As Sean has just reported, Ben Barres, a tenured professor in neurobiology at Stanford, is speaking out about his experiences as a scientist. His story is an interesting one and, in my book at least, there’s enough material for a second post.
There has been much recent discussion on the cause of the dearth of women working in the sciences. One hypothesis is that there is a systemic bias against women in the system. Barres has performed the ultimate experiment to test this hypothesis by starting life and her career as female, undergoing a transgender process, and continuing life and his career as a male. Same person, same innate scientific abilities, with observations and experiences from both sides of the fence. One couldn’t ask for a better experiment in a controlled laboratory environment! The only systematic error introduced into the process is that scientific acceptance and recognition takes time to establish and can come more easily to a more senior scientist. Provided, of course, that their early work was any good.
Barres has described his experiences in a recent Nature article (subscription required unfortunately), which has been picked up by a horde of newspapers. The summary is that doors and acceptance she never ever knew existed, suddenly opened up to Barres as a male. For some reason, I’m not surprised… I won’t be surprised either if the sun sets in the West tonight. Kudos to Barres for telling his story!
A main focus of the Nature article is a set of action items that Barres suggests to remedy the systemic bias and increase the number of women in the sciences. These are important and are the reason for this second post. They are:
1. Enhance leadership diversity in academic and scientific institutions.
2. Recognize the importance of role models and increase the diversity of faculties.
3. Take the responsibility to speak out against discrimination.
4. Boost the self-confidence of girls.
In my view, this is a great list! Each step is simple enough to inact and from my own experience I can say that they are somewhat lacking and would make a difference. They are not the only positive steps one can take, of course, but they are a good start. It’s time for institutions to tackle these 4 steps in a serious manner.
Lastly, I feel compelled to spout my personal opinion regarding the hypothesis that innate differences exist in the mathematical and scientific abilities between the female and male brains. (Restricting myself to family oriented language here) It is a complete, total, unadulterated, unmitigated, pile of crap. Some will undoubtedly cry out that I am being unscientific by refusing to test a proposed hypothesis. However, from my view, the hypothesis has already been tested and disproved. It’s been proven wrong by the number of successful women scientists working today. The number is not 50%, but in fact, is large enough to be statistically significant. Take a look at the accomplishments of the women who are stubborn enough to have pushed past the systemic bias - women such as Helen Quinn, Sally Dawson, Lisa Randall, Anne Nelson, Young Kee Kim, Vera Luth, Persis Drell, Risa Wechsler, Eva Silverstein, Nan Phinney, Helen Edwards, Elizabeth Simmons, Marcela Carena, Ritchie Patterson, Janet Conrad, Kay Kinoshita, Sau Lan Wu, Angela Olinto, Marjorie Shapiro, Mary Kay Gaillard, and hell, let’s include me too. This is just a random list of women scientists working in the US in HEP that I can think of at the moment, and yet they are all amongst the top in the field. If we are innately inferior, then how come so many of us do so well? What better set of data does one need?
This case is utterly, utterly bizarre. That aside, however, I have a couple of points I wish to pick up on. First,
I spit blood each time I hear somebody praise “diversity” in an academic environment. You want a diverse range of secretaries, admin staff, and technical support? Fine. But if you want diversity in academic staff simply for the sake of it, get bent. The sole criterion by which someone should be assessed for a Ph.D. studentship/postdoc/faculty role is their innate ability. Suggesting that any other attributes, not least of which an ephemeral desire to increase diversity, should come into play when deciding who gets hired is, if you’ll excuse the colourful language, self-defeating bullshit.
Again, simplistic nonsense.
I worry that, in the short term, points 1 and 2 are somewhat in competition. I first wondered
about this in the context of race rather than gender. Coming from South Africa, I’ve seen a
concerted effort over the past decade to redress the imbalances of apartheid. However, when
I met the Dean of Science a few years ago, he could not have older than his early forties. This
means that he’s already moved through his scientifically productive career into administration
and management.
I think calls for “leadership” should recognise that it takes decades to make a good scientific career and people need to be given that opportunity without being shunted through to “higher” offices where they are more useful from a beancounter’s perspective. So, while I heartily endorse #2, I think leadership is overrated. We need diversity amongst prominent scientists more than we do amongst the paper pushers.
No kid wants to grow up to be a university administrator…
I completely agree with your action items. Alas, I’m glad you call your last paragraph your “personal opinion”, because, like so much of the rhetoric in this debate, it is a pure non sequitur. Actually, two of them. First, the fact that women face discrimination in the sciences says nothing about whether innate differences exist (both can be true). Second, the existence of successful women scientists says nothing about whether innate differences exist (that men are taller than women does not preclude the existence of tall women or short men).
Unfortunately, many people confuse a statistical claim that one sex is better than the other with an absolute statement: men are good at this and women bad, women are good at this and men bad. Worse, they then assume that we should encourage or discourage people accordingly. If anything, we should do the opposite. Having half the population ignorant in science (male or female) is obviously a social catastrophe waiting to happen!
Another fallacy in this whole debate is to assume that inherent differences means differences in ability. We could be looking at differences in interest due to emotional makeup. Again however, we’re looking at averages only. And let’s not forget the fallacy of naturalism here — it’s right to encourage all people in science, regardless of any inherent differences.
I sometimes find it difficult to put into words my feelings on this subject, which is a subset of the larger problem of discrimination in all forms in society. To some extent, prejudice and discrimination reflect personal experience taken to extremes. It is almost impossible to make broad class judgments about the aptitude of any segment of society for any particular endeavor. For instance, when I was in elementary school, my friend X might have been bad at science while my friend Z was good at science. Given this information, I might have attempted to predict how I thought others similar to X or to Z might do in science in the future. Given my limited experience, those predictions might have been right or wrong, but the accuracy of those predictions would have borne little correlation to my experiences with X and Z.
As we age, we know more people and have more experiences, perhaps increasing our chances of our prejudices accurately predicting the ability of others to succeed in science. Given our relatively limited experience in comparison with the numbers of people in the world, however, the increase is similar to the increase in your chances of winning the Powerball lottery if you buy 100 tickets instead of one: pretty paltry.
And added to our experiences is the hearsay experience of others. Perhaps our parents or friends tell us that people like X are all bad at science. We generally have no idea whether this hearsay is gleaned from the personal experience of the people talking to us or simply anecdotal hearsay repeated ad infinitum. As a result, there is no way to test the soundness of the information we get from others. The truth is that no matter how much supposed experience we have or glean from others, our prejudices do not help us predict the level of performance of any particular person in any particular field.
For this reason, I believe JoAnne’s recommendations would make sense even if it were proven that women were intrinsically worse at science and math than men. All such studies could possibly prove is the potential (or aptitude) for someone to succeed in science and math. Given that so many more factors determine the ultimate success of any person in any field, such as passion, drive, and commitment (for a sports analogy, think of Tom Brady as opposed to Jeff George), there is no reason to dissuade anyone from pursuing a career in science (or any other field that they may choose).
The times they are a’changing though. I entered college in the early ’70s when, at many schools, including my alma mater, women were in the distinct minority. Current statistics indicate that women outnumber men on college campuses. These students are the children of a generation that saw a sea change in gender issues. I would hope that the children of the students passing through college now will see even less resistance to the idea of women pursuing (and succeeding in) a career in science.
Strictly speaking, the “Barre experiment”, if you want to call it that, suffers from a time delay: his experience as a woman is with the scientific establishment of ten to thirty years ago, while his male experience is the last ten years.
However, that’s unlikely to make much of a difference; there has probably been some progress in the last twenty years, but undoubtedly not enough to erase completely whatever bias and discrimination he faced when he was a woman.
Uh huh… and who gets to judge the innate ability of the candidates? A search committee made up of old white males? Pardon me if I harbor some doubts about the likelihood that such a panel will recognize or reward “innate ability” if it doesn’t come in a form they find familiar. Many studies have shown that the exact same resume (article, musical performance, teaching demonstration) is judged more harshly if the name on top is feminine than if it is masculine — regardless, I might add, of the gender makeup of the panel. It’s pretty clear to me that judging on what we think is “innate ability”, as has been done for decades, just continues to get us what we’ve gotten for decades: a white male-dominated hierarchy.
Because those positions require no special talents or abilities? Is this what you’re saying?
Fully agreed, Supernova. When the playing field is inherently biased, it’s necessary to introduce some means of balancing it (e.g., including “diversity” along with “inherent aptitude” in hiring criteria). Here’s one white, male scientist who hopes that the fellowship and job-search committees considering my applications this fall are thinking about diversity as well as “aptitude.” This only hurts me in the sense that it reduces my unearned advantage (probably without fully removing it, sadly).
damtp_dweller: Do you truly think it’s possible—even in a perfect situation—for a faculty search committee composed of human scientists, with various opinions on what constitutes “important research,” to reliably rank applicants on their “innate ability”—when those applicants come from different backgrounds and have very different (i.e., non-comparable) areas of research expertise? Simplistic nonsense, indeed.
Pedant alert:
It’s “enact”, not “inact”.
I honestly just don’t understand this bit about women being excluded. Honestly quite the contrary I dont know of a single department that gets together and is like ‘hey guys, lets just not hire any women.. Sound good to everyone? k’
The fact of the matter is, science is more or less a meritocracy. If your papers are cited and important, then you get a job.
To convince me of discrimination, you would have to make a case to me that women postdocs have a different citation rate/hiring ratio than males.
Now, its quite possible there is societal bias inherent, like the needs of family, the cutthroat/heated debate nature of physics and negative stereotypes by the outside world, but to claim there is systematic discrimination within Academia proper, would require more than one studies worth. Extraordinary claims and so forth.
Oh yeah? Have a look at this article:
Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review
“In the first-ever analysis of peer-review scores for postdoctoral fellowship applications, the system is revealed as being riddled with prejudice.”
Sorry, should have included the reference for that: it’s WennerÃ¥s, C. & Wold, A. Nature 387, 341–343 (1997).
While I frequently read this blog, I usually don’t reply to any of the posts, but for this one I have to make an exception.
Reply to 10. - The first sentence I heard in my first lecture in college was (exact quote) “Women should go back to the kitchen where they belong.” The prof who said this managed to “persuade” all of my fellow female students to quit physics - except me. And no, this episode is not from the 19th century, this happened not too long ago, in the ’90s…
Haelfix, do you understand this bit about women being excluded now?
And re innate differences - maybe there are, maybe there aren’t (actually I personally think probably there are). But the fact that men and women may or may not have different ways of thinking doesn’t mean that the male or female way is worse, in science and in general. And no - historical and statistical evidence doesn’t favor the male way, because that’s what this blog-post plus the article tries to explain.
Haelfix wrote:
Of course that’s not how it works - and in the US, at least, that would be grounds for a lawsuit if it got out. Discrimination isn’t usually organized or even conscious. Consider Sandler and Hall’s review article, for example:
For more information, try this and this. It would be nice to have a discussion where people took advantage of research on this issue, instead of simply making claims without evidence.
For example, if one claims that:
one really needs to rebut many studies that show it’s not so simple. For example, this study by Wenneras and Wold:
Skipping over the perennial debate, I just want to say that I’m glad Dr. Barres and Dr. Roughgarden are speaking about their experiences. It gives this young transguy hope that he, too, can make it in science. We need role models too!
Which brings me to my larger point, that while I thing gender imbalance is a major problem in physics, I wonder why we talk about it to the near exculsion of other underrepresented groups: racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, etc. Can we extend the arguments being made about gender to, say, sexual orientation? Is there something innate about queers that makes them worse at physics? Or is it a societal thing, lack of role models, inherent bias, etc? Me, I’m betting on the latter.
The biologists want to know. In the Barbara / Ben Barres test, were the subject’s hormones held constant or were they different between the two conditions?
Carl–
Not sure if that was a facetious question or not, but nevertheless:
Barres is certainly on hormone treatments of testosterone that mimic the testosterone levels in cisgendered males.
We had a very good tenured full professor in one of our science departments that underwent a transgender process, male to female. She was treated so badly afterwards that she finally left. If she was good enough to be tenured and promoted as a male, why should being a female make a difference in the way she was treated? It is sad to say, but I’m afraid we have a long way to go in learning how to treat all people decently. The comment that only ability should be considered in hiring only works if that is REALLY the case. Sad to say, other things are considered. As long as they are we need diversity programs.
Asher: I suspect the reason the debate focusses on gender is that this is a fairly visible imbalance. You walk into a conference room and it is immediately apparent that there are far fewer women than men. You can’t see someone’s sexual orientation. There certainly are young gay men entering physics, but as in the gender case, I suspect it will be a long time before the proportion in science approaches that in society, if it ever happens.
As for racial and ethnic imbalances, I don’t know why this is apparently discussed less. Perhaps because it is rarer to hear anyone say in public that any racial group is inherently less able than another? But that just makes the problem more insidious and dangerous - at least there is some level of openness in the prejudice against women!
Anon: You imply that gay men are underrepresented in physics, but this is right after you point out that it’s much harder to see (and measure via, e.g., faculty roseters) sexual orientation than gender. So: do you know of any studies demonstrating an underrepresentation?
Racial and ethnic imbalances are discussed (I know they are within astronomy, at least sometimes), but probably not as often as gender. I think there are two factors, in addition to those you suggest: first, within a country like the US, it is easier to diagnose (or dismiss) race/ethnicity underrepresentation due to socioeconomic factors — e.g., one can argue that blacks are underrepresented in US physics because, proportionally speaking, so many blacks are impoverished and don’t have access to the resources (good schools, financial support, etc.) to get into physics unless they’re very lucky.
Second, it’s much easier to look at gender differences across societies, because all countries have roughly equal numbers of men and women, but widely varying situations in terms of ethnicity and minority groups. So it’s easier to cite a Swedish study on sex bias and argue that it might apply to the US, or to Germany or Japan, but much harder to compare race/ethnic bias studies across different countries.
“However, from my view, the hypothesis has already been tested and disproved.”
And right there, your credibility on this matter is completely and totally gone.
>The biologists want to know. In the Barbara / Ben Barres test, were the
>subject’s hormones held constant or were they different between the two
>conditions?
And the other way around. The women I know (2 computer scientists and one engineer) who switched their gender from male to female necessarily adjusted their hormones, or the change physically would not have worked. A database (and a study) of the people we know in the technical fields who have made the gender switch with all relevant factors in addition to their stories would be a goldmine of information. Maybe the Ben Barres news story would help them realize it.
#21: I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but possibly what Joanne was asserting was not that there were absolutely no intrinsic differences between abilities of the genders (an almost impossible thing to test in general, though it may be of interest to some), but that it makes ANY difference in the abilities of both genders to produce driven, original, creative thinkers and hard workers that make superb scientists. Isn’t that all we ultimately care about?
“However, from my view, the hypothesis has already been tested and disproved.â€
And right there, your credibility on this matter is completely and totally gone.
So, Ghafla, you stopped reading before you found out why she thought that?
#9: Zhasper, I was warned about pedants roaming internet chatrooms, but I thought this was a safe forum.
#18: Perhaps the discrimination was because she was transgendered, rather than because she was female? Still indefensible, of course.
women such as Helen Quinn, Sally Dawson, Lisa Randall, Anne Nelson,…
You mean Ann Nelson?
I find Haelfix’s statement (post 10) about “extraordinary claims” stunning. Over essentially all of most culture’s history, there have been huge systematic biases against women, particularly in the academy. The extraordinary claim here is that all of that bias has vanished within a couple generations, and that is a claim for which there is tremendous evidence against. (Thanks John, btw, for posting references to several and increasing my already overburdened reading list
).
It’s certainly tricky interpreting the anecdotal evidence of Dr. Barres’ FTM experience, given that Ben Barres is a respected senior scientist and Barbara was a more junior researcher working in an earlier, less gender-friendly era. Similarly, it’s tricky to interpret the experience of MTF academics who feel that their situation has deteriorated… isn’t it likely that there will be some bias against people who opt for transgender surgery, simply because people are uncomfortable with transgendered individuals?
That said, if the vast majority of FTM researchers report that their experience in academia has noticeably improved and the vast majority of MTF researchers report that their experience in academia has noticeably deteriorated, then I think we’ve done an adequate job of chopping between the source and the sky. That is a statistical sample; at that point, we’ve seen the difference in the signals, and we may safely report to the scientific community that the we’ve finally measured the anisotropy of the Gender Bias Background.
Ha. That metaphor worked out very well, didn’t it?
Ioonunit,
Very insightful of you! I liked the way you weaved the anisotropy of gender into the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background…
Gotta know your audience…
Post #10 seems to be a nice encapsulation of the main type of gender bias in science today. People (mostly men) assume that because they themselves, and most of the people they know, have no conscious gender bias, therefore no significant bias exists. Unfortunately, a number of studies, already cited here, show that this is simply not the case. Examples like #13 notwithstanding, most of the bias is culturally ingrained and unconscious, which makes it all the more difficult to correct.
We, as scientists, should be trusting the data over our personal impressions, and the data say quite clearly that a bias exists.
The sole criterion by which someone should be assessed for a Ph.D. studentship/postdoc/faculty role is their innate ability.
Maybe it is because i am from the other side of the campus, but this sentence, as it is written and read, is utterly wrong. Innate ability is not a demonstrable characteristic or criterion for choosing to enroll graduate students, provide fellowships, or to promote faculty. Letters of recommendation that simply reiterate the sentiment that a student has incredible ability but that fail to provide evidence of the use of that ability are not valuable nor respected. It is the demonstration, the expression (repeated over time), of the capacity and ability of an individual to show that S/He is the person that is best suited for the role/position being chosen. Whether those doing the choosing are biased, prejudiced, racist, sexist, etc. is another matter, but “innate ability” on its own has yet to be something qualitative and quantifiable without evidence.
However, from my view, the hypothesis has already been tested and disproved. It’s been proven wrong by the number of successful women scientists working today. The number is not 50%, but in fact, is large enough to be statistically significant.
That data doesn’t disprove a hypothesis that women are on the average more or less suited to be physicists. All it disproves is a hypothesis that all men are better than all women.
We can be very sure that some men make excellent physicists, and some women make excellent physicists. If, somehow, we were able to reduce “suitability to be a physicist” to a single variable (which I believe extremely unlikely, but stick with my spherical cow right now), the distribution of that variable among men and among women would have to overlap; that much we know from the data you cite. Some fraction of the distribution would be above whatever relevant cutoff you would make for both men and women.
The systematic effects, though — the real reason that women have a harder time getting as far in physics than men do — make it impossible right now to say anything about where the means of those two distributions fall. It may well be that women are, on the average, more suited to being physicists than men, but the other sociological systematics completely obliterate any signal that would be available to see that.
We have to be careful. Saying that we have evidence that there are no intrinsic differences between how good men and women are in physics is just as much a fallacy as saying that we have evidence that there are differences, and for the same reasons. Making the assertion that men and women are known to be equally “able” in physics (again, whatever that means) does undermine credibility, and can’t help the cause of eliminating bias. We should go with the null hypothesis that, right now, we don’t know if one or the other is (on the average) more able, so we’ll assume they’re the same. We do know that some of both are able, and as such we need to eliminate discrimination to allow each individual to prosper as best possible.
-Rob
Im all for taking the data over anecdotal evidence. Prof Baez has 2 studies on the subject that he links.
The first shows instantenous subconcious bias, the latter shows discrimination within medical research in Sweden.
I contend the first study is transitory. The viability of a research project is truly appreciated within a year or two after it is published and I would point out citation count would likely be independant of bias as time –> infinity (if for no other reason than it is in the persons best interest to use the best papers on the subject)
The second is more compelling, but im a little skeptical about whether the choice of ‘impact score’ methodology is affecting things. Why not just take the hiring/citation count ratio and correct it for number of applicants by gender.
I can’t believe anyone is taking damtp_dweller’s “innate ability” nonsense seriously enough to even respond to. What if someone has the innate ability to be the world’s best physicist, but they went to law school instead? Should we hire them anyway?
The goal in hiring should be to assemble the best physics department possible. If there is an obvious systematic bias — as there is against women — it makes all the sense in the world to attempt to correct for it. Simple as that.
The real problem, though, is that the faculty-hiring stage is far too late. The damage is done in high school and earlier, and that’s the obvious target for trying to improve things.
Peter:
Anon: You imply that gay men are underrepresented in physics, but this is right after you point out that it’s much harder to see (and measure via, e.g., faculty roseters) sexual orientation than gender. So: do you know of any studies demonstrating an underrepresentation?
I don’t, sorry. My post was in response to Asher, who said that he suspected that there was a lack of role models for queer, transgendered people etc., and wondered why the discussion centered on gender imbalances so much. His post seemed (at least, to me) to be presuming an under-representation. My response was written under the same assumption. I confess I don’t have any data whatsoever to back it up.
The reasons you suggest for the different levels of discussion make a great deal of sense to me. They are probably much more significant factors than I had suggested. Thanks for the response!
The real problem, though, is that the faculty-hiring stage is far too late. The damage is done in high school and earlier, and that’s the obvious target for trying to improve things.
Anecdotally, I believe that the worst damage is probably done somewhere around fifth grade.
This isn’t specifically with regard to women, but with regard to students learning to fear math. I’ve talked to (only a handful) of teachers, and it seems that before that, students are eager and willing to learn. Somewhere around 6th-8th grade, though, kids learn that “math is hard,” and what’s more it’s OK to claim that they are no good at math and to just struggle through and barely pass the class. I am convinced that many people who call themselves “not a math person” and who struggle with math are capable of understanding more than they give themselves credit for. I see this reasonably frequently with my introductory astronomy students. I see it more often with women — partly because women have more often been convinced that they can’t do math, but mostly because (as is documented elsewhere) on the average, women seem to be more willing to work and go to office hours in college than do men.
I really do think that the difficulty girls face in getting “into” science is at least partially tied into the sociology among educated people that it’s OK to be math ignorant (whereas it’s not OK to be, say, writing ignorant). Yes, there is an asymmetry in that girls seem to get the message more than boys do, but it may be part of the larger thing.
-Rob
Rob — you came very close to bringing up something I often wonder about in this debate: “the sociology among educated people that it’s OK to be math ignorant (whereas it’s not OK to be, say, writing ignorant.”
I think it’s very interesting that many people are willing to insist that women are innately less able to think physically, spatially, mathematically, or in whatever other ways are necessary for scientists. Often these people tend towards political correctness by pointing out that there are, of course, *some* things us poor women are better at, such as oral and written communication. I note that our society in general, though, especially if you look at the education system, both K-12 and university, both stresses communication and believes heartily in the ability to improve these skills, while tending to accept that some people “just can’t do math.” I therefore sometimes feel an *extra* sting when someone says that women aren’t inferior, just different, because to me this is saying that women just happen to be good at things that men (or anyone whose skills are lacking) can work on and eventually also do, while men are good at things that can’t be learned.
I don’t think I’m putting this especially well, but maybe someone else will see where I’m trying to go!
For an interesting twist on brain differences see:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13560741/
cultural influences = “different ways of thinking”
I hear you, Annie. When men succeed in math and science it’s because of talent; when women do it’s because of hard work.
The following is from Talking About Leaving, a statistical and ethnographic study of college students who change majors from science and engineering compared with those who stay (Seymour & Hewitt, Westview Press, 1997). The authors are describing the results of interviews they conducted with male science, math, and engineering students about their female counterparts:
“Men in these majors seem reluctant to share their elite status with women. As they could not ignore the high grades earned by some female classmates, male students sought to explain these good performances in ways that did not concede intellectual merit: women were acknowledged to work very hard — perhaps harder — than many of the men. If there were some women who were good at mathematics, it was perhaps a freak occurrence… . “
Male and female brains are not statistically the same. You can see that quite clearly from the incidences of disorders like autism which affect males more frequently than females. Some scientist believe that there exists an almost continuous spectrum of autism like behavior from very mild to very severe.
There are studies that have found that success in technical subjects relates to ”how autistic your brain is”. In such tests you are given a pictures of a faces and you must guess if the person is happy, sad, depressed, sleepy, angry, etc. etc.
Women do on average much better than men on such tests. Male math professors do even worse than the average males. Female math professors do as bad as their male collegues, so they do much, much worse than the average females. Male nurses do almost as good as average females.
Another interesting fact is that if both parents of a child work in technical subjects the child has a significantly larger probability of developing (severe) autism.
All this suggests that there are genes that control communications skills and ability to do well in technical subjects. The better you are in one, the worse you are in the other. If you get too few of the communication skills genes then you run the risk of not picking up language at all as a child and becoming autistic.
My general impression is that in say molecular biology and medicine and law, women and men are represented equally as graduate students at the top departments in the US. In mathematics (my field), this is certainly not the case, and I have heard that the situation in physics is similar. Yet another impression is that the faculty in the loftier departments tend to be more likely to on the political left, and so you would think that women in math and physics would be more likely to get encouragement (relative to men) than those in, say, law. I just don’t see left-wing mathematics professors trying to keep women down & out, while the right-wing law professors try to keep them up & in. I am quite sympathetic to arguments about subtle bias and discouraging factors, but I’d have a hard time believing mathematics professors would be so much worse than law professors. Any ideas on how to resolve this apparent contradiction?
(Also, special thanks to Baez and Knop for the nice posts.)
Translation of the disgusting points 1-4 by JoAnne:
1. Further cripple the intellectual diversity of the Academia and make the life for those who are irritated by dumb feminist articles such as this one really unbearable.
2. Eliminate the remaining independence of thinking in the Academia and educate a new generation of scholars who will be just parroting other scholars, especially older female scholars - the “role models”.
3. Proliferate lies about discrimination that has been working against the men at least for 30 years, and criminalize all those who realize that the hypotheses about remaining discrimination against women are malicious lies.
4. Further cripple the self-confidence of boys and more generally all those who really matter in scholarship.
There is an article in the latest Scientific American the thrust of which is that experts are made, not born. However, it takes very hard work, and thus strong motivation, and those who are precocious or talented get enough positive reinforcement to persevere.
Sean wrote:
“What if someone has the innate ability to be the world’s best physicist, but they went to law school instead? Should we hire them anyway?”
I went to law school. Can I get a job in physics?
I thank Lubos for his perfect public demonstration of the sexist attitudes that us women still face in academia today. For those of you out there who do not know of Lubos Motl, he is a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University, and he has consistently shown that he believes what he wrote.
JoAnne,
Bravo! I hope that women of my daughter’s generation face fewer obstacles than women of previous generations. It would be nice to think that we’re moving towards a fair and just world. If that transpires, she will have strong women like you (and my wife) to thank.
Please continue.
All the best wishes,
Santo
#37–
I don’t have any statistics or studies on GLBTQetc. people in physics either (and it’d be hard to judge whether the proportion is the same at any rate, as the proportion in the general population is so difficult to measure) except to say that I’ve never met a prof, postdoc, or grad student who was out, and only a few others in my undergraduate population.
Of course, that’s just a personal observation, and is in no way rigorous, so I am somewhat hesitant to say it, and of course, there’s no way I can absolutely determine someone’s sexuality, but that’s how I see it.
I just don’t see left-wing mathematics professors trying to keep women down & out, while the right-wing law professors try to keep them up & in.
It’s a NIMBY effect.
I came up with this term when I lived in Berkeley: “Other peoples’ liberals.” These were liberals who professed belief in all sorts of great liberal ideals, until they had to face them personally. I had a friend in high school, a girl of white-bright europeanish descent, who after college was dating (and later engaged) to a black man. Her father, one who had always professed all the good liberal ideals, was at first not completely happy about it.
A good friend of mine here is gay. His parents profess good liberal ideas, vote Deomcratic, the whole thing. They are not happy that their son is gay.
There are also “other peoples’ conservatives”. Rush Limbaugh is for zero tolerance for drug abusers, until we find out that he is one. Here is my general rant on the topic:
http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/blog/?p=62
Given all of that, there’s no surprise whatsoever for me that completely liberal professors can at the same time be arrogant, self-promoting, sexist bastards who will as part of the fear that comes from “others” encroaching on their territory, seek to keep women down. Indeed, I’ve heard professors in my department (whose doors are covered with democratic campaign posters from years past) express belief in the “knowledge” of intrinsic differences, and also generally behave in a sexually discriminatory and harrasing manner.
Taking somebody’s political affiliation as evidence of their moral fiber is always very dangerous. Hell, that mistake is what got us our current president.
-Rob
You know that we have a long way to go when a (female) communications/outreach `expert’ at a physics meeting, who is trying to tell physicists how important it is to inform the general public about the meaning and impact of what we do, tells us that `this is the message that we should bring back to our WIVES and children’.
Test here what sex your brain is
The results of this test (Count Ibis #52) are given on a sliding scale 100 - 0 - 100 with one of the 100’s being associated with a female brain and other 100 a male brain. I scored 50 on the male side.
JoAnne, I also scored 50 on the male side (and I am male). It would be interesting to know how the other top female physicists do on this test and compare that with top female scientists in other fields like political science, law, psychology etc.
On angles, rotations, systematizing, I scored above the male average (sometimes way above). On hands, spot the difference (moved objects), and fluency. I scored way above the female average. I’m a dud at empathy.
I think the eyes test and the faces test are badly culturally biased, the fluency test is also, unless you are allowed to do the test in any (one) language. E.g, the faces shown were all essentially round, and that is far from my domain of preference.
Anyway, I ended up with a male brain of 25.
I’m about a 25 on the female side. That doesn’t surprise me; my undergrad degrees are in physics and English, and it’s much more intuitive for me to come up with creative synonyms for “happy” than to rotate cubes. I always test as a chick on these things! And invariably the results also show that I’m curiously masculine when it comes to planning and acting systematically — a trait I hands-down get from my mother.
I screwed up the first few “angles,” because I was trying to estimate the actual value of the angle instead of trying to visually test which sets were parallel. That’s definitely one of my weaknesses in physics — going the long way around, calculating, when instead there should be some intuition.
Arun — the “eyes” test was definitely biased for me; I tended to recognize the models/actors to whom the eyes belonged and I found myself choosing the “emotion” based on what I know of the person.
For the record, I aced the angles and the rotations, was highly feminine on spotting the difference, have surprisingly long ring fingers on both hands, am lacking empathy but am extremely systematic, am at a loss for words (don’t think my family would agree with that. I got stuck with “grey” and couldn’t think of anything except elephants and mice!), and (thankfully) I prefer masculine faces.
I ended up with a 50 male brain. It would be nice if they gave statistics on their numbers.
Carl
Regarding Rob Knop’s comment #50 to my #43:
I agree that leftists are often less broad-minded than the way they like to present themselves (and that rightists are less hard-hearted than the way they do, c.f. #44), but still, under the assumptioins I stated above, you’d have to explain why mathematicians, say, as a whole are actually significantly more discouraging to women than, say, professors of law or business or molecular biology. It’s not so hard to believe that our idealized left-wing mathematician and right-wing law professor could, in practice, be equally discouraging to women. But it’s still hard for me to believe that the right-wing law professor would be significanly less discouraging. (And of course, there will always be outliers. Let us ignore them.) Are they both simultaneously hypocrites in opposite directions?
It could be that this model is so simple it is worthless. But I suspect it is not, and that whatever happens after high-school graduation is negligible compared to what happens before. Perhaps this is because I want to remove myself from any responsibility, but I don’t think so.
Before reading this please realize that I wish there were more women in science. Certainly any differences in perspectives, outlooks and priorities that may be added to a field will do much to enrich the subject. The idea that there are those who discriminate because of a belief that women are lesser abled is digusting and patently absurd. But.
What if the problem has to do with how science is done?
Predisposition
Suppose there was an innate difference and this difference was to do with the large amount of long periods of secluded work a field is composed of and as well a higher preference for practicality than not by women. Such could be argued using evolution, females tended to needed to have practicality in focus much of the time to raise offsprings and provide care and developed strong interpersonal skills in order to keep tribes operating as a cohesive unit.
Is this why as one goes from subjects of higher practicality and done more in collaboration to increasingly abstract and more secluded jobs one finds higher disporpotionate numbers of women? e.g.
psychology, biology, engineer, programmer, experimental physics, math , theoretical physics , pure theoretical math. Nothing to do with ability - even if there was a difference it would be simply a strength in a different direction, and thus inversly viewable as a lacking in men - indeed a different perspective is a very good catalyst in the development of a body of work. But what if it is instead an innate predispostion to simply be uninterested?
But then what of certain managerial and especially lawyer or art jobs which require strong parts of secluded work. But then these jobs as well contain a high portion of social interaction.
Certainly the physical structuring of ones mind affects what behaviours it may evince and as well its preferences and dislikes. Suppose it was such that the female brain was more likely than not to be disinterested in areas that are more and more disconnected from the rest of the world? Ofcourse it cannot simply be this. There must certainly be a strong cultural aspect of what is appropriate for a girl to do that is unconciously transmitted as she grows. But this too cannot be all since women are notorious for going ahead and doing what they want if they really want despite what the silly men say.
There must be a reason that there is seemingly less resitance here than in other areas (I mean art is not taken seriously and adviced agaisnt as a career yet we still find artists,same for the male video game programmers). There is certainly a structural difference, simply observing 12 year old girls and boys across all cultures is evidence enough. Suppose this difference as well contained a certain aspect to do with what may be considered worth spending one’s time on that contributes to this disparity in occupation? Why are there not more men in primary education?
Cultural
More importantly though, many males should realize that they do *feel* they are better than females at science regardless of what they *think* (the same applies in white/asian vs non white/asian). Why, even some females think males are better (there are studies where parents peers of both sexes and teacher alike regularly chose 2-4 males as gifted to every female). With such beliefs how can one not expect the little 11 year old girl to think she is infact not capable. A self fulfilling prophecy altering her path with this lack of belief compropmising the mental cultivation required as she grows hence making what need not have been true as fact. In general, our western society considers math as something that most cannot reach a high level in but especially more so for girls. This imbalance makes it even harder for the girls with their having the larger negative motivation they must counter before even believing in themselves! This belief being paramount, regardless of ability or gender.
As well, the supposed things which women can and cannot do in math and to some level, science, is culturally instilled and simply due to bias motivated by infarmiliarity with a certain scenario. How often have you found the author of a technical work be female (or mexican or african) and then treat it with skepticsm without having read it? If this is not acknowledged because you cannot possibly be sexcist then the hypocirsy will remain and hiring will remain unfair. One must say, I just had an idiotic thought that is untrue. Let me continue objectively and instead judge by merit. This will go a long way to dealing with the issue.
I Conclude
I thus hypothesize a combined cultural and certain predispositions towards a dislike of how the more abstract parts of science are done (is one more likely to find an antisocial male than female?). Those who do take up science are likely more immune to cultural influences and posessed of a stronger than average preference of abstract works and where they do land is a function of this balance, I think.
I suggest that while more should be done to remove the stereotype that science is not very ladylike, more should be done to make science seem less geeky, with even the most theoretical parts of number theory containing an increased amount of social interaction. Perhaps all mathematics departments should have weekly or monthly informal gatherings within each department such that everyone in the departement gets to discuss with all members what they are working on.
This too might help a bit. Were I not satisfied with continually sitting for 12- 14 hours at a time behind my computer I do not think I would want to be a pure mathematician, regardless of whatever “innate” skill I might posess in it. I simply would not be happy doing it.
I scored right in the middle, smack dab at zero. That’s kind of cool.
Anybody score anything other than zero or (either) 50?
Annie, you could recognize the eyes?!!
My score is almost the same as Annie’s (~25 female) and we seem to have the same strengths and weaknesses. Arun: the eyes were hard (usually I’m good at gauging moods). The verbal part is curious. Words come fast and easy to me, so I went over the top on grey and happy (25 words), but according to the 2003 “Gender Genie”, a test for writing styles (link, but down now), which is based on language use, it consistently and wrongly scored my writings as coming from a male.
Thank you Count Iblis, for finding a test that is so good at pointing out all the things wrong with these tests!
For instance, the spatial rotation test is an excellent indicator of whether or not you have taken high school or college physics (right-hand rule, anyone? It’s impossible to get any wrong if you have learned to do cross-products by waving your hand around. And if you haven’t learned cross-products, you can easily transpose your words; up-left-up-right to up-right-up-left and end up with the wrong answer for reasons unrelated to your ability visualize object rotating in space).
As for the words, since I had been reading the comments here before I took the test, naturally my first words for “grey” were elephant and mouse. I managed wolf and flannel as well, and might have gotten more except that I typed rlrpahnt (and went back to fix it), nouse (and went back to fix it), etc. So this test is an excellent predictor of whether or not you have taken typing! (Insert comment here about how in high school females and pushed to take typing and males to take physics.)
Annie and others: don’t take the averages so seriously. The test is designed to sell you a bunch of crap a la Meyer-Briggs so your score always looks inflated (Look! You are a misunderstood genius! Buy our line of specially designed aptitiude tests and become a millionaire/improve your sex life/take over the world!). I once took the Tickle IQ test: the first time I answered to the best of my ability and scored 147. The second time I deliberately answered every single question wrong and scored 135.
Oh, my score? 25% male. I cheated (unintentionally) on the picture of objects part and used the 60 seconds to write out the picture on a piece of paper, so I did extremely well.
Otherwise I might have come out more male.
The complete irrelevance of aptitude tests at predicting sucess in a science career has been so well discussed here and elsewhere that I have nothing to add to the discussion except “Hear, hear.”
Helma
I wound up smack right in the middle. Interestingly it was due to the fact that I blew the geometric forms due to not following directions. This “pushed” me towards being more female but I consider not following directions more of a male trait. Obviously the test didn’t take that into account
Interesting exercise though. The faces were challenging.
Some time back, Sean wrote:
The real problem, though, is that the faculty-hiring stage is far too late. The damage is done in high school and earlier, and that’s the obvious target for trying to improve things.
In that vein, I’ll post a plug for this Inside Higher Ed piece on diversity in academic hiring. It’s focussed on race, not gender, but it says some interesting things.
And while I’m pimping Inside Higher Ed pieces, here’s an old one that’s relevant to Rob Knop’s comment:
I really do think that the difficulty girls face in getting “into†science is at least partially tied into the sociology among educated people that it’s OK to be math ignorant (whereas it’s not OK to be, say, writing ignorant).”
Helma, I agree that the test isn’t perfect, but it isn’t like these “you are a misunderstood genious IQ tests”.
The test is based on serious research and there are some significant results which are hard to explain away. Hormones such as testosterone have been shown to be able to influence how well people perform in tests.
As you point out you can use various tricks to circumvent problems like rotating the figures in your head. Note that in schools teachers often depend on innate abilities. Formal techniques are often not taught. Innate differences can probably be made irrelevant if proper teaching methods are used.
Anybody else think one of the pair of eyes looked like GWB? I assumed it wasn’t since none of the available choices was “moronic”.
From the LMRF.
In his hysterical (both meanings of the word apply here) attack on Joanne he writes:
“Moreover, men have a measurably higher variance of a diverse list of quantities. The average IQ, the average number of children, and so on are all quantities that are more fluctuating in men than in women. The higher variance implies that it is easier to find more extreme men than more extreme women, regardless of the exact quantity that defines the extremality.”
The statement that there is a higher variance among men in the number of children for men than women is astounding. Who would have thought that the fact that women actually have to BEAR the children would push them towards the middle of the pack rather than the extremes.
Elliot
It is interesting that no one has yet announced a score
of 100 or even 75 on either side. I (being a male) scored a 50% on the male side…I was suprised how difficult this test was.
Arun — some of them, at least I believe so! I recognized Keanu Reeves, Claudia Schiffer and Luke Perry . . . and this is why I have no room in my head for E/M equations ;).
I scored 25 on the female side. A few years ago I did similar test and scored smack dab in the middle. I’m not good with rotation questions but I’m very good at identifying facial expressions from just the eyes! If there was a number sequence part to the test (and I was surprised that there wasn’t one because aptitude tests usually do), I would have scored higher on the masculine side.
My scores reflect pretty well how I approach various situations in everyday life. I depend upon both my intuition and logical thinking facilities as needed and this approach has so far served me well. (When teaching Physics I closely monitor the facial expressions of my students and if I see a lot of puzzled or tuned out expressions I know I’m not getting through to them.) However, I can make a good guess that if I admit to my colleagues the extent to which I use intutive perceptions, my credibility will suffer.
Beautiful post. Also, the previous post on this linked to an awsome interview with Barres
Q.What about the idea that male scientists are more competitive?
A. I think that’s just utter nonsense. Men just make this stuff up.
A-freakin’-men. Its about time people stopped entertaining this foolish biggoted hypotheses. I completely agree with Joanne, the experiment is over, and only by declaring that loudly and not taking any more crap, will progress be made. Good science requires up to toss out flawed and outdates theories and all of this crap belongs in the dustbin with the rest of “the bell curve” schlock. I am so glad that someone has the guts to come out forcefuly and call bullshit on things.
Hmm…this test gave me a score of zero on that sliding scale. It said I got eight of ten faces. But it called me an absolutely terrible empathizer AND systemizer. (like 3-4 on each)
I think I’m just going to call this an absolutely terrible test.
funny observation of myself as I took that gender-brain test: I wanted to score attain more maculine for some reason. I am a Ph.D. physicist (female), and I scored a 50% on the female side.
Something I observed about myself toward the end of my Ph.D. is that I subtly devalued thing considered ‘girly.” This occured to me at a conference while looking at a table of shirts in two colors, blue and pink. I really liked the pink, but I said out loud, “that’s too girly.” The brilliant woman behind the counter was quick to point out, “but you’re a girl.” I had forgotten that that was a good thing!
Seriously, I found the lack of female roll models deiheartening as a student. Even some female professors seemed to de-feminize themselves (actually there is a bit of liturature on this subject). In my department, if a women dressed up in a nice, feminine outfit, they would be confused with a secretary. It was as if looking feminine were not professional in teh world of science (but as a secretary, it was demanded), and I think that is part of the problem. One can be a woman, in the many ways there are to be a women, and still be capable at whatever profession they chose. One shouldn’t need to be masculine (in her brain or anywhere else) to be able to succeed.
about that Sweden study -
why wouldn’t more faculty search committees adopt a “total impact” based on weighed sum of publications - with properly weighed first-author impact, perhaps, as the primary criterion of at least early stages of sorting through CVs?
With the amount of bias against female application, this “impartial” factor seems like a good idea. A female physicist was just hired as third choice in my department - the first and second choice candidates were males with total impact half that of her.
She is a little more shy and didn’t give as impressive talks as the two male candidates, but she was also giving her talk after theirs, which indicates the pre-selection of top two candidates was made during CV review stage.
FYI - her “total impact” score was ~78, and first-author of 38. The top candidate numbers were 42/18. The second choice was 64/35 - closer, but still less than her. Another hire that is currently being considered (another male) is 40/24.
My personal feeling is that she is a much better scientist (as the impact values seem to confirm) than the guys, but she is not as good in giving aggressively self-confident macho-style talks, as the guys, and may be lacking in terms of connections as well (two out of three male candidates have strong local connections to “known” scientists at a neighbouring university).
Sexism and nepotism indeed. Someone should take the data from numerous rumor pages and run the numbers to see how the selections made. I will bet you the strong bias is still there. The difference may be not “three Science/Nature publication equivalent”, as reported for biosciences, but even a single Science/Nature, or a PRL or two difference is a HUGE obstacle that is very difficult, almost impossible to overcome easily in competitive market and large number of male candidates to pick from.
By the way, my brain is apparently male/female neutral (I am male) with a ratio of zero (strongly male on angles, removed object, rotating things in brain and finger lengths, prefer feminine faces, but also quite feminine in empathy and language.
And Lubos is a troll and an idiot, in addition to being a sexist chauvinist (or all three), so he shouldn’t be taken seriously… If you haven’t figured this out already.
Tammy - that’s a funny point. My girlfriend didn’t want a pink cell phone because it was too girly. She is a scientist too.
I don’t think I know any man would reject something on the basis that “it’s too manly”.
“I don’t like those jeans - they make me look too manly.”
“That truck/sports car is too manly for me”
“That haircut makes me too manly.”
These you will never hear from a man.
Tammy, good points. As you can see from my picture, I have meter long hair. And until recently, every time I gave a talk or taught a class, I tied it back, braided it, put it up, whatever. Anything to hide it and make me look less feminine. It was a conscious effort. It’s only a couple years ago that I realized this was ridiculous! Now I let it float about me (the frizzier the better), let my earrings dangle, and wear my platform shoes.
To every woman scientist out there: Don’t make this mistake - be yourself!
Is is worthwhile to post the 77th comment here? Probably not, but here goes …
I find Wennaras & Wold striking and convincing. I find it shocking that this appears to be the only study of its kind. I would be very interested in seeing the results of a similar study in high-energy physics or astrophysics in the US. My (possibly naive) guess is that things are much better, but I would really like to know. It wouldn’t be too hard to do this: figure out who was on the job market in a given year, and comapre the offers made to an objective rating of impact based on citations. This isn’t perfect, but it would be much better than the wild guesses that currently dominate the discussion.
Most of the other research that I’ve read about (eg the studies cited by Sandler and Hall) deals with highly artificial situations (eg rating fake CVs) and its relevance for the real world is therefore (in my opinion) highly questionable.
My dim view of this kind of research stems from the following true story. When I was a freshman in college, a couple of psych majors were going around my dorm, handing out one-page essays and asking people to rate them. At the top of each essay was a small picture of the putative author. I immediately handed it back and said, “You’re giving out identical essays and just changing the picture.” They admitted that this was right. (Why else would there be a picture in the first place?) And so I didn’t participate. And I wonder about those who did. Did they not notice that there was an irrelevant picture? And if not, how much attention were they paying to their assigned task?
I see that while I was distracted by other tasks, my 77th comment became the 82nd. So I guess the discussion has not died out!
A further comment on feminine dress. Has anyone noticed that the men are not very stylish either? We all dress down. And there may be a positive reason for this: in science, we want to participate primarily as intellects, and set aside extraneous factors such as appearance. Anyone too far outside the norm is therefore an unnecessary distraction.
It does seem clear that this puts a greater burden on the minority gender, though.
I quite honestly can’t believe that I have to respond to this. Let me state first that I am a woman who has spent the past two years working towards a PhD in a not at all disreputable institution. That should hopefully dispense with the ridiculous kneejerk reactions to my comments, all of which are apparently motivated by the belief that my comments represent a male point of view.
Sean, if you think anyting other than innate ability should come into play when determining who obtains faculty positions I quite genuinely feel sorry both for you and for any university with which you are associated. Perhaps your attitude is representative of an EU-US disconnect, but I can quite honestly say that I have never experienced any sort of discrimination against me within physics or mathematics due to my gender.
I find it extraordinarily offensive that anyone is willing to propose that I, or any other women, deserve positive discrimination because of a perceived negative discrimination against our gender. I’m quite willing to believe that things may be significantly different in the US, but my experience in Europe (particularly in the British Isles) is that discrimination against female scientists in an academic setting is nigh-on non-existent; certainly neither I nor any of my other female colleagues (with whom I discussed this earlier) here have experienced such things.
Undoubtedly. However, in the absense of any evidence to suggest the existence of such discrimination anywhere I have worked, I find it extremely offensive to suggest that I, or any other women, need the odds deliberately stacked in our favour. This sort of rabidly left-wing nonsense is apparently endemic to the US. Certainly, for all our faults, nobody in the UK would have the neck to suggest such utterly, basely ridiculous things as “build the self-confidence of girls” as a constructive approach to redressing any perceived gender imbalance.
I rarely find myself agreeing with Lubos, but on this occasion I am happy to.
Women undoubtedly have exactly the same innate mathematical, logical, and scientific skills as men, and the male heirarchy is cruelly screwing them.
Those equal skills, combined with women’s undisputed superior innate skills in grammar, word fluency, vocabulary and verbal areas means that, umm, why of course … in the aggregate women are just flat out the superior sex … equally as strong in the guy things and undeniably stronger in the girl things.
Nah that wouldn’t be fair. So it must be that men instrinsically have the same grammar and verbal skills, but the female-dominated educational system has been cruelly screwing them.
I submitted comment #18 above. I was banned from commenting on this topic by Lubos Motl prior to making any comment at all about this subject (and his recent posting) at his blog. I always thought science was about questioning and discussing in order to understand things better. Clearly, not all of us agree. JoAnne please keep pointing these things out to us so that we may try to do better. Please everyone try to remember the real issue is not about how one scores on a particular test but how to treat other human beings.
Female theoretical physicist — overall score of zero
Nailed the angles and rotations, but also got 24 total words…
Much higher than average anything on both systemizing and empathy; male on the ultimatum but prefer masculine faces. Neutral on moved objects, eyes and fingers.
I put this kind of test up there with Meyers-Briggs (e.g essentially meaningless).
Most interesting aspect — that I can’t resist a test — must be innate competitive nature.
I still fail to see conclusive evidence showing female discrimination in Academia, at least with the small smattering of things posted on this blog and what i’ve looked into following the Summers affair.
People keep harping that its ‘case closed’, and so forth but if the studies linked above are all that there is, well any reasonable person should feel that there is still a large and nasty question mark on the subject. Surely we can do better than that.
Sean’s post about innate abilities is also highly suspect, it is likely far more complicated than his assumptions with subtle interplay between nature and nurture as well as selection biases. I don’t think anyone, outside the wackos, claims that environment plays no role in the paucity of females in science (in fact it should be fairly obvious as there are nonnegligable cultural gaps between say Europe and the US)
I still find the Pinker Harvard debate the most thoughtful presentation of both pro and con on the subject. Both sides had strong points, and I was left quite unsure what to think.
So someone who is apolitical and more knowledgeable scientifically about this subject, please feel free to intervene and convince me one way or the other.
I am surprised how many of the comments by scientists on this subject are so unscientific. Most of the people making very strong statements on eitehr side have simply not read the actual, scientific studies on the subject. If we claim that sciencce and scientists, for that matter, are clearly only looking at the ‘hard facts’ when it comes to highering or judging the worth of scientific achievements, but this very discussion shows how flawed this statement really is.
Very strong judgements are being presented here on the basis of personal experience and perception alone and not on the results of any experimentation designed to remove these biases (these studies do, by the way, exist). It is funny to note that I have often heard this body of work discredited by people who have never read the research simply because the studies are looking at biases against certain groups (in this case, women) In other words, the bias in some individuals lead them to believe it is unreasnable to even examine toe subject because, in their experience, there is not problem…again, a very unscientific way to look at the world. I am a bit dissapointed by the limited scope of thinking of some of my colleagues. What would the status of physics be if we all looked at the physical world in such terms?
dampt_dweller said (#84):
Sean, if you think anyting other than innate ability should come into play when determining who obtains faculty positions I quite genuinely feel sorry both for you and for any university with which you are associated.
Departments and institutions almost never hire on the basis of “innate ability” alone. (Or else you’re using a rather strange definition of “inna