics-i/#comment-11067
Since it’s been completely ignored so far, I’ll reproduce it here: “The report states that young female faculty start their careers feeling well supported and not discriminated against, with the problems building up only later on, after tenure. Now, this strikes me as being at odds with the problem description underlying much of this thread and the Women in Physics conference, which appears to have been addressing undergraduates about to enter grad school. If the women in the MIT report did not meet discrimination until they had tenure or thereabouts, does that not imply that the cause of leakage at lower levels must be sought elsewhere?”
4) http://www.springerlink.com/(2lpufv55qlhnkh555gut5p45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,10,13;journal,165,223;linkingpublicationresults,1:401600,1
“360 college students (180 male; 180 female) were asked to evaluate an academic article in the fields of politics, psychology of women or education (judged masculine, feminine, and neutral, respectively) that was written either by a male, female, or an author whose name was initialized.” Unsurprisingly, it turns out that perception of the article was affected by the name of the author. Obvious conclusion: college students are unfit to serve as referees and/or on grant/hiring committees, at least in the soft fields of politics, psychology of women or education, where objective evaluation is notoriously more difficult than in hard sciences. A more speculative (but not unreasonable) hypothesis motivated by this study could be that double-blind refereeing (i.e. concealing the author’s name) is a good idea.
5) http://www.austms.org.au/Publ/Gazette/1995/Dec95/equalop.html
An article entitled “EQUAL OPPORTUNITY IN ACADEMIA: MYTH OR REALITY?”, which mainly offers statistics about the undisputed underrepresentation and slower career progress of women in academia. As far as causes are concerned, only three negatives are offered (it’s not because women teach more, it’s not because of parental responsibilities and it’s not because of lower mobility). The alert reader will note that the second negative is in direct contradiction of the main finding of reference (1). Ooops.
6) http://www.wisenet-australia.org/issue54/sergeant.htm
An opinion piece consisting to 2/3 or so of a FICTIONAL story about the imaginary characters John and Joan. At the top there is some actual data: a finding that the Swedish Medical Research Council is rife with nepotism (duh, what did you expect of socialists?) which obviously favours whoever happens to belong to the dominating group (i.e. male members of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party). But then something really funny happens: the author reproduces a table from the study in (4), describing it as showing “the mean rating of a scientific manuscript intended for publication and sent to 180 male and 180 female reviewers”. Go back to (4) and compare with what that study actually did. What happened to the inconvenient fact that those “reviewers” were actually college students? Ooops.
This is pretty sad stuff all round, Sean, and it sure isn’t going to help anyone. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: most people contributing to this discussion are supposed to be very serious-minded scientific types, so maybe we could try a little harder to apply the scientific method in diagnosing the problem?
If unapologetic feminism were the best way to pick up chicks, there wouldn’t be bars. There’d be Wymyn’s Reading Groups and whatnot.
I don’t know, when I was an undergrad in physics (’91-’95) there were lots of women in my classes. It was maybe like 50%. The math classes were probably a little bit lower because the engineers balanced out the math majors. In that 4 years, I never felt discriminated against in the physics or math departments. Actually one professor kept making fun of the military until I ended up having to wear my NROTC uniform to class one day 🙂 — but he didn’t discriminate. I really felt that everyone at the University of Maryland (except for maybe 2 jerky professors who were jerks to everyone regardless of demographic) wanted all of us to do well.
I guess I just don’t feel your pain.
Absolutely wonderful, Sean. The bizarre element of these debates is the strange manner in which those who claim there is no problem simply ignore a huge mountain of anecdotal tales, responding only with cold, abstract theories that ignore the whole point of the anecdotal stories. It’s like there are two wholly different conversations going on.
Julianne, I totally troll the wymyn’s reading groups, cruising for chicks. Is that so wrong? I even bring along the laptop to show them my blog posts, but for some reason I keep striking out.
Dissident,
And I quote directly the conclusion from your example #5 above.
“Sandler(1986) concluded that despite the perception that inequities had been removed, parity was still a distant goal. This conclusion remains valid today. There have been considerable gains, most notably in women’s access to undergraduate and graduate education. However, once a woman enters the workplace, she soon discovers that her male counterparts are moving ahead of her. She is making some progress, but much more slowly than for equivalent work from men. Furthemore, if and when she does move up the ladder, she continues to discover that the gap between her gains and rewards widens as her own accomplishments relative to those gains increases. Or, as Persell(1983) concluded, there is a positive correlation between performance and rewards for men but a negative correlation for women. This lack of equitable progress is intrinsically linked with (cultural) perceptions that a woman’s work is deemed to be of less importance. It is this feature of the landscape that needs to be addressed before true equity will prevail. Otherwise, as in the U.S., the initial gains will likely level off before parity has been achieved. Only with determined effort will the playing fields be levelled and open to all.”
That is the conclusion verbatim. Not your summary. A little different flavor eh?
If as you suggest you are looking for a serious discussion you should at a minimum accurately describe your sources. Not everyone is going to take your descriptions as factual.
Elliot
Sean, with all due respect, I find the reference to homework assignments needlessly patronising. I am perfectly familiar with the views that you and Clifford describe here at CV. My point, which I admit was nebulously phrased, was that many of the opinions in the other thread can be countered effectively only if those of us who actually support increasing the representation of women in physics are prepared to step up to the plate and actually test the idea that men are more naturally gifted at mathematics than women.
We’ve witnessed countless discussions over the past year about this issue. The common thread among the Everything’s-fine-as-it-is crowd (apart from downright mysogyny) is a latent belief that there is some neurobiological justification for low numbers of women in physics and maths. I find it hugely amusing to watch both sides eviscerate one another while totally missing the point. Someone needs to do the damn study and obtain a convincing answer one way or the other.
#16: Elliot, Sean’s list was presented as containing EMPIRICAL DATA; the conclusion you quote states a HYPOTHESIS (“lack of equitable progress is intrinsically linked with (cultural) perceptions that a woman’s work is deemed to be of less importance”). I have tried to isolate what little data there actually is among the fictional stories and misrepresentations. The three negatives in #5 are it, and one of them contradicts #1.
#17: Yes! At last somebody gets it!
Ahem. Shouldn’t the header above the graph read “% of physics degrees awarded to women”? It would be great if 20% of all women were awarded a B.S. in physics, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Great post, well said.
However, I don’t see these comments threads as that useless. Those who are wrong will not go away if we do not engage them in tyring debate time after time.
dampt, even if there are inate differences, we know there are social differences orders of magnitude larger (actually starting from infants girls are treated differently from boys, so even inate differences meassured in childhood may have social origins), so you can not expect to observe their effects “in the wild” until we have achieved a perfectly equal society.
Also, again speaking for Germany, it’s interessting to see how the statistics differ there, I don’t have a history but last year the percentage of women among those awarded the Diploma was ~15% (20% among the freshmen) while the number of women among those who got their PhD was 14%. (both apparently slowly rising)
So we seem to lag behind in terms of support in the early degree but actually get a higher ratio for the PhD level.
It looks like our countries are succeeding at different points (there’s hardly any leakage at the PhD level of “the pipeline” though onwards towards tenure things decline dramatically, but are catching up to the PhD level now), much to learn from each other.
One of the more interesting experiences i have had over the weekend, and there were many, was the scanning of world news presented in Switzerland and on various Euro-tv. What leaped out at me last night, or early today, non lo so, was how many leaders of nations there are that are women. This is a sign of progress that needs to be valued and honored too; and i do thank and honor Sean for his post here. Women lead Germany, Chile, Liberia, Ireland, and other nations; and yes, once we had women leading India, Pakistan, and Israel where i can only hope they will lead again. It is now an almost common site to see or read interviews with females discussing economic trade issues and nuclear proliferation, as some men wish to continue to discuss the fashion statements made by celebrities. As we here in the US approach a time when we will have our own female President, where we have more women in the US Senate than ever before and more to come, it is time that the sciences, especially physics, recognize what the rest of the world knows. Unfortunately there are some men out there that just won’t let it be, fearing i guess that if women are truly equal then somehow they will become more than equal. Ridiculous and paranoid.
Dissident,
The article cites numerous empirical studies as the basis for its conclusion. You seem to be reading it selectively.
Maybe it would be useful for you to describe the experiment you would like to be performed.
Elliot
17: We’ve witnessed countless discussions over the past year about this issue. The common thread among the Everything’s-fine-as-it-is crowd (apart from downright mysogyny) is a latent belief that there is some neurobiological justification for low numbers of women in physics and maths. I find it hugely amusing to watch both sides eviscerate one another while totally missing the point. Someone needs to do the damn study and obtain a convincing answer one way or the other.
With all due respect, that’s not the point. It really isn’t.
Putting aside for the moment the question of “is there a meaningful way to even define ‘natural mathematical ability,’ much less attempt to quantify it, and measure it?” study after study has shown that the major reasons we have so few women getting degrees in science/engineering and continuing up the faculty track have all to do with social issues. These are the studies Sean is referring to earlier.
The desire to have demonstrable proof about whether or not there are innate differences is beside the point.
Want to go do another study? Go ahead–no one is stopping anyone from doing it. We already know what the cause of the problem of few women in science from a variety of other studies, and there’s no reason to fix those problems we know to be major while we await more studies.
I would recommend Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” as a good starting point for understanding the attempts to measure “natural” ability and the perennial efforts to twist that against a particular race, class, or gender.
I disagree with one thing Sean wrote – that the people who have an unconscious bias in their dealings with women colleagues are the same as those who didn’t want women to vote, etc.. I think the people we are talking about expect and even encourage legal equality for women, but don’t think that legal equality should be expected to produce parity in results, simply because of innate differences, etc. They thus think parity is social engineering.