Joyeux 4th of July, mes amis américains! I am checking in from Montréal, a temporary stopover on the way back to the U.S. of A. from a brief visit to Quebec City. I was there for Renaissance Weekend, an occasional (five times per year) gathering of the important, demi-important, and merely interesting and/or well-connected to get together and talk about stuff.
I had a great time, and I would be happy to tell you all about it if RW goings-on were not strictly off the record. (For example, I could reveal the amusing story behind how nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler met his wife Rosa Wang, or how I took down a huge pot from Scripps College president Nancy Bekavac when my quad tens demolished her ace-high flush, but rules are rules.) But I am perfectly within my rights to share things that I said myself. I gave a few mini-presentations, among which was one in a series of two-minute lunchtime talks on “What I Would Do If I Could,” a rather free-ranging topic if ever there was one. Other people suggested banning torture, printing people’s phone numbers on their license plates, or moving to a chocolate-based economy. Here was my little spiel:
If I could propose one thing, it would be to do everything in our power to encourage young girls to get excited about science, math, and technology.
As a physicist, I know that my field is only about ten percent women. There is a theory on the market, occasionally suggested by people in positions of power and influence, that an important contributor to this imbalance is a difference in intrinsic aptitude. The technical term for this theory is “bullshit.” I say this not as a starry-eyed egalitarian, but as one who has looked at the data. This is a theory that makes predictions, and its predictions are spectacularly wrong. If they were right, the fraction of women that dropped out would rise at the higher ranks, as the competition for positions became more fierce; that’s not true. The percentage of women scientists would be basically constant from place to place; that’s not true. The fraction of women getting physics degrees would be stable over time; that’s not true. The truth is that women drop out of science between high school and college (and, tellingly, disproportionately more women try to specialize in physics later in college than those who choose physics as a major during their first year). And they do so because they are discouraged by a million small signals that add up to a powerful cumulative message.
We shouldn’t encourage girls to be enthusiastic about science, math, and technology because we need more scientists, mathematicians, or engineers. We should do so because many young girls are potentially interested in technical fields, and this interest should be celebrated, not deprecated. Support to pursue one’s passions is something that everyone deserves, regardless of their chromosomes.
Let freedom ring, everybody.
Nice spiel. But prepare for invectives from our Harvard friend.
Sorry for being off the topic, but I’m curious: what do you think about Barack Obama’s recent religious talk? Topic for a post maybe?
Never mind the fact that it’s bloody easy to find non-intrinsic-aptitude causes why women would flee from physics if you just look around a little bit…. If there’s a bullet wound and a smoking gun, you don’t have to insist that if we look hard enough, we’re sure to find stab wounds on the body.
-Rob
Great talk, Sean! 🙂
Thanks (from a woman scientist)
Rien, I haven’t had a chance to look over Obama’s talk, as I’ve been traveling and concentrating on work. It’s good to engage with religious people, it’s bad to buy into Republican talking points. But it is off-topic — maybe I’ll get a chance to post about it soon.
If there’s a bullet wound and a smoking gun, you don’t have to insist that if we look hard enough, we’re sure to find stab wounds on the body.
Except that there might well be bullet holes and stab wounds.
Thanks from another woman (grad student this time 🙂 )
Sometimes I wonder if I am lucky, lucky, lucky that I have never run into any creepiness, discrimination or discouragement, or if I am just naive, naive, naive to believe that I haven’t!
Annie
I felt the same when I was younger. Trust me, the latter is true.
“As a physicist, I know that my field is only about 10 percent women”.
And 80% wine, and 10% song.
As they say down South, bless your heart, Sean, for caring about women in science.
Sean,
The under-representation of women in science and engineering relative to men is due overwhelmingly to differences in intrinsic interests than to differences in intrinsic ability. Given this, efforts to recruit women into the hard sciences will only have a marginal effect. They will be as fruitful as efforts to increase the number of men specializing in primary education, library science, or women’s studies.
Sure. But how strong could one’s “passion” be, if “a million small signals” can dissuade one from pursuing it?
Agreed. We shouldn’t encourage anyone to enter those fields, because there is currently a surplus of technical labor. [Unless, of course, you agree with Big Business that tech types should be paid even less than they are now.]
Cough.
Belizean, what do you mean exactly with “intrinsic interests”, and how did you verify that they are different from men and women?
Philip Greenspun has argued that women are just smart enough to realise that careers in science are a bad choice for nearly everyone, while men’s status anxiety blinds them to reality. If this is even partly true, encouraging girls to go into science is going to improve things only very slowly, and what we need to be doing is making science competitive with other career options.
PK,
By “intrinsic interests” I mean the innate tendency for women to be in general more interested in people and social relationships. While men are more interested in objects and mechanical relationships.
That these differences are innate is obvious to anyone who’s experienced chronic exposure to a sample of young children of both sexes. It’s so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those asserting the contrary — that these differences are not innate. I don’t think, however, that there are very many developmental psychologists under the age of 70 who still assert this.
Belizean,
Let me see if I am interpreting your comment#14 correctly…
It seems that you are implying that a woman – with her inferior innate mechanical skills – would probably not be able to repair her broken air-conditioner. However, a woman – with her superior innate people skills – would probably be able to manipulate a man into repairing her air-conditioner.
Feel free to correct my interpretation of your comment… In the meantime, I will simply declare that your comment is riddled with flaws.
Referring back to Sean’s post, the following statements seem to apply to Belizean’s hypothesis as much as the ‘aptitude’ one:
That’s not good science. If you want to prove that differences between the genders are innate, then you must perform experiment. Without experiment, it is the null hypothosis that should be accepted, namely that there are no differences.
Remember in all this, that gender is only one of the more obvious dichotomies that can be made in a human population. There are many others which might often result in more striking contrasts in the data. Take for example the differences that might be observed between introverts and extroverts. Or between left and right handed people. Or between persons with different blood groups. Or indeed, persons from different socio-economic groups.
Most of these studies draw their conclusions from the mean of the data. This is often not a very useful quantity. For example, on average, anywhere on earth, the sun shines for 12 hours in a day. But this only occurs one day in every year. In paticular applications, the general mean may not be helpful.
The rising trend of women obtaining higher level qualifications in the sciences, and in academia in general, brings into question “obvious” conclusions drawn from anecdotal exposure to young children. It is clear that it is these established views that are need of experiment to test their veracity.
#10 Belizean
>because there is currently a surplus of technical labor.
Perhaps you need to define ‘technical labor’, because, with the exception of a few, most western countries are hungry for technical savvy workers. If I take a random sample of a classified ad list from one of the hungriest technical markets, the S.F. Bay area in California, the sci/biotech, medical/health, software, technical support, internet engineers job arenas are far from experiencing a ‘surplus of technical labor’.
In this January 2000 Economist article titled Career Evolution,
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=277491
we read how fast the industries in the United States are changing, and that those which don’t change go under quickly. Quoting from the article:
“The information technology industry in America is growing more than twice as fast as the economy as a whole—and in every state it is producing more job changes.”
and
“In the 1950s, when three out of five American workers were “unskilled”, education was considered a bonus; now the one in five workers who is unskilled is at a big disadvantage. The need for continual re-education extends even into the later stages of most working lives. Few can any longer afford to rest on their laurels, or to rely on experience which rapidly becomes obsolete because of technological change.”
Belizean: the fact that girls get dolls to play with and boys get fire engines (from an extremely early age, I might add) does not have any influence? Come off it! If you treat children according to the expected role model, they will conform.
The only hope for you to prove your position is to find the implicating genes. In the meantime, we can’t really know whether these interests are innate or not.
Belizean, there might very well be differences in intrinsic interest, just as there might be differences in intrinsic aptitude. I suspect that the “intrinsic” nature of those things is greatly exaggerated due to the difficulty of separating non-intrinsic factors, but I’m willing to keep an open mind.
However, in both cases, you can’t be expected to be taken seriously if you simply leap from some tests of young children to an explanation for what is happening at the faculty level without taking into account the mountains of data concerning what goes on in between. As Pacian says, the idea just doesn’t fit the reality, especially the fact that there is a higher percentage of women switching into physics later than the percentage who choose it as a major in the first place. There are systematic biases that discourage girls from pursuing an interest in science, and as those biases are being combatted, the numbers are getting much better (just as they have done for law schools and medical schools, which are essentially 50-50 by now).
If we were to eliminate the systematic biases to the point where intrinsic qualities were plausibly the most important factors determining the fraction of women in the field, I’d be happy. Right now we’re not close.
Regarding your spiel, Sean, see the NY Times’ July 4 interview with biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (Nobel 1995):
Hey Sean, I’m really interested in this thing about women switching into physics later — I haven’t heard it before. Do you have a link or a reference for it?
What amazes me about this whole debate is the number of people who are willing to ignore societal pressures, as if we’ve “solved” the discrimination problem and therefore all these “intrinsic” differences are showing up in a vacuum. Seems to me you can’t hope to uncover any small intrinsic effects until you’ve eliminated the other factors that are likely to swamp them.
The problem is that half the population is getting the million small signals and the other half isn’t. Pretty hard to infer anything about differences in “passion” level in that case.
“If I could propose one thing, it would be to do everything in our power to encourage young girls to get excited about science, math, and technology.”
This strikes me as a little odd. Of the multitude of heinous problems facing human civilization, why does this one come to the top of your list?
To me at least, it is not obvious that the gender imballance in science is really causing that much suffering. In theory it would be nice to have more equal representation, but my impression is that most women don’t go into science simply because they find it less interesting (—for whatever reason). It is not because they were thwarted by an inpenatrable wall of prejudice and discrimination at the college level and beyond.
Of couse, it is possible, even likely, that women are less interested because of systematic prejuduces—i.e. societal expectaions—which influence the child’s personality and interests from a very young age. In some sense this is sad, but I don’t think most women regret that “if only dad gave me a truck instead of a barbie doll when I was 3, I would have been a completely different person than who I am today, and there is a slight chance that that person would be a better, happier person than who I turned out to be.”
Pervasive prejudice doesn’t strike you as a heinous problem? Is the problem of racial underrepresentation in scientific and technical fields more worthy of our attention in your mind, or does it suffer from the same irrelevance in the grand scheme of things?
I’m playing devil’s advocate to some extent — sure, there are lots of life-and-death issues out there to worry about, and one could argue that many of them are more dire than the issue of women in physics. But there’s a sense in which one has to pick one’s battles. We in academic physics may not be especially well placed to help end global warming, for example (though many of us try to do what we can with donations, political engagement, etc.), but we are in a perfect position to advocate for an end to discrimination within our field of specialty.
Supernova, thanks for answering Justin’s question. As to your own about switching into physics later, I wish I had a reference but I don’t. The statistic was mentioned by Tim McKay during the course of a talk about the results from studies done by the University of Michigan ADVANCE initiative, but I don’t know if it’s been published. I thought it was an important finding, as it suggests a concrete proposal that would help encourage women in science: universities can structure curricula such that students can complete a physics degree in three years rather than four (which is a good idea anyway).