Women in Science

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.”

There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn’t have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.

That’s the opening of this Wall Street Journal article about Ben Barres, a neurologist at Stanford who has been written about by just about everybody over the last week (including Arun in comments here). Not about his neurology research in this case, but about an article he wrote for Nature (subscription required) about his experiences as a transgendered scientist. Barres underwent treatments about ten years ago to go from being female to male, so he has a unique perspective on the different ways that male and female scientists are treated. Not completely unique, of course; the WSJ article also quotes Joan Roughgarden, also at Stanford, who was “Jonathan” up until 1998:

Jonathan Roughgarden’s colleagues and rivals took his intelligence for granted, Joan says. But Joan has had “to establish competence to an extent that men never have to. They’re assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise. I remember going on a drive with a man. He assumed I couldn’t read a map.”

They seem to be implying that women face obstacles in the world of science that men do not. In other news, the Sun rose in the East this morning.

Today’s New York Times has an interview with Barres by Cornelia Dean. They get right down to it:

Q. What’s your response to people who say you rely too much on your own experience and should take scientific hypotheses less personally?

A. They should learn that scientific hypotheses require evidence. The bulk of my commentary discusses the actual peer-reviewed data.

That’s not fair! Barres needs to understand that phrases like “scientific hypotheses require evidence” are only to be used by people who believe that the differences between men and women can be traced to variations in innate qualities. The mountains of data pointing to systematic biases are to be ignored.

So who are these unnamed people who think that Barres “should take scientific hypotheses less personally?” That sounds suspiciously like a straw man — most careful scientists would be reluctant to stoop so directly to an ad hominem attack, rather than dealing with the aforementioned mountains of data. Sadly, it’s a direct quote from our old friend Steven Pinker, himself a master of the straw-man technique.

Professor Pinker, if you are reading this, you are a brilliant thinker and an extraordinary writer and lecturer. The Language Instinct was one of the all-time classic books on science for a wide audience. Please do not work to make your public profile identified primarily with the claim that innate differences in capacity are more important than systematic biases in keeping women out of science. It is not only wrong, but wrong in a particularly damaging way.

One more time, to be as clear as possible, so that nobody reading in good faith can possibly misunderstand. I (and most people who harp on this) am not objecting to the hypothesis that there are innate differences in how male and female minds work, nor am I discouraging research on the subject. It’s an hypothesis, it should be tested, knock yourself out. Okay? It’s just not the question that is being talked about here. The questions “Why are there fewer women in science?” and “What are the innate differences in mental abilities and inclinations between boys and girls?” are just not the same. They may be related, obviously, but they are just not the same. And while the latter question is subtle and extremely hard to answer at the current state of the art, due to the extraordinary difficulty in separating out what is “innate” from what is influenced by the outside world, the answer to the former question is blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to open their eyes. Do you really need Ben Barres or Joan Roughgarden to tell you that men and women are treated differently as scientists? Read the Xie and Shauman book. Read Meg Urry’s article. Just look at what goes on around you. And don’t take reality so personally.

Update: via Crooked Timber, some interesting stories at Science + Professor + Woman = Me. For example, a question asked by a professor to a female grad student:

Q. So you’re doing a Ph.D.? Couldn’t you find anyone to marry you?

Of course, they are only anecdotes, so you should feel free to pretend that this stuff almost never happens, if that makes you feel better.

Newsflash: gender equality in science not yet quite achieved.

• Joolya from Naked Under My Lab Coat notes how the “Dr.” honorific seems to mysteriously disappear when it’s attached to a woman’s name.
• Dr. Free-Ride, with an assist from Pandagon, suggests that women can be nerds, too.
• Nerds or not, though, I’d suggest treating them with politeness. Otherwise they will kick your ass.

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.

Back at the old blog we used to occasionally chat about the notorious speech by Harvard President Larry Summers, in which he suggested that intrinsic aptitude was a more important factor than discrimination or bias in explaining the dearth of women scientists. Examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. There was a lot of posturing and name-calling and oversimplification on either side of the debate, of course, which tended to obscure the basic fact that Summers was, as far the data goes, wildly wrong. Two favorite goalpost-moving maneuvers from his supporters were first to pretend that the argument was over the existence of innate differences, rather than whether they were more important than biases in explaining the present situation, and then to claim that Summers’ critics’ real motive was to prevent anyone from even talking about such differences, rather than simply trying to ensure that what was being said about them was correct rather than incorrect.

It was a touchstone moment, which will doubtless be returned to again and again to illustrate points about completely different issues. Here’s an example (thanks to Abby Vigneron for the pointer) from Andrew Sullivan:

DAILY KOS AND LARRY SUMMERS: It’s a small point but it helps illuminate some of the dumbness of the activist left. “Armando” of mega-blog/community board, Daily Kos, takes a dig at Larry Summers, and links to a new study on gender difference. I’m not getting into the new study here, but I will address Armando’s description of Larry Summers’ position. In a bid to be fair, Armando writes:

NOTE: Yeah I know Summers didn’t say men were smarter than women, he just said they had greater aptitude in math and the sciences than women. Huge difference.

This is one of those memes that, although demonstrably untrue, still survives. Read the transcript of Summers’ now infamous remarks. His point was not that men are better at math and the sciences than women, as Armando would have it. His point was that there is a difference not in the mean but in the standard deviation:

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper – looked at the book, rather – looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those – they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth – but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation – and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways – you get five to one, at the high end. (My italics.)

Summers was addressing the discrete issue of why at the very high end of Ivy League math departments, there were too few women. His point, as the Harvard Crimson summarized it was that, in math and the sciences, “there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.” Armando is wrong; and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of leftist blog credibility. Will he correct? I’ll keep you posted.

Ah yes, the good old standard-deviation argument. It’s the absolute favorite of those in the intrinsic-differences camp, since (1) it sounds kind of mathematical and impressive, and (2) they get to insist that it’s only the width of the distribution, not the mean, that is different between men and women, so really the argument doesn’t privilege men at all, while it manages to explain why they have made all the important contributions in human history. In a debate with Elizabeth Spelke at Edge, Steven Pinker rehearses the argument somewhat pedantically.
But let’s look at what the argument actually says, both explicitly and implicitly.

1. Standardized tests scores reflect innate ability.
2. Boys’ scores on certain tests have a larger standard deviation than girls’ scores, leading to a larger fraction of boys at the high end.
3. The dearth of women scientists is explained by their smaller numbers on the high end of these tests.

Now, everyone who is familiar with the data knows that point 1 is somewhere between highly dubious and completely ridiculous; Summers himself admits as much, but it would ruin his story to dwell on it, so he soldiers on. But point 3 is interesting, and deserves to be looked at. It’s a nice part of the argument, because it’s testable. Is this difference in test scores really what explains the relative numbers of men and women in science?

Summers’ data comes from the book Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes by Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman. Interviewed shortly after his remarks, both Xie and Shauman were quick to criticize them, using words like “uninformed” and “simplistic.” We were fortunate enough to have Kim Shauman herself as a speaker at our Women in Science Symposium back in May. She pointed out that the studies Summers refers to can indeed be found in her book, right there in Chapter Two. But if you wanted to know whether the standard-deviation differences were actually what accounted for the dearth of women in science, you would have to read all the way to Chapter Three.

Here’s the point. By the time students are in twelfth grade, there is a substantial gap in the fraction of boys vs. girls who plan to study science in college. So it’s easy enough to ask: how much of that gap is explained by differing scores on standardized tests? Answer: none of it. Girls are much less likely than boys to plan on going into science, and Xie and Shauman find that the difference is independent of their scores on the standardized tests. In other words, even if we limit ourselves to only those students who have absolutely top-notch scores on these math/science tests, girls are much less likely than boys to be contemplating science as a career. Something is dissuading high-school girls from choosing to become scientists, and scores on standardized tests have nothing to do with it.

Now, looking at Sullivan’s post above, there’s nothing he says that is strictly incorrect. He is simply characterizing (accurately) what Summers said, not actually endorsing it. Still, he is certainly giving the wrong impression to his readers, by repeating a well-known allegation without mentioning that it is demonstrably false. It’s a small point, but it helps illustrate some of the disingenuity of the activist right. Sullivan is misleading, and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of quasi-right-wing blog credibility. Will he correct? We’ll keep you posted.