Women in Science and...(an illuminating conjunction)!

[Loisenman]

Intuition In-Depth
Lois Isenman
March 21, 2008

The title of the article on women in science was a little bit odd, "Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?" and there were some other clues as well. But my misgivings were allayed by the following sentence that appeared close to the beginning. "The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, sensible answer." I experienced a pleasurable crisp feeling as I read that.

'snip'

The facts seem clearly stated in the third paragraph of the article. “ Women comprise just 19% of tenure-track professors in math, 11% in physics, 10% in computer science, and 10% in engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 25% of the Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences---way up from the 4% of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields." This apparently clear statement of the facts along with the crisp sentence cited above helped set me up (primed me) to be more accepting of the author's argument than I otherwise might have been.

She argues that the low percentage of women in these fields reflects the female tendency to prefer fields based on nurturing. She cites for example a survey in which 1500 professors (gender breakdown not given) were asked what accounts for the low percentage of women and 74% chalked it up to differences in interests. She also cites work by Baron-Cohen suggesting that autism is the far end of the male spectrum. He feels that the male brain on average is wired to be better at systematizing and the female brain better at empathizing.

'snip'

I finished the article and then noticed that it had been published in the American Enterprise Institute bimonthly newsletter. I also recognized that the author Christina Hoff Sommers had written an intensely antifeminist book. Uh-huh, I thought to myself. READ MORE...

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. And on another note, you won't believe this, but it is a fact that

we should respect and be aware of:


http://www.amazon.com/review/R6PCMJKC2D9D1

The book has a chapter on Iranian women. The author appreciates Iranian women, their strength and their level of social participants. However, she only interview either political figures or low level workers. She never bothered to interview many female engineers, academics, practitioners who are not political but still have so much to say. In Iran, about 60 percent of university graduates and 30 percent of PhDs are female. In IT industry women outperform men. In Tehran there are more art galleries by female artists than male ones. Elaine shows no interest to these women. She only focuses on the fact that in Iran women have to hide their hair and wear scarf. Why it is so important to her? It sounded so strange to me.

[Jim__]

2. What do you see as a desireable resolution to the problem?

I am a little disturbed by this excerpt:

In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action... assertive, instrumental, and task oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different: it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.

Valian does not deny that schemas have a foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and their effect. Our society, she says, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop "a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement." All this inevitably result in a permanently unfair advantage for men.

I'm not sure what the permanently unfair advantage for men is. My guess is that its a career advantage. But the attributes that men are encouraged to develop: a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement don't seem like the best attributes to develop in order to lead a meaningful life.

Later, the article states:

... Cooperative science works, and more of it sounds great to me. Moreover, as current events strongly argue, the well-being of our economy and our health and safety as citizens depends considerably more on having leaders capable of objectivity and willing to assure adequate government regulation and than it does on resisting any hypothetical decline in scientific and technological innovation that having more women in these fields might bring. Besides having more women might increase innovation!

I think that makes a lot of sense. However, my fear is that we will increase the number of women in science by having women develop these less than desirable traits. I think a better, although much more difficult approach, is to change the way we do science.

[Loisenman]

4. Some thoughts

Jim,

First I want to say that I find your comments extremely astute. Yes in part I reacted the same way you do to Valian’s claims, although I did not focus on that in my piece. But I don't think prestige (etc.) is really the issue, rather it is the ability to contribute as fully as one can. Some women find this exclusively in nurturing roles, some women do for a time and then not, and some women are never satisfied just supporting others. Yet for the most part, both men and women appreciate the chance to feel capable of autonomous independent action, being assertive and instrumental, as well as nurturant, expressive, and communal.

I agree that if everyone becomes restricted to the male model there will be a serious loss of meaning. I would argue for efforts to enlarge the gender schema for each sex. In fact the notion of “contributing” to the best of one's ability brings the two together. It takes the worst out of the ego aspect of being instrumental. Thus with much more of a societal emphasis on being a player, having a voice, feeling self-esteem etc. by contributing to the greater good, we might cut down on those who get to feel instrumental by screwing others to satisfy their greed.

I do feel that one of the problems in the past with more women entering science is that to climb the ladder (and in the process) they have become much like male scientists. I feel two things are relevant here. With a critical mass of women in faculty roles in science this will slowly begin to change. Also I think that the most important tasks facing science are necessarily beginning to change, and perhaps will so much more dramatically in the future. For survival in the face of an ever shrinking world and shrinking natural resources, the assertive, individual model is less and less tenable and the communal model more and more required.

[n2doc]

3. The biggest problem is how we do science today and how it is funded

The current system is extremely unfriendly towards anyone who doesn't plan on working 16/7/365 on science. Little or no value is placed on teaching ability or preparation of lectures/mentoring. What is expected is that the person churn out research papers, proposals and build up a big lab full of students, postdocs and techs. Given funding rates of less than 10% this means most young scientists in academia spend most of their time writing and rewriting grant applications (or papers and books in the liberal arts areas).

There are plenty of women in the environmental sciences as students. They see the lifestyles of their professors and decide it is not for them. This isn't to say that there is sexism going on, there is, but it also goes both ways with hiring and funding geared towards "diversity" goals. But frankly the really good minority and female students that I have had have mostly gone into non-academic positions as they can have a life outside of work. And the pay is better.

[TZ]

5. People are making this problem more complex than it is

It really has more to do with environmental upbringing schooling, than anything intrinsically inherent in the way science is done.
There have been NUMEROUS studies that show that they way science and math are taught to girls vs. boys is the big key in getting more women in science. Men and women do think differently about things, however to just say that women naturally are drawn to "nuturing" fields and don't or can't practice the scientific method is a fraudulent claim, IMO. I took a class on women and science in school and saw no evidence that the thought patterns of men vs. women make a difference in going into science. If there was ANY truth to this, why in the world have most of the departments I worked in (in biology) been either female dominated or at least 50% female? Granted the higher ups are STILL mostly male, but that has more to do with inertia than anything else.
If you check college enrollments you will see even in the hard sciences that female enrollments are gradually increasing.
Also cultural factors are a HUGE influence. Has anyone who did this study BOTHER to compare different countries and cultures?
I understand that in some other European/Western culture the amount of women in the sciences tends to be higher than in the US. Of course in countries that discourage women from being independant thinkers this is gonna lower the gender ratio.
Bah. Anybody who does a study like this has an inborn expectation of bias and therefore gets the results they are working on..In other words I call bullshit.

[BlooInBloo]

6. It's too bad too - when I taught math at a few universities, girls statistically outperformed boys..

.... Not because they were instrinsically any smarter than the boys, rather simply because they could follow instructions better. Things like "do the following homework", etc. And lo and behold test day comes around, and the girls overall outperformed the boys. It's too bad a variety of forces add up into the result that girls tend to not pursue math & science at the graduate level. It's all of our loss.