I was hoping to actually say something substantive about this, but time is precious these days (and it’s been all over the blogosphere anyway). The National Academy of Sciences has released a report, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. They seem to think that the relative paucity of women in science is not due to differences of innate aptitude, or even to an aversion to hard work and competitive environments, but to systematic biases within academia. Hmm, fancy that. Cornelia Dean in the NYT writes:

Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday…

The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.

If there are cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said…

The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a `wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

As Bitch Ph.D. says, “I, personally, am expecting the apologies from Larry Summers’ apologists to start pouring in any day now.”

So I have a question. The reason why most of us were upset by Larry Summers is that he was wrong, in a spectacular and potentially damaging kind of way, and the new NAS study supports this (yet again). But, almost without exception, Summers’ supporters pretended that what got people upset was the very idea of raising the possibility of gender-based cognitive differences, and that these people were anti-free-inquiry and afraid of the truth. Steven Pinker was the most dogged straw-man-constructor, but there were plenty of others. (See also Lawyers, Guns & Money.)

My question is: was there anyone who was actually upset at Summers for this reason? That is, was there any respectable academic who really came out against even asking whether there were gender-based cognitive differences? To make things precise, I’m looking for (1) actual professors or other academics, not crazy blog commenters and so on; (2) people who explicitly were against even asking the question or doing the research, not people who (quite reasonably) argue that bias and discrimination are much more important factors in explaining the current gender disparity; and (3) did so in response to Summers, not some time back in the 1970′s or whatever. I sincerely want to know, did anyone take that position? I’m sure it wasn’t the position of most of us, strawmen notwithstanding, but given the speed and efficiency with which the fairy tale was promulgated among Summers’ supporters, I can’t help but think that at least one person did say it. There are alot of crazy academics out there who say all sorts of nonsensical things, it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone.

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?

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.

Joyeux 4th of July, mes amis américains! I am checking in from Montréal, a temporary stopover on the way back to the U.S. of A. from a brief visit to Quebec City. I was there for Renaissance Weekend, an occasional (five times per year) gathering of the important, demi-important, and merely interesting and/or well-connected to get together and talk about stuff.

I had a great time, and I would be happy to tell you all about it if RW goings-on were not strictly off the record. (For example, I could reveal the amusing story behind how nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler met his wife Rosa Wang, or how I took down a huge pot from Scripps College president Nancy Bekavac when my quad tens demolished her ace-high flush, but rules are rules.) But I am perfectly within my rights to share things that I said myself. I gave a few mini-presentations, among which was one in a series of two-minute lunchtime talks on “What I Would Do If I Could,” a rather free-ranging topic if ever there was one. Other people suggested banning torture, printing people’s phone numbers on their license plates, or moving to a chocolate-based economy. Here was my little spiel:

If I could propose one thing, it would be to do everything in our power to encourage young girls to get excited about science, math, and technology.

As a physicist, I know that my field is only about ten percent women. There is a theory on the market, occasionally suggested by people in positions of power and influence, that an important contributor to this imbalance is a difference in intrinsic aptitude. The technical term for this theory is “bullshit.” I say this not as a starry-eyed egalitarian, but as one who has looked at the data. This is a theory that makes predictions, and its predictions are spectacularly wrong. If they were right, the fraction of women that dropped out would rise at the higher ranks, as the competition for positions became more fierce; that’s not true. The percentage of women scientists would be basically constant from place to place; that’s not true. The fraction of women getting physics degrees would be stable over time; that’s not true. The truth is that women drop out of science between high school and college (and, tellingly, disproportionately more women try to specialize in physics later in college than those who choose physics as a major during their first year). And they do so because they are discouraged by a million small signals that add up to a powerful cumulative message.

We shouldn’t encourage girls to be enthusiastic about science, math, and technology because we need more scientists, mathematicians, or engineers. We should do so because many young girls are potentially interested in technical fields, and this interest should be celebrated, not deprecated. Support to pursue one’s passions is something that everyone deserves, regardless of their chromosomes.

Let freedom ring, everybody.

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.

Well, as the really sharp ones among you may have gleaned from a careful reading of my posts on this blog, I like to make sure that there’s a bit of fun mixed in with the work whenever I can. Makes the work better, overall. For example, today I got up early, dashed to the top of neighbourhood geographic highlight, Mount Hollywood (ok, I used one of the upper trailheads), and back down, did some shopping at Trader Joe’s, and then from 10:15am to 1:00pm brainstormed with three of my students (Arnab, Tameem and Veselin) on campus. (We think we have discovered a new phase transition! Hurrah! More later.) Then in the afternoon, I seem to have done nothing but laundry and floor-sweeping….

Ok, wait. Stop. That last bit’s not so fun….. Day not ending well. Hmmm. It’s Saturday night, so I think I’m off to either see a movie or go contemplate life (and maybe a bit of physics) in a local bar (probably scaring the clientele). Decisions, decisions.

Well, while I figure that out, why don’t you verify that I’m not the only one who likes to mix work and play. Happens all the time, you know. Here are hilarious pictures of Alice Shapley (Princeton Prof. of Astrophysics), Chung-Pei Ma (Berkeley Prof. of Astrophysics), and Alison Coil (Arizona Astro postdoc) showing how it’s done, during a long night of a Keck observing run. (I found the link by accident while preparing an earlier post.) The Paris Hilton impressions are uncanny!

Perhaps we can get them to come and tell us what they were up to, physics-wise? Looks like fun too!

[Update: Alice, in the comments, says, "I should mention that in addition to wearing such "fashionable" observing clothes and napping on the sofa in the Keck Observatory Remote Operations room, we were trying to learn about the physical conditions in star-forming regions in galaxies 8-9 billion light years away. The galaxies we targeted were drawn from the DEEP2 redshift survey (a project led by University of California astronomers), which has mapped out a chunk of the Universe at z~1 and is telling us about galaxy properties at that earlier epoch. We were attempting to measure the relative strengths of rest-frame optical emission lines from Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, which are produced in the regions of ionized gas in which stars form. In such high-redshift galaxies, the lines which have been targeted by traditional optical astronomy for decades get shifted to the near-IR region of the spectrum, and we then use the KeckII near-IR spectrograph (NIRSPEC) to measure them. The relative strengths of these lines can be used to infer the degree of chemical enrichment in the gas from which the stars are forming. But, in turns out that the line strengths we measure actually follow a significantly different pattern from those of galaxies in the nearby universe, which may tell us something very interesting about star formation in the early universe (we're still working on exactly what...)"]

-cvj

P.S. Looking at the dialogue (who writes that stuff? – It’s great!) in the captions to the Astrophysics party (more…)

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.

Blogging to you (semi-)live from the on-going women in physics conference being held here at USC this weekend. It was concieved and organized by two of our department’s graduate students Amy Cassidy and Katie Mussak, and the conference webpage is here.

Here is a quote from their motivations:

The low representation of women in physics is an issue of international concern. This disparity points to an untapped resource of talented women who could contribute to future developments in science. The percentage of degrees awarded to women in physics in the USA is much lower than in some other countries. In the AIP report, Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005 the US ranked 12 out of 19 countries for percentage of PhDs awarded to women and 11th out of 20 countries for percentage of Bachelors awarded to women.

….and further:

To help undergraduate students from USC and other schools in Southern California to successfully make the transition from undergraduate to graduate studies in physics.

To foster a culture in Southern California and at USC in which women are encouraged and supported to pursue and succeed in higher education in physics.

To strengthen the network of women in physics in Southern California.

Notable events (for me) so far:

**Excellent talk by Caolionn O’Connell (Caltech), on accelerator technology in experimental high energy physics. She focused on Plasma Wake Field accelerator technology, which she has described on her blog. Finally I actually got to meet her, having only communicated with her electronically in the past. I let her know that her blog is missed by many (the quantum diaries project has ended). (Note to self: Maybe I can convince her to start blogging again in a new project… we could form a joint blog where we can combine efforts in blogging about life and physics in the greater LA area….. Hmmmm.)

**Excellent talk by Nai-Chang Yeh, on experimental condensed matter physics, focusing on a variety of superconductors, magnetic materials, and superconductor/ferromagnet heterostructures. Find out more about her lab’s work here.

**Answering so many excellent questions from so many excellent students (Undergraduates from all over the map) about graduate school, physics in general, high energy physics research, string theory.

**We also had a very good lunch, attended by all the students and organisers, together with a number of the faculty, our department chairman, two of our Deans, and several other faculty who administer the Women in Science and Engineering program here at USC (a very valuable source of support for women in these fields, both colleagial, financial and otherwise). I remind you that it is a Saturday, but these folks turned out in strength, which was good to see.

There’s more to come. I’d better go back for the next talk, by Sheila Tobias.

-cvj

This feisty blog has occasionally talked about issues of discrimination against minority-group members and women, in science, or in academia, or just more broadly. We have also, one must admit, occasionally taken the Bush administration to task for this or that example of egregious malfeasance. Thus, rigorously fair folks that we are, it’s only right that we also mention those instances when the administration takes time off from its busy schedule of intelligence-doctoring, operative-outing, deficit-growing, and hurricane-ignoring to actively fight the pernicious effects of discrimination.

So, here we go: the Justice Department is going to sue Southern Illinois University for discriminating against white males.

No, you can’t make this stuff up. SIU, like almost every university in the country, is seriously under-represented by minority groups among its graduate students; out of 5,500 graduate students, only about 8 percent are Latino or African-American (compared to over 20 percent of Americans). So they have a few fellowship programs that specifically target women and minorities, and help out a tiny number of people — perhaps 40 per year. The Bush administration, tireless warriors for social justice that they are, will stop at nothing to squelch this manifest anti-white bias:

“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The letter demands the university cease the fellowship programs, or the department’s civil rights division will sue SIU by Nov. 18.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to discriminate against someone, I would be able to do a much better job than that. You know, like actually having fewer members of the discriminated class at my university than in the surrounding society, rather than significantly more.

Sadly, this is an issue that (even) scientists don’t always think very clearly about. There is a feeling in some circles that perfect fairness consists of taking the tiny part of society’s workings over which you have control, and pretending within that part that there is no such thing as race or gender, everyone should be treated equally. But in the real world, where we are not all born into equal circumstances and presented with equal opportunities, it makes perfect sense to recognize that and account for it when we recruit and train students.

Of course, people will complain that singling out minority-group status forces us to treat people according to some external characteristics rather than as individuals, and amounts to an insidious form of reverse racism, ultimately hurting the people it tries to help. This philosophically appealing position has the downside of being in flagrant contradiction with the evidence. Although it’s true that programs typically aim (small amounts of) resources at people because of minority-group status rather than a detailed understanding of their personal history in overcoming obstacles, the fact is that this clumsy strategy actually works. People gain access to education and training that they otherwise would not, and the result is that the pool of highly-educated and successful people grows more diverse, which helps both the people in those groups and the society as a whole. As crude as it is, the strategy of targeting fellowships at under-represented groups is both cheap and effective.

Deep down, nobody likes affirmative-action type programs. Nobody. We would all much prefer it if universities and other employers could truly ignore the race or gender of applicants and workers, because they were treated completely fairly throughout all of society. But that’s just not reality. And until it is, making a tiny little effort to help out people who have faced systematic bias throughout their lives — even if the efforts are clumsy and imprecise — is the least we can do.

While we’re on the topic of women in science and children, I thought I’d point to this special section on Woman and Leadership in Newsweek last week, which profiles women leaders in several fields, including Vera Rubin, who discovered some of the first evidence for dark matter, and Eileen Collins, who was commander of the space shuttle Discovery. Both of them mention the effect of children on their careers. Collins didn’t have them until 38, and Rubin had them early — and was described in the Washington Post article about her first AAS talk as a “young mother”. The series of interviews is pretty good for its diversity of viewpoints. Here’s what Rubin has to say about how much progress woman have made in the last few decades:

I’m also impatient about the progress of women in academia, which has been much worse than industry. The statistics for women scientists are pathetic. This is a battle young women may have to fight. Thirty years ago we thought the battle would be over soon, but equality is as elusive as dark matter.