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.
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.
Er… I look around at my department of 29 professors (two women), I look at the casual thrown-away comments that are all over the place, I look at what I’ve heard (yes, anecdotally, admittedly) from quite a number of women here and elsewhere, and I’ll tell you what: the obvious hypothesis is very different from what you seem to think is obvious.
a few more random points:
I have a bit of a moral dilemma about encouraging anyone to go through grad school. On one hand, science is exciting and all that… but practically – job security sucks, pay is low, hours are long and there’s over-supply of PhDs. Most young people are a bit naive about these issues at the time they enter grad school, and only become aware of it at the end of postdoc.
So why should we encourage women (or anyone?) to choose physics as their career?
Second – what about social interactions factor? Scientists are introverted people, and there’s a lot of weirdos that I have met through grad school. If I was a woman, this would probably qualify as “creepy” rather than “funny” experiences.
Third – some departments solve the problem of improving equality status quo by simply hiring female grad students from overseas – russia, china. At least it was the case in my school. Does this count as a positive change, or is it simply a ploy?
Fourth – since we are talking about foreign students – I can assure you that nationality-based bias is as big of an issue as gender-bias. But for some reason I don’t hear people talk about it. For example, asians are not considered “strong leaders” and despite a large representation in sciences, they hold very few leadership positions – likely more disproportionately than women or minorities.
Fifth – as long as we are talking about foreign students. If the goal is to have equal representation of the two genders (something I tend to agree with), then what about other criteria? I am playing devil advocate here, but what about equal representation of students from middle east, africa or south america? Does it mean we need to reduce the number of students from soviet block, china, korea and india?
Sixth – I disagree with a lot of points Belizian makes, but it makes me wonder if we are trying to desperately encourage women to do something that they may have very little interest in doing. We are clearly not there yet, but what if he is correct, and there’s a difference in some sort of innate interest, that would limit female:male ratio at, say, 1:2. It’s the same question as with affirmative action – how do we know that the problem is solved? And how much can departments do to ensure equality? What if even with all the encouragement from professors and high school teachers, physics is still more interesting to males than females?
Seventh – how much of what we say and the way we act represent our true feelings on the subject, and how much of it PC?
Ok, enough of “devil advocate” points here. While I can easily come up with counter-arguments, it’s not enough to paint a self-consistent picture.
I have a bit of a moral dilemma about encouraging anyone to go through grad school. On one hand, science is exciting and all that… but practically – job security sucks, pay is low, hours are long and there’s over-supply of PhDs.
Yes, I have the same problem in general. To some extent, you can view this as a separate problem from the gender imbalance. At least in Physics, we still “train” everybody to become a professor or researcher, even though we know there won’t be jobs for all of them to do that. But if we fix that problem, using the gender imbalance (in the sense of “whew! at least we don’t have to worry about getting rid of half of the population”) isn’t really a moral way to proceed. Yes, perhaps we should produce fewer PhD’s… but the people who should get those PhD’s may not be well-represented by the pepople who are doing it right now.
Scientists are introverted people,
That’s a stereotype.
My own observations — again, this isn’t really hard statistical evidence, but more my own cynical lense on the world — is that the people who go furthest in science (in terms of being well-recognized, having the best positions and funding, etc.) are much like the people who go furthest in any field. That is, the self-confident (at least outwardly), aggressive, even arrogant types. Our society socializes men to be more aggressive and arrogant than women, and who knows, perhaps there is some innate tendency for those with a Y chromosome to tend to be more aggressive and arrogant. I am not convinced, however, that “aggressive, arrogant, and focused on one’s own self-interest” is what is really best for science. That is, I think that some of what propels people forward the most in science may actually be somewhat detrimental to science. Given that, if you accept that women tend to, on the average, be less arrogant and aggressive than men (either because of social or intrinsic factors), it might be that it would be better for science if the imbalance were the other way.
The more introverted you are, the greater the obstacles in your way in succeeding in science. “Success” comes not just from technical ability and brilliant insight, but from schmoozing and pushing your agenda, just as in anything else, unfortunately.
I disagree with a lot of points Belizian makes, but it makes me wonder if we are trying to desperately encourage women to do something that they may have very little interest in doing.
I think that’s the wrong way to state it.
We souldn’t encourage anybody to do something that they may have very little interest in doing. Women are not a monolithic block; they are composed of individuals, just like any other broad group of people.
There is evidence, however, that there are more barriers against women who are interested in science getting into science than there are for men. That’s the problem. No, we don’t want to encourage women or men or anybody else to do something they really don’t want to do. However, we do want to remove the barriers. Unfortunately for some of the individuals involved, part of the way to remove the barriers is to just get more women involved to help bring perspective to the issue, to provide role models both for young women as well as for older men (who need to see that women really can do this stuff), and so forth. This is unfortuate, becasue the “early adopters” are going to suffer the other bullshit that’s impossible to get rid of a priori.
-Rob
This is not correct. Occam’s razor is the guiding tool in the absence of experimental data.
The least controvertial hypothesis initially was that all celestial bodies revolved around the earth., and behaved differently to each other. However, after enough experimental data was gathered, this view had to be modified, via epicycles, and eventually had to be changed. The simpler assumption that all mass obeyed the same gravitational laws lead to the correct agreement with the data.
Again remember that the dichotomy between men and women is only one of many which can be made. It falls to those proposing it why this dichotomy should be held above all the other in this context. The assumption being made is that there are innate differences, yet few experiments attempt to separate the innate from the instructed. If the difference are innate, we should expect to be able to deduce a relationship between the differences, based on say, hormone levels etc.
I would find this unsurprising, given the vast arrays of advanced unguents and potions adorning the shelves of many impressionable young girls across the world.
A few more random points, answering the beginning of the last message from Ponderer of Things:
“I have a bit of a moral dilemma about encouraging anyone to go through grad school. On one hand, science is exciting and all that… but practically – job security sucks, pay is low, hours are long and there’s over-supply of PhDs. Most young people are a bit naive about these issues at the time they enter grad school, and only become aware of it at the end of postdoc.”
“job security sucks”
Is it so special in other industries? I watched my brother-in-law go through 4 rounds of downsizing at HP, on the fourth round his position was eliminated.
“pay is low”
Usually (with the exception of places like Italy or Greece), the salary is liveable or more than liveable.
“hours are long”
Yeah, but you can fight and (usually?) succeed to get your time to be your own
“over-supply of PhDs”
I am not sure about this. There are certainly fluctuations in the market from the people with available job positions compared to the people with PhDs, but I’m not convinced it is a chronic condition. For example, these references from Google Answers: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=578583 would argue that there are not enough PhDs. And why do you think that US businesses are so frightened about the large numbers of new Chinese engineers?
Amara,
I think you are talking about industrial physics, where things are a lot better. But a lot of physicists may not have that option (astrophyics, high energy, atomic, nuclear, all of theory), at least they are not as useful to employers as someone who worked on laser systems, UHV chambers, semiconductors or biophysics.
For these people the market sucks because if you can’t land a faculty job after numerous postdocs, the options are pretty slim. Basically you can keep doing soft-money postdoc-like position with very low pay, or you can re-train yourself in finances, software, consulting or some other field unrelated to your primary field of expertise. This is rather unfortunate and depressing – I see it as a waste of resources, time and effort, especially as many PhD’s spend 6, 7 or 8 years doing research, followed by a couple of 2-3 year postdocs, which quickly become the norm. In a global market this situation would eventually correct itself, except there’s very little feedback from people forced to quit physics in search of a job that can pay the bill, to the naive graduate students who think their future is so bright.
I wish there was a crystal ball that someone could look into at age 21 or whatever, and it said something like: “With
sorry, got cut-off
I wish there was a crystal ball that said to the class of 30 incoming grad students:
One (two max) of you will succeed as a faculty member at solid research university.
Two or three will end up teaching in liberal arts colleges with no chance to do top research (which doesn’t stop you from being in denial about it). In the end you will convince yourself that it’s precisely what you wanted in the first place.
Three of you will end up as staff members in government labs, after failing to land that dream faculty job.
Five of you will get good training in experimental technique (condensed matter/materials/bio) and will go into industry.
Five of you will drop out of grad school still young enough to become successful engineers, patent lawyers, doctors, stock-brokers or whatever.
The rest fifteen or so of you will not be able to land that dream faculty job after 7 years of grad school and 6 years of post-docs. So in your mid-30ies, no family, maybe a significant other who you dragged across the country forced to relocate 3 or 4 times, you will have to forget everything (or almost everything) you learned in grad school to become a wall street quant, McKinsey consultant, or software hack – if you are lucky. But you will also notice that on corporate ladder you are not that much further up ahead than some 21-year old college graduate. Except he is fresher, hungrier and younger than you.
I do understand. I didn’t want a PhD for many years for many of the reasons that you listed. Heartbreaking for me to see the trials of the graduate students and postdocs, and I didn’t want that life for myself. I changed my mind (Comment #68) though, with the help of a serious work injury, at which point I needed to evaluate my life and follow my heart (got my PhD at age 40). Moving to Europe shifted my perspective, as well (more time for myself, hobbies, etc.). One thing we might emphasize to Physics PhDs, is that your training might not land you in the long-term job of that particular field. Instead it prepares you for a way of thinking that is useful for many technical fields, if you can accept being flexible.
Thank you, Rob, for your last comment (#78); it was very well said.
Amara,
We are trying to understand the cause of the relative dearth of female physicists in the U.S. The conjectured primary causes are
1) discrimination or discouragement directed disproportionately toward females
2) an innately lower interest among females in the subject
Neither of these conjectures precludes the possibility of a country in which, for example, 90% of physicists are female. That’s because both of theses depressive effects can be compensated for by social inducements. People, for example, seem to have an innate revulsion for death, but we can always increase the number of morticians by making this occupation more glamorous, lucrative, prestigious, secure, or otherwise more attractive. If 90% of the physicists in Slabovia are female, we cannot in the absence of fairly intimate knowledge of Slabovian society understand why. The profession of physician became overwhelmingly dominated by women in the old Soviet Union. That fact alone tells us nothing about whether there is a sexual difference in intrinsic predispositions to practice medicine.
In order to know which of the above conjectures matters most within a given society, we’d need some way of quantifying them. Short of that, we’re stuck with our qualitative judgment of the relative strengths of these within the societies in which we live.
In my case, I see hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the assumption that women and men have different interests (chick flicks vs. action flicks, romance novels vs. techno thrillers, Lifetime Network vs. Spike TV, fashion industry vs. pro sports, etc.) and repeated experiential evidence that this dichotomy (people/social vs. objects/mechanical) of interest patterns exists from birth. Even cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have dropped the zero-difference dogmas of the 50’s & 60’s. Stacked against that there are the subtle discouraging signals that girls allegedly receive in the educational system. Even if such signals exist, it seems unreasonable to suppose that they are primary explanation for female under-representation in physics as opposed to a higher order correction.
Rob,
Are you saying that you are are in an old-line university department (i.e. one in steeped in the social dogmas from over 40 years ago including that of zero-innate sexual differences) and yet the idea of a sexual difference in innate predispositions is not controversial?
“The point here is that women in science are suffering from more disruptive influences than men doing the same work. Also, I don’t know what point you are trying to make wrt children. Lisa Randell doesn’t have children – how is this supposed to demonstrate that things aren’t any better in the business world?”
If you’d get your head out of your academic ass you’d be able to see that the problems (“suffering from more disruptive influences than men doing the same work”) of women in academia are no different from the problems of women anywhere- in business, at home, where-ever. The point about children is that when a woman is a mother that job does (and should) become her primary concern over any other. To continue with the Lisa Randall example, if she had children she would probably not have had the time and energy to do as much as she has in physics. Look at the business world and you’ll see countless examples of women who had to choose family or career. It’s a matter of biology more than anything else, whether we like it or not. But I don’t think that brain function/intrinsic aptitude is necessarily the very relevant factor that all these elevated minds want to say it is.
But when a male physicist becomes a father, that job does not (and should not) become his primary concern over any other??
Yes, there is a whole world of assumption implied in that little parenthetical (and should). 🙂
Belizean: Your conjectures are a moving target and I gave you data.
Here’s some recent data from the aip from a survey of women physicists:
http://aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/iupap05.pdf
One of the highlights of the survey:
“Although a majority of the responding women physicists said they would choose physics again, a majority also reported being discouraged about physics. Many spoke about negative interaction with colleagues, including many stories about discriminatory attitudes (Table 17). Eighty percent said that attitudes about women in science need improvement (Table 18).”
Discussions such as the one on this blog would benefit from using data instead of vague impressions and anecdotal stories. It is a serious issue and when a majority of women in the field still this way, it’s time to listen to them.
But macho, dealing with the data would make it harder to believe that men are better than women at physics because boys like to play with trucks. Where’s the fun in that?
You’re right — perhaps my mind has been clouded by the fine Colorado Whiskey (George Stranahan’s special brew) that has been flowing freely out here in Aspen. A little physics, a little hiking, a little whiskey — who needs data?
Gee! I must have missed section of this thread in which this was argued.
Macho,
Good work in finding data that shows that U.S. women graduate students feel discriminated against. Unfortunately, the discussion appears to be about whether discrimination or innate disinterest better accounts for low number of female U.S. physicists. So we need a comparison of the magnitude the two effects.
It is now generally acknowledged (except by hard core holdovers from the 70s) that male and female brains differ at birth (not just in humans but also in vervet monkeys) along the people/social vs. object/mechanical axis.
The question, then, is this: “To what degree do innate mental differences between the sexes correspond to different levels of interest in physics during adolescence?” Possible answers are
a) none — [We know a priori that innate mental difference cannot exist.]
b) a small degree (not enough to largely explain the dearth of female physicists)
c) a large degree (enough to largely explain this dearth)
Unfortunately, this is one of those sticky nature-vs-nurture questions. There’s no data, because there doesn’t seem to be any way of raising girls in an environment known to be free of discrimination against them. That’s why we’re stuck with judgments. If you’ve found experimental data addressing this question, please share.
The data are based on survey responses of over 1350 women physicists, only 30% of whom are currently full-time students. So it is not graduate students who feel discriminated against, but women at every level, including those who are tenured faculty at major institutions.
I posted a detailed list of references several months ago on this blog (don’t know how to go back and find it, but you probably can).
What percentage of all households has one gender doing all the cooking?
Now, what percentage of all chefs in restaurants has the other gender doing all the cooking?
(Notice how I loaded up that first question with the second one?
It assumed that everyone has my age and came from a household with a married couple living in it.)
I have been on this planet for 57+ years and have failed to see even ONE female chef in that time. Does this imply that women cannot cook and have some inherent repulsion to learn it?
Secondly…
Why was it that witchcraft (self-taught chemistry) became popular right when alchemy rose up in practice? Why was it punished?
(second sending, don’t know where the first went to). What is the context of the second question? It seems to have come out of the blue. Anyway, I have a hobby-ist interest in the 2000 year historical trail of the alchemists, and have a good reference book at home: Promethean Ambitions by William Newman.
Witchcraft and alchemy. It’s not a true link in the sense that the Canon Episcopi was written about three centries before the transmission of alchemy from the Islamic world to Europe. The Canon text gives no indication to the aurific art (witchcraft). It was only much later that some sources connected the two.
The Canon episcopi written about the 10th century, addresses two claims of the time. The first is that certain heretical women worship the pagan goddess Diana in large groups to which they have been trasported over great distances in a single night on the backs of beasts, and the second is that the same women or others can be transformed into animals. The Canon rejects the idea that anyone can really change his shape or species as heretical and forbids the belief in the shape changing power of women. So this document is a reference to witches.
About the mid to late thirteenth century, Dominican monk Martinus Polonus wrote in his Margarita decreti encyclopedia an entry for alchemy which begins with the phrase “alchemy seems to be a false art, because he who believes one species to be able to be transferred into another, except by the Creator Himself, is an infidel and worse than a pagan”. These words were echoed by subsequent writers and so alchemy and the Canon episcopi was then linked.
To clarify definitions: Historically, alchemy is primarily an art of transmutation: one metal is turned into another, one living creature erupts out of the substance of another. Art was defined following Aristotle, which is: to 1) perfect natural processes and to bring them to a state of completion not found in nature itself (i.e. improve), and to 2) only imitate nature without fundamentally altering it, i.e.,. to imitate various aspects of the natural world.
So shapeshifting and alchemy was linked by Polonus, but it was not tied to the Devil until the middle 1400s, when a Franciscan monk named Alfonso de Spina analyzed the question of the Canon whether witches can undergo spatial transport at tremendous speed and whether they can change their shape, and he says that only the Devil can do this. He links alchemy and shapeshifting and then with this line:
“The cause is that he (the Devil) knows how to apply actives to passives, as appears in those things that the magicians of Pharaoh did. But that the Devil may cause one man to be converted to a serpent, bird, or plant – this is impossible for him. Therefore, many perverse Christian alchemists are decived having pacts with demons, and believing that they transmute iron into gold through their art.”
De Spina and other monks rejected the idea the nature could be improved upon by ‘art’, and a large text named Malleus was subsequently written. The text denied the power of witches and gave a denunciation of alchemy. This book went through at least 26 printings between 1487 and 1669 and became the witchhunter’s guide. The Devil and demons were endlessly discussed and debated alongside the alchemical art-nature debate.
Albertus Manus straddled both sides of the alchemy (pro/against) debate, but it was his student, Thomas Acquinas, who continued strongly Manus’ anti-alchemy position. Acquinas’ position was that demons were between humans and God, and more powerful than humans. At that time, many of the Medieval arguments against alchemy stemmed from giving demons too much power. Since alchemy represented a high point of the arts in its relationship to nature, it was a useful yardstick to assess the things that demons could or could not do. But the ‘transmutation’ of the alchemical art-nature debate into one involving demons, then unfortunately led to the Great Witch Hunt.
The AMS on their news page
http://www.ams.org/dynamic_archive/home-news.html#AWMpetition
recently posted a link to an on-line petition being circulated by the Association for Women in Mathematics that reads:
The petition itself is located at
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/474037752?ltl=1152298950
The AMS itself said, regarding the link, that “The AMS is committed to working for the increased participation of women in mathematics at all levels.”
Richard,
Your post #98 pertains to an issue that always seems to pop up when gender imbalance topic is addressed. Why use population averages as a crutch to make decisions that pertain to individuals? Just because proportionately more boys/ are represented in the Physical sciences, that’s not a reason to discourage girls/ en masse. Let those who show interest and aptitude be encouraged, irrespective of how well or otherwise persons of the same demographic group are represented in the field.
Amara,
Good points and refreshment to the origins of alchemy. The point I was raising was not entirely out of the blue. It basically did point to how much the self-taught are a threat to the leadership dependent and to those who made a living by teaching.
If everyone learned the art of being self-taught, would there be need for any teachers back then?