Ever since their inception and hasty popularity rise, Second Life and its virtual cohorts have been a fascinating fishbowl into human nature. With their near-limitless possibilities for meeting, dating, battling, selling to, and influencing strangers, these cyber-worlds are perfect for studying the ways we behave and interact—both the beautiful and the ugly. And there’s been plenty of the latter to go around, from rape to infidelity to theft—in other words, all the same cruelty, discourtesy, and immorality that goes on in real life, only in a smaller, more publicly track-able format.

As such, it should be no surprise that the prejudices that play out in regular society—such as, oh, say, racism—also manifest in virtual worlds. In a new paper published online in Social Influence, Northwestern University professor Wendi Gardner and grad student Paul Eastwick found that avatars with darker skin in the virtual world There.com (a close cousin to Second Life) were less likely to have a basic request granted by another avatar.

The researchers had 416 participants/avatars make 2 back-to-back requests of another avatar. The first was to teleport to 50 virtual locations and allow the requester to take a screenshot at each one (a royal pain in the cyber-rear). The second, more reasonable request was to travel to a single beach and let the asker take a screenshot.

For those requesting avatars that were white, 20 percent more people said yes to the second request. For African American-looking avatars, the increase was only 8 percent. What does this mean? As Sharon Begley of Newsweek put it:

[B]ack in the real world, decades of psychology studies have shown that whether or not someone agrees to a request under these experimental conditions—and also in real life—depends on whether they think the requester is worthy of impressing, For dark-skin avatars, apparently, the answer is, not so much.

So much for the end of racism.

All in all, women are doing pretty well in science. Surveys from the National Science Foundation show that the percentage of women getting science and engineering B.A.s has gone from from 39 percent in 1984-85 to 51 percent in 2004-5 (though the number of them actually stay in the profession is still dwindling). In fact, only one field can truly call itself still entrenched in male domination: computer science. The stark gender divide was summed up beautifully in last week’s New York Times:

Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.

Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field.

And the numbers are just as startling: “In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent.” And this year? “Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates.”

So why is this happening?

Well, it could be a perfect storm of a continually male-dominated culture, fewer opportunities open to women, persistent societal preconceptions, and subtle discrimination. Or it could be some Larry Summers-esque sign of the female-math-skills apocalypse—though we seriously doubt it.

Or it could be the (novel) idea that nothing is wrong—maybe there are no barriers keeping women out, and they simply aren’t choosing to come in. Female comp sci students could be funneling their talents and interests into other science fields, now that women have greater opportunities there. Or they might be making choices based on the job market, like the comp sci star described by her professor as “chos[ing] to major in nursing because of what the student perceived as better prospects for finding employment.” In all honesty, she may not be so off-base.

Related:
RB: Note to Media: They Give Nobel Prizes to Women These Days
RB: Title IX Hits the Science World, But Will It Do Any Good?
RB: The Mommy Wars and Science Collide (Again)

We know that adults consciously and subconsciously “expect” their leaders to be male and Caucasian. But now it looks like the white male-ness of our past leaders is alive and well in the minds of kids as young as five.

In 2006, research teams at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kansas quizzed 205 children ages five to 10 on “their knowledge, attitudes and beliefs” about the similarities among the U.S. presidents we’ve had so far. The three studies asked kids from “diverse” racial and ethnic backgrounds about why there had never been an African American, Hispanic, or female president. Here’s a summary of the results:

The researchers found most children are aware that women and minorities have been excluded from the U.S. presidency. Although most of the children believed people of all races and genders should be president, they offered surprising answers as to why only white males have held the nation’s highest political office:

One in four participants said it is illegal for women and minorities to hold the office of president;

One in three children attributed the lack of female, African-American and Latino presidents to racial and gender bias on the part of voters; and

While some children expressed the belief that prejudice shapes how adults vote, another third of the participants said members of the excluded groups lacked the skills to hold the position.

Overall, the kids were optimistic about their chances of becoming president (what parent is going to shoot down an idea like that?) though the girls who attributed the lack of female presidents to discrimination were more likely to say they couldn’t ever hold the office. By contrast, African-American children who identified discrimination as the reason for white-only commanders in chief showed an increased interest in becoming president—which, should Barack Obama win in November, will only continue to rise.

This morning, the three winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine were announced. One of the honored three is French scientist Françoise Barre-Sinoussi, a member of the team who first discovered HIV and its role in causing AIDS. Her co-discoverer, and fellow Nobel winner, is Luc Montagnier. Besides the fact that they were the first researchers to isolate the virus, the biggest thing there is to know about them is that one is a man, and the other is a woman.

Unfortunately for Françoise—and for the reputation of the science-covering media—the Nobel committee apparently failed to include a picture of her in the press release, spelling out her female-ness for all to see. What happened next, in a display of basic fact-checking—or even just minor Googling—that would make Jayson Blair proud, was the following CNN report:

Two Frenchmen and a German won the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries of viruses that cause HIV and cervical cancer, the organization’s Web site said Monday.

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of France were honored “for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus.” The pair are recognized as the discoverers in 1983 of the virus that can expose people to AIDS.

And to pour a little sodium chloride in the wound, Scientific American’s Steve Mirsky described the duo as “the two Frenchmen” in a podcast that’s now posted on their Web site. The transcript of the podcast has since been changed—without any note of the correction—to “the two French scientists.” Apparently Françoise was deemed female enough to be identified as such—Nobel Prize and all.