Bloodless Coup

Nature and Nurture

Although I'm not sure why I titled it that, given that there seems to be a near total lack of nurturing - and something more akin to or even beyond active neglect - operating towards women in the sciences.

And for the literalists, I know, that's not the definition of nurture that's implied. It's a play on words. Get it?

As for Nature, they have a piece in this month's issue that tackles the question of women's inferiority in science. Unsurprisingly, it concludes that there are basically no natural differences in the levels of male and female performance, and that discrepancies are due to discrimination against and the concomitant reduction of confidence in women.

I'm very interested to read the whole thing, but even though I have access to the university library electronic subscription to Nature, I can't get the article, because they embargo for twelve months before putting the journal online for institutional sources. Way to boost subscriptions, eh?

So, I'm going to use the short excerpts Amanda used in her post as a teaser, and you can all head down to your local library and read the hard copy. Or pay 18 bucks for the PDF. Or wait a year and get it online.

Anyway, an extended excerpt from Amanda's post, and then some thoughts about how the same sort of thing works in the social sciences, which are supposedly more "soft" and open to women.

Amanda summarizes (italics mine):

Dr. Barres delivers the smackdown to men in academia who want so badly to believe that science must prove their prejudice against the mental abilities of women. Barres argues that existing evidence shows that women fall behind in science because of discrimination, not because of innate inability and that having powerful academics like Larry Summers and Stephen Pinker bloviating about how inferior women are without backing it up with solid evidence of such is an example of just such discrimination.

Despite powerful social factors that discourage women from studying maths and science from a very young age, there is little evidence that gender differences in maths abilities exist, are innate or are even relevant to the lack of advancement of women in science. A study of nearly 20,000 maths scores of children aged 4 to 18, for instance, found little difference between the genders, and despite all the social forces that hold women back from an early age, one-third of the winners of the elite Putnam Math Competition last year were women. Moreover, differences in maths-tests results are not correlated with the gender divide between those who choose to leave science.

One thing that we know for sure, according to Barres, is that in gender-blinding studies, the social belief that women are naturally inferior creates some pretty powerful discrimination against women trying to make it in science.

For instance, one study found that women applying for a research grant needed to be 2.5 times more productive than men in order to be considered equally competent. Even for women lucky enough to obtain an academic job, gender biases can influence the relative resources allocated to faculty, as Nancy Hopkins discovered when she and a senior faculty committee studied the problem at MIT. The data were so convincing that MIT president Charles Vest publically admitted that discrimination was responsible.

He addreses some of the other stereotypes whipped out against women in this debate, and with I might call a bit of cheeky humor.

Mansfield and others claim that women are more emotional than men. There is absolutely no science to support that contention. On the contrary, it is men that commit the most violent crimes in anger—for example, 25 times more murders than women. The only hysteria that exceeded MIT professor Nancy Hopkins’ (well-founded) outrage after Larry Summers’ comments was the shockingly vicious news coverage by male reporters adn commentators. Hopkins also received hundres of hateful and even pornographic messages, nearly all from men, that were all highly emotional.

I loved that passage because it’s such a perfect example of how gender essentialism changes according to the sexist needs of the speaker. Women are more emotional is just a flattering way to express the idea that women aren’t as smart or rational as men. It depends on the audience wanting to believe it so bad that we forget that things like anger are emotions as well.

There is no scientific suport, either, for the contention that women are innately less competitive (although I believe powerful curiousity and the drive to create sustain most scientists far more than the love of competition). However, many girls are discouraged from sports for fear of being labelled tomboys. A 2002 study did find a gender gap in competitiveness in financial tournaments, but the authors suggested that this was due to differences in self-confidence rather than ability. Indeed, again and again, self confidence has been pointed to as a factor influencing why women ‘choose’ to leave science and engineering programmes. When women are repeatedly told they are less good, their self confidence falls and their ambitions dim.

I think there are a couple of reasons why these studies focus on the "hard" sciences. First, because the proportion of women in these positions is among the lowest of any profession. Fewer women get in, and stay in. On the other hand, I also think the "hard" sciences get a lot of attention because of the money. Because the salaries are relatively high (for academics), and lucrative grants greater (again, compared to other fields), it's important to see how women are excluded from the most lucrative career paths.

But what about the social sciences (or the humanities)? Are we really better off? We have more women than the hard sciences, but the salaries are lower, the grants are smaller, and teaching loads higher. It seems to me that in many ways, the social sciences and humanities are the academic equivalent of a pink collar job. Beyond that, within the disciplines (although with some notable exceptions, where women have achieved "critical mass") there's still plenty of the same kind of nurture-vacuum for women that there is in the hard sciences. There's the perception of inferiority that Barres describes, but that's compounded by perceived female and male tracks. Women are the nurturers, the student-centered, the team-players. These perceptions end up creating self-fulfilling prophecies even for those who resist with all their might (and that's pretty much what you have to do, making every day a constant battle to overcome the idea of what other people expect you to be, and it's a lowered expectation at that). And if you're a feminist, well, that means that not only are you more girlie - because feminists are angry and emotional and women are emotional - but it becomes easier to brush off any complaints feminists can get in edgewise because, of course, feminists are always grinding political axes. Feminist scholarship? Outside of some fields and certain departments, it buys a woman a fast ticket to "not being taken seriously." Input on hiring? It's almost possible to hear the tape playing in their heads: "oh god she's going to say we need to include more women on the short list again."

It's not like that everywhere. I have feminist colleagues who are prized by their departments, where women are included in departmental decisions, their research encouraged. On the other hand, I know so many who have left - their jobs, or even academia entirely - because they are worn down, tired out, and sick of trying to overcome the obstacles in their way. Obstacles that their male colleagues refuse to see, deny exist and therefore reinforce. Those of us who stay often wonder if we are champions or chumps, or if we are traitors to consider jumping ship and leaving others to the fight. One of my friends, who was fighting tooth and nail against "girlie tracking" by a dean, decided to flee rather than continue to fight a losing battle, as the dean continued piling on excessive teaching and administration, with no accomodation for the reseach my friend was hired to do and loves the most. She was told by other women at the university that it was her feminist duty to stay and fight. That temptation is strong, to think that one person can change an insitutional culture, or that times are changing and surely those much noticed "liberal academics" are better on gender than the crude sexual harassers and discriminators that women face in other kinds of jobs.

And we educated elites in the social sciences are far better off with our options, our salaries, than women in minimum wage jobs who can't quit because their options for other jobs are so limited. Yet we all experience the same strangling of talents, crushing of ambition. I'll never forget a grad student I knew as a visiting professor who was a good bit older than me who had come to a PhD program by a long and tortured path. She has been a farmer, a social worker, a car mechanic in the 1970s. We talked about discrimination on the job, and the differences between academia and the garage. She put up with a lot to be a mechanic, and the men were "rude, crude and socially unacceptable" when she started. But the academics, well, most of the academics didn't even see her, acknowledge her existence or contribution. Oh, they were happy to let her start their whole distance learning program, but that was scut work. That she had a working class background, was heavy, and was older, made it even worse. She was lucky to have a great advisor (not me... a different field) who believed in her, and stuck by her. The rest of the faculty... nothing. They weren't assholes who put nudie calenders on her locker. They just assumed she couldn't do it, and therefore virtually erased her from their perception.

And if you don't think gender alone determines people's views about the qualifications of women in science, ponder this last statement from Barres:

Shortly after I changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s."

Yeah. That pretty much sums it up.