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.
There is not a single argument in your text, Sean, just a lot of unjustifiable personal attacks against people whose knowledge you find politically inconvenient.
You should be ashamed for such an approach, much like all the people who endorse your shamefully irrational attitude to this important question.
I think that your idea that the people who oppose your preconceptions must necessarily be discriminating against someone; or that they have not been leaders of football teams “if you know what I mean” can easily be ruled out, too, much like all other specific statements that you have made.
It is very different if someone just states obvious findings from neuroscience and other fields that show cognitive differences between different groups of people – which is more or less well-established science – from your insane speculations that there are correlations between interpreting the data in certain way and being captains of soccer teams or criminals.
Why is it different? It’s because unlike the cognitive differences between the sexes that are supported by hundreds of scientific papers and millions of observations of each of us throughout our lives, your speculations are only supported by your own hatred against those who disagree with your far left-wing confusions.
To summarize, your piece of propaganda exactly follows the type of newspaper articles that the communists used to write against Vaclav Havel and all inconvenient people who would otherwise be respected. I can show you how these articles looked like and you can try to invent some difference if you believe that there is indeed any difference. What you’re doing is really disgusting, Sean, and I wonder how much time you need to realize that you’re being a real jerk.
Even if there are demonstrable innate gender differences in math/ spatial/ logical reasoning aptitudes between males and females as groups, that doesn’t rationalize treating gifted individual women as less credible than their male peers.
What you’re doing is really disgusting, Sean, and I wonder how much time you need to realize that you’re being a real jerk.
If you listen closely, you can actually hear Irony dying.
(to steal a line)
As for #8: 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.
That’s because the question is studied all the time. Whether or not there are innate differences? Lots of studies. What effect they have of gender representation in the sciences? Lots of studies. I don’t understand why you (and others) seem to think that these questions are not studied. They are. You can listen a bit about them here, and that was just from a really cursory googling.
For more references than the five mentioned by Dissident above, please see Macho’s comment at:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/01/02/dangerous-stupid-or-simply-dishonest/#comment-10006
S
What I find most depressing about discussions on this topic is that most of the effort is directed towards aspects that should be beside the point. Discrimination is about individual access. It is not about quotas. As such, the arguments about whether women are innately better or less suited to science is utterly irrelevant. Those women that have the aptitude & desire should have the same opportunities — thats just basic civil liberties.
Ideally you’ld hope that scientists, at least, would be able to sort the signal from the noise on this question, but it rarely seems to be the case.
Lubos, in all due respect, your utterly unscientific approach to a wide number of issues outside of (and sometimes within) your own field is saddening.
It is precisely the kind of approach Feynman described precisely in his “This unscientific age” article, which I am sure you know. Perhaps you should also consider wether there is something to learn in this article for you, especiall regarding your approach to things you have no expertise in.
You have no idea of literature theory or sociology or modern philosophy yet dish out plenty of naive and unsophisticated blanket criticism to these fields. In as far as these fields try to impose themselfs on physics that is justified. That you turn this around and impose your physics thinking on these fields bespeaks the same close mindedness and inanity that you attest to those strawmen you critizise consistently.
Your application of elementary economics to micro-sociological problems makes about as much, or less sense as female physics would. Except that I have never actually seen anyone propose the latter, while you are shouting out stuff along the lines of the former constantly.
Brad : What I find most depressing about discussions on this topic is that most of the effort is directed towards aspects that should be beside the point.
What’s more depressing is that there is even discussion about whether discrimination against women in science exists or not. I used to think that that’s kinda obvious and the more interesting discussion is what people are going to do about it (I think there are good and bad ways to deal with this problem).
But apparently I was being really naive. Perhaps it’s only an extreme but vocal minority that seems to pop up everywhere chanting their innate-differences mantra that is giving this impression that we are still living in the past.
Someone needs to do the damn study and obtain a convincing answer one way or the other.
dampt_dweller, the difficulty is in accounting for all the differences in socialization and upbringing between men and women. Two seven-year-olds could have very different spatial thinking skills if one was given building blocks as toys and the other was only given dolls. Nevertheless, other commenters have linked to some of the careful studies which have been done.
I think Lee’s post on the other thread (Clifford’s USC women in physics conference thread) which pointed to the MIT study done some years ago was very good – if I’m not mistaken, they actually measured square feet of lab space and dollar value of start up funds and found that the packages put women assistant professors at a disadvantage. Lee, thanks for the link.
Sean, I love the trends, it is changing, regardless of the yipping and yapping of those who think there isn’t a problem or the problem is due to some factors that are out of our control. We’ll get there. And JoAnne, if you are reading, I like your suggestion a lot, I will put it to use. The only time it has happened to me was with a female professor, and she was my advisor at the time, she was smart enough to send me out of the room before she brought up my idea as her own. But I heard about it afterwards and dealt with it. The important thing is not to let it slide.
Keep up the good work, Cosmic Variance et al.!
Part of my comment got eaten somehow. (Are two blockquotes in a comment not allowed?) My response to jfaberuiuc’s comment about the fellowships is that 56% of the AAS members under age 24 are women, so the situation for women in astrophysics is not as dire as in other physics fields. There is still a leaky pipeline, but 11 women out of 23 fellows is not unusual nowadays.
The question is, why isn’t the number of women in the field increasing in other areas of physics?
Dissident,
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/womeninacademe/Xie%20PowerPoint.pps
is Xie and Shauman based on empirical data asserting that neither differences in average nor extreme math ability explains undergraduate enrollment ratios.
-Arun
#26: It’s unfortunate, but I have to agree. That was not a post reflecting scientific integrity, Sean.
#27, #30: Absolutely! Unfortunately these discussions degenerate into foodfights because people present statistics about the partecipation of groups and, like Elliot in #23, fail to appreciate the distinction between descriptive statistics and causation. Elliot has the excuse of not being a “scientist by trade”, but I do wonder what Sean was thinking.
#36: Arun, that study is the same as the book “Women in Science”, first item in Sean’s list. See #11.
Well, in my experience, it is mainly the “no innate differences” camp who has the “faith”. Any reasonable “innate differences” person is willing to admit that environmental factors play some role. But a staggaring number of “no innate differences” people make their opinion just that–there can be no innate differences in intelligence between human beings, no matter what. It’s an axiom of their world-view that all humans are created equal; it’s just a matter of time before science proves it. Just think back in your life to the conversations on this issue that you have overheard or participated in. There is a profound asymetry: if a “no innate differences” person suggests an environmental factors explanation, the opposite camp acknowledges it, but downplays its role. If it’s the other way around, however, and biological factors are suggested to one who doesn’t believes in environmetnal factors, now there is no budge in position whatsoever, and quite often name-calling, cold refusal to continue the conversation, or unhelpful comments like “you’re on the wrong side of history”. You have violated an axiom of their faith (i.e., the truth) by suggesting innate differences play a role, and the retribution is quite naturally harsh and/or condescending.
This is purely a sociological observation. I actually have no position on the issue–nothing in particular I’d like to convince people of, except that this asymmetry is there, and that it is ridiculous. If it were obvious that innate differences are nonsense then the asymmetry would be reasonable, normal, and expected. But saying that men and women have identical brains when it comes to intelligence (in all its forms) is really a scientifically very *unlikely* proposition. Men and Women’s bodies and brains differ in so many ways; it would be unusual (in a cosmic variance sort of sense) if the parts of the brain that are responsible for success in science were identical. It is certainly *absurd* to assert this as an axiom.
I just want a world where both sides respect the other, where both sides realize that the truth (like it always is) is on a continuum, in this case between innate and environmental factors–where 95% of specialists working in the field aren’t already convinced of the answers before they ask the questions; where the most obvious explanation isn’t automatically discredited, even as a small factor, because black people used to be lynched.
I hope and pray that there are no innate differences in intelligence between men and women. But there’s just a chance–more than just a chance, in fact–that God and Evolution made this world a little less than perfect. And if that’s the way things are, we need to know. Is it so much to ask that this question be asked fairly?
I’d appreciate a response from anybody who has the time.
-Sam
Brad– you have hit the essence of the whole thing. If one woman has had to live through a hostile environoment, forcing her out of the field, the situation is unacceptable. It is unacceptable even if she was not forced out.
Unfortuantely, it is manifest that the number of women in physics who have to put up with sexist crap from their peers is much, much greater than one. It is unacceptable, and it’s a problem that must be dealt with, regardless of whether or not doing so will affect the number of women in physics (which it clearly would).
All these abstract arguments regarding the number of women that should be in physics, blah, blah, are completely irrelevant. The absurd Male:Female ratio is just an indicator that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denying that this discrimination exists reminds me of a Soviet beaurocrat ignoring the fact that the infrastructure under his tutelage is crumbling in order to protect his job.
I’m a fourth-year (female-ish) physics major, with designs on grad school. It’s my personal opinion, completely anecdotal, that the biggest problem is that it is difficult to have a family and an academic career, and that across society, this burden falls (for better or worse) disproportionately on women. I don’t think that this problem is localized to physics.
I certainly have never encountered any sort of anti-woman prejudice or discrimination, at least not as “women have inferior physics skills”. For the record, my mind is open to whether or not there is measureable difference in men’s and women’s “natural ability”. On the other hand, I think there are many, many more things that go into making a good physicist, like hard work, and the ability to work with others.
But I don’t think we can blithly sit back and pat one another on the back for at least creating a non-hostile work environment. Because, until we are inclusive of all women, we haven’t done a very good job. I find that there is subtle, but noticeable, discrimination against queers in physics. Now, being queer and being female in physics, I realize that I am a minority of a minority. However, I don’t think that comments about how I shouldn’t get a word in in discussions of women in science because “you aren’t going to have children anyways” (True, but irrelevant) or because “you don’t really understand what it’s like” (What?) or the simple fact that any discussion on women in science inevitably focuses on heterosexual women who want children, constitute being far enough along. Worst of all, I find the majority of these comments come from women, as do the disapproving looks when I mention my girlfriend. As does the fact that anytime I bring this up, I must grow another head, as that’s the only thing that can account for the stares I get.
Is it worse than some stuff I get out in the “real world”? No. But it’s still annoying and still there.
damtp_dweller on Jan 16th, 2006 at 4:13 pm:
I have read about studies relating brain activity of different brain parts during certain tests and people’s jobs. It turnes out that engineers and scientists when subjected to the same tests as nurses use their brains differently. Although there is a difference between the average male and the average female, female scientists use their brains just like male scientists (same is true for nurses).
If I remember correctly, the average female scores higher in tests measuring communicative skills. There is a test in which you are shown pictures of faces and you are asked to guess if the person is tired, depressed, angry, happy or whatever. Females, on average, score much higher than males here.
There is also strong evidence for a genetic link to intelligence and communicative skills (or the lack of these skills) from studies using single egg twins raised in different families.
Most striking to me was a recent documentary about autism. In Eindhoven here in Holland, schools were complaining about the lage number of autistic children in their classes. A study was performed and it found that there was indeed a significantly higher than average number of autistic children in Eindhoven. Now Eindhoven is a ”technological” city where a large number of highly qualified male and female engineers moved to some time ago. According to another study the probability of getting an autistic child when both partners are ”science oriented” is much higher than average.
So, it seems that there exist genes that more or less fix how much of our brains we will devote to do the processing for communicative skills and how much to other tasks useful to solve analytical problems. There are differences on average between male and females. But if you get too few genes that control the communicative skills, you run the risk of becoming autistic.
Sam. I have yet to see someone here discount the possibility of innate differences. It is however blatantly absurd to suggest that the known minimal innate differences can explain the drastic differences in the sociological distributions we see.
Furthermore good scientific thinking considers context. Innate differences were at all times conjectured to explain social structures. These were time and time found to be nonexistent. So we have a long history of postulated innate differences each weaker then the previous one, each found to be wrong. So structurally equivalent claims have to overcome a highly justified barrier of skepticism. The burden of proof is on those who claim innate differences, not the other way around.
Evolutionary our brains were not made to be good in completely post intuitive fields like Maths or Physics. Our intuition there is acquired not inbred.
The few neuroscientific results in brain differences are impossible to relate to sociological trends, as a simple survey of the complexity scales involved will show. That would be akin to trying to read the whole working of an organism given nothing but (some small strands of) it’s DNA. Probably impossible.
I read about, and listened to an NPR segment about, an interesting study the other day in which some of the common cognitive tasks were tested in a group of men and women. The example given was a “mental rotation” task in which you try to picture what a colorec cube, a pyramid, etc, would look like under a given rotation. Typically, men perform better than woman at this task.
Then, everyone was given a chance to practice that kind of exercise — and after such practice, the women made up the difference. One of the interesting points in the article, for me, was that while men traditionally score more poorly than women on tasks having to do with verbal and oral communication, these tasks are part — a HUGE part — of school curriculum in the United States. Spatial tasks are hardly ever part of the curriculum, and are even less a part of basic education at the high school level.
On NPR, the speaker went from this study to the really basic point — that even if we say, okay, there are innate biological differences, that doesn’t mean we can’t *do* anything about it. This applies to all areas of life, right? If somebody were saying, as an extreme example, “Oh, my parents were alcoholics, so I’m predisposed to that and might as well just drink myself to death now,” we would all jump up because that’s not how it works. The argument that gender differences are to blame for gender disparity in the sciences is even more ridiculous — it’s like that previous person saying, without any consideration of the person as an individual, “Oh, my nationality is stereotypically more predisposed to alcoholism, so I might as well just drink myself to death.” Not only does biology not work that way, that’s a ridiculous misinterpretation of freshman-level statistics.
#42: Count Iblis, the same abnormal incidence of autism has been noted in Silicon Valley. See e.g.
http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2004/02/rise_of_asperge.html
and links therein.
For those that want to collect physical studies:
Men do hear, but differently
but studying the social strata would be a lot more useful.
I find it interesting that everybody here jumps on Lubos Motl for his remarks, but nobody seems to have a problem with the statements by Brad DeLong who essentially claims that there are less women in science because they prefer a comfortable family life over a tough scientific career due to biological reasons.
Dissident, Amara, thanks for the interesting links!
Annie, but what if less females want to study physics? I mean, even if the biological differences aren’t really preventing them from doing well in physics, there may be biological differences which makes them (on average) to persue different directions. Motivation is of huge importance to be successful in physics.
My personal impression is that you have less females compared to male high school students who are interested in physics. Then, because you have less female physics students, you end up with less female professors. Then it becomes a male oriented profession in which you unfortunately get discrimination against women.
We must eliminate the discrimination but we cannot change physics into something else…
Dissident,
I don’t need an excuse of being a non-scientist. I understand the difference. You seem to be reading what you want to read. Go to the original research cited in the reference then give us a report on the “real data”.
FP,
I wouldn’t call the role of mother “comfortable”. I frankly think that I with my business world “day” job have it easier than a stay at home mom.
Lubos,
If we were to take your “hypothesis” of inherent differences seriously why wouldn’t the logical conclusion be that the investment in teaching women or minorities math or physics was not justified.
Elliot
Hey Sean! Can’t you start a new entry about something that no one cares about — like dark matter of the fate of the Universe or something?