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.
macho, yes, the lack of progress is depressing, which is why it’s worth repeating the obvious over and over again.
The Xie and Shauman book is Women in Science : Career Processes and Outcomes.
Belizean & Justin: Just what rock have you climbed out from under?
Sean: Interesting statistic about women switching to physics later. I have never heard it before, but indeed did so myself. I took my first physics class ever as a sophomore in college to fill a science credit. I ended up liking it and took a couple more classes Fall quarter my junior year and then switched to physics in the spring of my junior year. Needless to say, I had alot of catching up to do…
BTW: I have known (and supervised!) many women who have quit academic science purely on the basis of the discrimination they encountered. It is not unusual.
Anyone who doesn’t think that some women actually are pushed out of the field by discrimination needs to enlarge their tiny universe of anecdotal evidence.
On the flip side, more happily, encouragement works as well! It’s surprising what impact being told “You can do it” or even “Give it a try, see if you like it” can have.
Thanks for the Xie & Shauman reference! I’ll check it out.
Comparisons with France might not be particularly helpful. A higher fraction of female Ph.D.s might, for example, simply be a consequence of France being a more credential-driven society than ours. Credentialism tends to flourish in inverse proportion to the strength of local capitalism. French capitalism can’t be particularly robust given that we just witnessed weeks of rioting when the French government considered passing a law that gave businesses the right to fire worker under the age of 26.
Amd yet there are those who would deny the existence of closed timelike worldlines.
In other words, Belizean, the fraction of women physicists in France is heavily influenced by contingent social factors, while here in the U.S. (at precisely this moment) it is simply a natural reflection of intrinsic predispositions?
No. In the absence of an experiment one assumes the least controversial hypothesis. Otherwise, we’d have to be neutral about whether civilized beings are living in the middle of the sun, whether eating freshly severed skunk heads cures the common cold, or whether the two-year warranty at Circuit City is worth buying.
In this case the least controversial hypothesis (except where it conflicts with prevailing religious dogma, as in various old-line university departments) is the seemingly obvious one.
Nature features “Cosmic Variance” as one of top 5 science blogs (and the only physics-related):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7098/full/442009a.html
You’d think you see a blog entry on Cosmic Variance about it, or something…
Yes. My guess is that social influences affecting whether a woman will pursue a physics career are currently weaker in the U.S. than in France. Hence, the fraction of U.S. female physicists is currently more a reflection of innate interests. Should physics in the U.S. become more glamorous, prestigious, secure, or lucrative — i.e. if the pro-physics social influences strengthen sufficiently — this will change.
Sean,
My view is that females as a group are innately more interested in people than in objects and consequently less interested in physics than are males. I do not hold that a female’s interest in physics cannot be increased by external influences.
It should be clear, to take an extreme hypothetical example, that a society that tortures women who do not enter a physics program and rewards those that do, will have more women physicists irrespective of whether females are innately interested in the subject.
The phenomenon that you adduce — women becoming physics majors later in their college careers than men — seems to support my view. Women aren’t as naturally attracted to the subject and need to be coaxed into it by welcoming physics professors.
The degree to which the fraction of female physics Ph.D.s in a society is a reflection of innate interests of women as opposed to social influences depends on the relative strength of these influences. Obviously, to zeroth order (i.e. in the absence of social effects) the fraction of Ph.D.s is totally due to innate interests. The question is whether this zeroth order approximation applies to our society, i.e. whether social influences in the U.S. are small compared to innate interests. I think that in this particular case they are. The reason is that there are no forces in our society that act to suppress the innate feminine interest in people over objects. And pro-physics and anti-physics social forces acting on women are relatively weak. They’re so weak that it’s possible not to notice them, even if you’re female. Social influences, then, are at best a first order correction.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop a society from increasing the pro-physics social forces acting on women. It’s just a question of whether the effort would be better invested elsewhere.
Sorry to give up on attempts at constructive engagement, but … that’s just one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
I almost never hear a woman saying this, especially after two years or so of grad school. I do hear men saying this quite frequently, even arguing that women are at an advantage for hiring and whatnot, which I find laughable.
Yes, now that you mention it, I see that that phrase does conjure up an amusingly creepy picture.
btw, apologies if you are a woman Belizean, I shouldn’t assume
bittergradstudent,
I talked two women that I know — a physics post doc and a physics grad student — about this very subject. Neither noticed any discrimination. [Although, one of them complained that she’s constantly being hit on by guys she considers unattractive. And it’s challenging to rebuff their advances without straining her professional relationship with them.]
They could be flukes. But, by contrast, I can’t think of a single person in my extended family who is older than 60 and didn’t experience anti-black racial discrimination first hand.
They could be flukes.
Or…for some mysterious reason…they are not keen to talk to you about the subject.
What about the phenomenon of attrition? Proportionately more women than men change college majors from physics to other fields, proportionately fewer women than men go on to grad school in physics, and proportionately more women than men leave grad school before getting a Ph.D. I suppose the women who leave have been mercifully awakened to the fact that they weren’t innately interested in the subject after all? (It’s interesting to note that the female undergrads who leave physics have higher grades in their physics courses than do their male counterparts who leave.)
Kea has a very good point about the anecdotal evidence. It is very difficult for women to talk to men about these problems, for fear they will be seen as complainers who are advocating for “special treatment” or who can’t hack it in physics and are looking for a scapegoat. This is especially true if the man asking the question is competitive with or senior to the woman. Belizean, you aren’t by chance these women’s adviser, are you?
I imagine Sean talked about women in physics rather than world hunger or peace in the Middle East, because the first problem is something he can actually do something about. Attack an important problem in which one can be effective in, even if it is not the most important problem in the world is a good strategy, IMO.
Regarding Sean’s efforts, the two possible negative responses are:
1. It is futile.
2. It does harm.
I don’t think that even those who believe that the ratio of women to men in American physics is determined entirely by innate, unalterable factors, and thus the effort is futile, could argue that Sean’s efforts would do harm, provided it is not an attempt to lower standards. But I see Sean as advocating that girls compete more vigorously, that they be taught and engaged better in the sciences. Better teaching and more exposure to science will also benefit boys. And it is not as though Sean will be able to commandeer all the resources available to benefit his pet scheme.
Therefore I don’t see why there are so many critical comments. 🙂
Belizean: “Comparisons with France might not be particularly helpful. A higher fraction of female Ph.D.s might, for example, simply be a consequence of France being a more credential-driven society than ours.”
Then you would need to explain Italy, where the population-at-large thinks the degree is mostly a useless degree (Comment #16), while the number of men and women PhD earners are about half and half. Italy is still a large ‘exporter’ of PhDs (i.e. Brain Drain) because of the large societal and economic factors against science in general. To have access into the literature comparing different countries such as France and Italy, Google on “Eurodoc”. Here: Comparison of Higher Education Studies in Different Countries. In this document, you’ll find numbers of men versus women PhDs for many fields, but unfortunately not specifically for physics; the tables usually list subjects: Engineering or Natural Sciences. Regarding Italy, for those who stay in the country for their degree, please notice the number of research doctorates awarded to men and women, which are roughly equal (see tables 6 and 8, page 67 and 68).
The number of women with full academic positions (versus positions at CNR / INFN / INAF / ENEA etc. — research institutes) is very low however; women are penalized every step along the way in top-level academia. You can read about that in this paper: Academic Scientific Careers in Italy.
Belizean: “Most of those jobs are offering a mere $60,000 per year or so to perform extremely demanding work, for which one must have mastered many technologies that did not even exist a decade ago, while living in the most expensive part of the country. The evidence of a surplus is the low salary offered for such a demanding job.”
It looks you agree that technical skills are necessary to some level. I’m aware of the living prices in the Bay area. I moved away just before the dotcom bubble and subsequent burst, but I’m back there frequently (family and friends and my permanent U.S. address is in San Jose). I’m sure that Bay Area employers are aware of the cost of living. If they couldn’t provide a liveable salary then they wouldn’t be advertising all of those positions. 60K is a liveable salary for a recent university graduate or otherwise skilled technical worker. (When I was living there, my salary as a MS Physics educated scientific programmer working for government astronomers was 40K.)
The number of open skilled positions (university or trade school level) is very large. If one doesn’t have some basic technical skills, I think that one’s career future will hurt. There are fewer, to be sure, highly skilled (PhD +) positions, but don’t see anything wrong about that.
Data.
Technical jobs at dice: no preference on job location (worldwide), required travel and type of job (full-time, contract) returned 87,566 jobs. Another job site http://www.careerbuilder.com/ , by selecting all United States and then selecting the individual job areas: ‘Science’ returned 6632 open jobs, selecting ‘Telecommunications’ returned 2847 jobs, ‘Skilled Labor Trades’ returned 39,758 jobs, selecting ‘Pharmaceutical’ returned 5570 jobs, selecting ‘Informational Technology’ returned 32316 jobs, selecting ‘Engineering’ returned 30,843 jobs, selecting ‘Biotech’ returned 1671 jobs (actually I would have thought this would be a factor of 10 higher; there must be better biotech job sites). I think that Monster will give the same or more results (http://www.monster.com/)
Now for PhDs. At PhDs.org, selecting ‘Physical Sciences / Math’ one finds 135 jobs, selecting ‘Life Sciences’ one finds 45 jobs, ‘Engineering / Computer Sciences’ one finds 140 jobs, ‘Academic’ one finds 45 jobs, ‘Industry / NonFincance’ one finds 60 jobs, Quantitative Finance one finds 90 jobs. Searching all (physics) jobs at Physics Today returns: 117, searching Nature jobs, just using a keyword ‘technical’ for all jobs at all locations returns 83 positions.
Belizean says:
But are you adopting the least controversial hypothesis? Not according to this blog. Perhaps it is where you come from, but why does that carry more weight than the discussion here?
If women are more interested in people than in objects, then why are there more women in other disciplines – like biology? In my exprience there’s more women who are chemists than physicists, but I don’t have numbers to back that up.
I think there’s clearly some discrimination, but at the same time the peer pressure from the rest of society to pursue other fields is a bigger factor. Reaching some “critical mass” of female students and female faculty may help in eradicating some of these problems.
And let’s not forget that any institution that discriminates against some group will in the end suffer because other (non-discriminating) institutions will take advantage of this and snatch the best talent away. So perhaps a combination of “critical mass” effect and simple capitalism will be the key to solving these problems?
The Cream Rises to the Top
The case of Lounette Dyer/PhD Caltech is an interesting story
She’s on the Caltech Board of Trustees, I assume partially because of her gender (it looks as if she’s totally qualified). Interesting thing, she eliminated Academia as an option & pursued entrepeneurialship. Of all things, she received negative influence by a male teacher in HS (“all girls should take typing, because secretarial work is all they’re good for”). This contrasts with Danica McKellar (who was failing math in HS, but got support from a female HS math teacher), who went on to take math courses @UCLA (late, on a whim..kinda like Joanne): graduated w/honors & co-published a significant paper.
Update: she’s started a new company.
I also think — even if you accept, or play Devil’s Advocate with, the idea that women are more interested in the “social” and men are more interested in the “physical” — so what? There’s a lot of grant writing, networking, conference attending, colloquium giving, mentoring undergrads, organizing a group of grads all jockeying for the hot thesis topic, proposal writing, data sharing (like the Virtual Observatory), and involving of other colleagues in the job that we label “science.” There’s also getting along with your dean and department chair, serving on department committees, and serving on other academic committees or scientific advisory boards.
I know this argument is always trotted out, but I think Belizean and I might be in agreement that for every desk jockey who works all day in a haze of equations and code and finds it unbearable to have to deal with students, there’s some other person out there communicating to the public, working in outreach, and schmoozing to secure funding. We disagree because he believes the former to be a man and the latter a woman.
It can’t help the rest of your argument to misrepresent something tangential to it, can it? Correction: the right to fire anyone under 26 in their first two years of employment, without having to give a reason. One can argue that this would help or hinder a capitalist society, but I don’t think it is implicitly necessary for it.
How is the null hypothesis regarding life in the middle of the sun that these beings may exist and could be civilised?
Of course, there have been experiments. A meta-study last year found that although studies finding differences between men and women got a lot more press, most studies found no difference. A friend of mine wrote about this in a post entitled Men Are From Earth, Women Are From Earth and I bask in the vicarious eloquence of his title.
But, I forgot, we are here talking about the supposed innate interests of the sexes. Surely a person’s interests are even more likely to have been affected by the way that they have been treated? Their equal aptitude has apparently been accepted by all. You contend that the differences in interests between the sexes should be considered to be natural until someone here presents evidence that they are caused by social pressures. When they do present evidence, you dismiss all tendency towards physics as social pressure and laud all tendency away from it as ‘innate interests’. I’m sorry, but this really seems like someone bending the facts to their worldview to me.