The wrong side of history

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.
Women's Physics Degrees Get used to it, boys.

146 Comments

146 thoughts on “The wrong side of history”

  1. #60 George Musser
    “For instance, the research life can be unforgiving to people who want to raise families, men and women alike. Therefore the sciences lose a whole cohort of people for whom this is important. Women are disproportionately represented in this cohort, but to describe this as sexism loses important aspects of the problem.”

    This editorial (written by me some years ago) describes a medical technological advance that I think all young women should be considering to help give themselves more time to balance work life and family life in their futures.

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  3. Haelfix,

    I haven’t seen Kursunuglu’s name in many years. When he was at the University of Miami, my mother was his secretary at the Center for Theoretical Studies. Small world.

    Elliot

  4. fh:

    Sam, as I said, contextually that goal is well justified. Inate differences may exist, but they should cause something like a 55% to 45% ratio in order of magnitude, not a 95 to 5 one. Also see Spelkes talk I link below, differences in the cognitive profile of men and women do not neccessarily add up to differences in mathematical abilities.

    Yes, but you have to take into account that (other)innate differences (not necessarily related to cognitive profile) may cause women to choose to study different subjects like, say, biology instead of physics.

    Men and women do make significantly different choices in life. This is obvious if you look at criminal behavior. What is the ratio of murders committed by men vs. women?

    It could be that women are more comfortable in a structured environment. A study here in Holland has shown that the average female student graduates faster than the average male student. This is due to the fact that female students attend lectures more regularly.

    Men are probably more likely to ”violate the rules” and do things they ”aren’t supposed to do”. That’s highly problematic when the rule is not to hurt others. But in high school you probably have more males than females who go to the library and read popular science books. Perhaps the fact that proper science education is virtually absent in primary and high school contributes to the low number of female students.

  5. By the way, JoAnne, I’m fully on your side, but I disagree that the reason this is such a thorny issue is because male physicists feel threatened by female physicists. Certainly some do. But I think the more fundamental problem is that this issue, for many, calls into question the legitimacy of Physics itself.

    Many scientists (men and women both) feel strongly that since we are Scientists, we are automatically exempt from the unconscious biases and micro-discriminatory behavior that critics allege are largely responsible for women’s under-representation in the sciences. After all, we are trained to be Objective! We see things as they Really Are! We pride ourselves on our ability to determine the unambiguously Best Qualified Person for any job! For many of us (men and women both), suggesting that differences exist in the way men and women are treated in the physics community is tantamount to suggesting that the purity of Physics as a scientific discipline is suspect. That physics is no better or more fundamental a pursuit than literature or philosophy or any other humanities field where Truth is relative and any perspective is valid. That physics has no legitimate claim to any special relationship to the objective reality of the Real World. These ideas are very disturbing and go to the core of our self-identification as physicists.

    I will leave aside the question — a whole can of worms on its own — of whether one should or shouldn’t believe these things (somewhat exaggerated here for rhetorical effect) about physics in general. But guess what, folks: it IS possible to separate Physics from physicists! There’s no contradiction in believing in the ideal of objective science but recognizing the limitations of the all-too-human scientists who practice it. And there’s no shame in admitting that we all have biases. Men and women both, people of all races and faiths and sexual orientations ALL HAVE BIASES. I see it as part of our duty as scientists, in service of the objective ideal, to learn to recognize and overcome these biases in our behavior toward each other.

    O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
    How can we know the dancer from the dance?
    — W.B. Yeats, Among School Children

  6. Sean,
    I just didn’t have the patience or time to read all of the comments in your recent posts on women in science (especially since so many of them were the result of seemingly-intelligent minds focusing on the irrelevant or completely misinterpreting your points), but I wanted to thank you for your arguments on the subject. As a female undergraduate astronomer, it’s a relief to have this kind of support. I am lucky to attend an institution where I feel like the entire physics and astronomy faculty is very supportive of women in science.

    And, in general (since I rarely comment), I just wanted to say I’ve always enjoyed your writing – from the Preposterous Universe days as well. I like reading your fellow bloggers here, too.

    Thank you,
    Victoria

  7. Thanks, Victoria. It’s definitely a big help to be in a supportive environment; we just have to keep working to make more places like that.

  8. Supernova,

    I think your point is very well taken. I think that physicists as a group tend to have an “inflated” belief in their own objectivity and this may be one of the causative factors at work here that they cannot recognize their own biases because it conflicts with their self image.

    I enjoyed the Yeats snippet too.

    Elliot

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  10. I’m interviewing all month and haven’t had time to post recently or even read this whole comment thread. But thanks, Sean. Obviously this isn’t the first time you’ve done so, but I’ll echo Julianne’s comment about how refreshing it is when men take this up as a serious subject worthy of their time and effort.

  11. In other words, how can we know when we’ve achieved the perfect meritocracy? (i.e., the correct metrics are objectively used to evaluate the suitability of a person for a job)?

  12. #111: Excellent. But needless to say, the balanced, factual, reasoning approach of the author is on the wrong side of history.

  13. Dissident, since the beginning of the year you have averaged almost five comments per day on this blog, doing your best to be irritating without adding anything of interest. I would ask you to please ratchet it down to about one comment per day on average; more than that seems evidence of an unhealthy obsession. If you have more to say, it’s very easy to start your own blog, and we will always accept trackbacks.

  14. Sean, you evidently find anyone who doesn’t readily buy your opinions irritating, be they lowly Dissidents or Nobel laureates. How silly of me to think that the comment section was intended for discussing ideas, pointing out alternatives and suggesting links to relevant online resources (and yes, for some goodhumoured jesting too, lest it all become dry and boring). If the real purpose of the “comment” section is to praise Sean, I’m afraid I’ll have little reason to post even one comment per year. Bye bye, and good luck. With your attitude, you’ll need it.

  15. Anonymous Geek Revolutionary

    Vaguely relevant futurology: places like MIT, Caltech, University of Waterloo, etc will continue to select for geeks of both sexes. Perhaps there are minor hardware differences across males and females, but we’ll hack and port around them, and find those people already running geek software successfully with both the male and female chipsets. We will nuture them, and eventually create a third gender — math/sci/tech geek — which will map uneasily across sex, culture, ethnicity, and various other cultural and biological distinctions. We will continue to be socially awkward and offputting for a while longer, but we will eventually develop pleasing personal interfaces as we propogate the geek gender. We will prevail.

  16. Count – it’s important to remember, when talking about personal preferences, that people tend to enjoy doing the things they believe they are good at. If people don’t think they are good at math, they avoid professions and lesuire activitites that require that they spend their time slaving away at it. And yet; witness sudoko. Hey! it’s not math, or a logic puzzle, it’s a crossword puzzle with numbers! (not) The number of women I know that have started playing sudoko, but would likely insist that they suck at simple math and logic, is just astounding.

    People who have always been in situations were they are members of the majority tend to either forget, or not ever even realize, that simply being a member of a minority (whether it be women in science, men in early childhood education, or a nerd in high school) can be challenging even when the majority doesn’t actively try to make it that way. The majority often makes assumptions about everyone sharing certain characteristics that are actualy unique to them, and then creates structures that reflect those assumptions. Plus, minorities can have a hard time developing relationships with other members than come naturally to everyone else in the group simply because there seems to be less common ground. When one is talking about physics, where most people have socially awkward pasts to begin with, bridging that gap can be an enormous obstacle, and one usually left to the minority member to figure out.

    I don’t take offense at being called a “socially awkward adolescent” – but I guess I’m like Rhett Butler that way. Everyone who managed to be a nerd and yet not be socially awkward in secondary school, feel free to take offense, but I don’t think we’re wrong in claiming you are the minority. Which, since we are talking about group dynamics, not individual characteristics, is rather the point.

  17. I rarely comment on the blog. Besides, this period of time, with the beginning of classes on one hand, and preparing results for the winter conferences on the other, is particularly hectic. But I’ve been trying to follow this thread on women in physics (although much of it has been said before on this blog…) and I can’t resist at this point to make a comment.

    Several people have been accusing Sean that he dismisses the possibility of differences between the sexes. But I remember when he posted a similar article on CV on Sep 22, 2005, titled “Bell Curves”. (I remember it because it was one of the rare occasions I had commented — and I do have an elephant’s memory anyway 🙂 There, he provided links to previous postings he had made on the same subject on “Preposterous Universe”. If you follow the first of those links (from Jan 20, 2005), you will read his opinion on the possibility of biological cognitive differences. He doesn’t dismiss it, either in favor of one sex or the other. This is something that we can’t really measure. The point is, have there been systematic biases against women in science through the years? Can anyone deny this with a straight face? And if there have been, what can we do to remedy the situation?

    So give Sean a break, and lets concentrate here on the positive things we can do to encourage young women to take the science path. Lets take our daughters to the Science Museum instead of the “American Girl Place” after Sunday brunch. Lets buy them a telescope for their birthday instead of that sweater (or in addition to that sweater, what the heck). And yes, lets reassure them that it is OK to be smart and love math and science *and* wear a pink miniskirt at the same time. And that they should always, always speak up for themselves. And follow their dreams. And then lets build more day-care centers at our labs and universities. And teach our sons that raising their kids is half their responsibility (although I think most young men understand this already). And so on…

    I am not senior enough to have participated in faculty hiring committees, so I don’t know what is going on there. (All I know is that when I am hiring my postdocs, I am oblivious to their sex or color, I just want the person most suitable for the job at hand.) But I think that the problem of disproportionately few women in science starts at much earlier stages, in subtle ways, embedded in our societies. And this is something we can all do something about.

    By the way, I never thought of myself as a female physicist. I think of myself as a physicist.

  18. Mickle,

    your posting reminds me of study according to which women on average have less confidence about their mathematical abilities than men. I don’t remember the details of this study anymore.

    Another factor one has to consider is that mathematics isn’t really taught properly in high school at all. Proofs are almost always omitted. Almost no high school student can tell you why minus 1 times minus 1 equals 1.

    Perhaps if one started to teach ”real maths” in high school, the difference between male and female science students would become smaller.

  19. Count — that’s along the lines of what I was thinking with my earlier comments. If it’s easier for scientists of any gender to write good papers & present to a group well if they have been learning how to properly organize their ideas since kindergarten, it stands to reason that women who have had better exposure to “real” math — including more spatial stuff, which I think is really essential to start including in curricula — will have an easier time than women who didn’t run into this material until they were 20 years old.

  20. Annie, I agree. Also, if you know more maths then you have more options to solve a problem so that you can avoid certain weaknesses you may have. E.g. despite the fact that I’m male, I’m not so good at visualizing 3d objects. But because I was so far ahead with my maths in high school, I was able to score 10 out of 10 most times in 3d geometry exams. I just solved systems of equations instead of doing drawings of projections to calculate what was asked.

  21. As a soon to be PhD in particle physics I would like to relate a story about the most moronic thing a man has ever said to me.

    I was at a summer school in theoretical physics at IAS. I was having a dinner conversation with fellow grad students about women in physics and one guy said to me that he thinks women are naturally more submissive/less agressive than men because during the sexual act the woman is the one who gets pentrated by the man.

    This person, who to all appearences seemed to be intellegent was trying to extract a meaning from something that was absolutely meaningless. I was surprised/dissapointed that I really didn’t know what to say to this person.

    This entire argument is just like that, trying to extract meaning about what is ‘natural’ (A word that barely means anything, in a sense everything is natural because nature allows it) If 15% of PhDs go to women and women do well in the field physics than it is utterly absurd to argue women lack the skills to do physics. No experiment or group of experiments has ever established that. No amount of brains lighting up , women rotating objects in thier heads, or psuedo-scientific sociobological fairytales have ever conclusivley prooved anything. I don’t see how they could when the only meaningful experiment, the ongoing participation of women in the field of physics, has shown that women do have the skills and ability.

    Honestly, women in physics will only feel comfortable if jackasses who think the act of sexual pentration or means something, at least learn to keep thier mouths shut when women are around,

  22. Carpenter: Testosterone is definitely linked to aggressiveness, but.. whatever.

    Statistical arguments are inapplicable to the individual; either one can do X or one can’t – and that’s all there is to it.

  23. ok, 1st, Carpenter, I’ve heard that exact same stupid belief before. (Someone said the same thing to me)

    2nd: I am a female physics major. I have always been good at physics. I tutored people in the AP class in High School even though I wasn’t taking it. I have always understood it and it seems to come naturally to me. I was not going to major in physics. I am a “non-traditional” student so I’ve taken some time to think about this. I got sat down by my physics prof (female, and feminist) and told that I was being silly doing my other major and that I was a scientist. For the first time in 15 years I am back doing what I love, physics. I was one of those women who didn’t want to go into math/physics b/c I bought into the things that I had been taught and thought that it would be too hard for me. As with last year, and my last physics class I am tutoring people again, yet the lab techs (people younger than me) say the most sexist things. To say that the dinosaurs are dying out is just plain ludicrous. These are people who will be my peers and I hate them all ready.

    It’s not about who’s born with more skills, it’s about how those skills are nurtured. It’s about saying that boys are better at math and science and it’s about how we treat girls in the classrooms. There’s a Seattle group for women in science hooking up undergrads with women in their related fields. I have talked to about 6 women who were/are physicists and a lot of them left because of hostility. That’s not a welcoming environment.

    (Thanks Sean, it’s always great to hear that people are fighting for equality in physics.)

  24. OH whatever about testosterone… no one ever conclusiveley proved that women are less aggressive than men either let alone that they are by virtue of testosterone. And as for these statistical arguemts they should be folded neatly and shoved up Larry Summers ass because they weren’t true when they tried to apply them to Blacks in the Bell Curve and they aren’t true now. These ideas are grounded not in the pursuit of scientific knowledge but in the need for one group of people to prove that the exosting social order could never be different. If they were really grounded in fact then everyone would have to conceed that we don’t have any proof that these things are true. We haven’t shown that there are large structural differences in the brain let alone what differences might mean…scientists are even backpeddling away form the corpus collasum crap. We haven’t prooved that different skills are innate rather than learned, in fact eveidence seems to point away from that. We haven’t prooved that lower standardized test scores are linked to intellegence or that they reflect on peoples abilities or theythat they reflect ‘natural’ differences.

    The question we have to ask is why people insist on claiming these things are true when they in fact aren’t established at all.
    Is it becuase male scientists feel like they have something to loose?
    Is it becuase everyone says it and thus people accept it s true without bothering to question it?
    Is it because likethose who believed the world was made of 5 platonic solids that were the regular polyhydrons…the idea that the sexes are exactly opposite and complimentary too simple and symmetrical to be false?

    I can tell you that I have never met someone who beleived in innate differences in math science ability that hasn’t also believed in a miriad of other unfounded stereotypes like women being less agressive, more psycologicaly weak, less courageous, less good in leadership positions, as sexually submissive etc etc etc.
    These things are myths that were invented for a specific sociological purpose and have been repeated until everyon accepts them despite the lack of hard evidence.

    The problem with women in physics is obviosly that we have to deal with sea of unspoken prejudic and we have to waste our time wondering who we know is a jackass and what they are going to say next.

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