Via Kevin Drum, more fuel for the Summers wars:
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.
[…] Based on those experiences, as well as research on gender differences, Prof. Barres begs to differ with what he calls “the Larry Summers Hypothesis,” named for the former Harvard president who attributed the paucity of top women scientists to lack of “intrinsic aptitude.” In a commentary in today’s issue of the journal Nature, he writes that “the reason women are not advancing [in science] is discrimination” and the “Summers Hypothesis amounts to nothing more than blaming the victim.” […] “It’s not hard to believe that differences between the brains of male and female adults have nothing to do with genes or the Y chromosome but may be the biological expression of different social settings,” says biologist Joan Roughgarden of Stanford, who completed her own transgender transition in 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.”
My and my wife’s experiences as scientists more or less agree with the trends described in the article. Frequently people expect men to have an edge when it comes to logic, math and engineering, and it seems ridiculous to pretend that one will not respond to expectations. The very best like Dr. Barres and more than a few people whom I know grit their teeth and succeed anyway.
Interestingly, one of the things that this flame war lacked is a controlled experiment. If you take a female scientist and change her into a man, will people respect her more? If you change a male scientist into a female, will people respect her less? There you have it.
CAVEAT: The only constant in society is change, and right now the gender makeup of science is midways through a tectonic shift. The female fraction of scientific graduate students has increased dramatically in recent years, in some programs exceeding 50% by a good margin (see here; keep in mind that 1993 is more of a midpoint than a starting point). Tenured faculty will occasionally reaffirm the old adage that ‘funeral by funeral, science moves forward,’ but on the whole the environment has grown increasingly gender-inclusive.
As far as academic hiring committees are concerned those new PhD’s cannot move up the ladder fast enough. When the gender disparity first became an issue committees faced a particularly painful catch-22: they had to hire a lot more women to make up for gross imbalances but only a small fraction of applicants were women. Nobody wanted to be the last department with an all-male faculty but the faster you try to rectify the problem the greater the conflict between meritocratic and class-based hiring decisions. The basic conflict that I’m describing here also explains why I enthusiastically support the idea of affirmative action, but only if we apply it at the elementary school level. Asking employers to fix a problem that (for the most part) they didn’t create strikes me as unfair and counterproductive. At any rate the major surge in recent female science graduates should make the committees’ decisions, if not any easier, at least more fair.
RSA
My field, computer science, lags pathetically behind: 18% of our Ph.D. graduates nationally are women, with the same percentage being hired in tenure-track positions.
Justin Slotman
Tim, what did you think about that quote from Gregory Petsko? “Almost without exception, the talented women I have known have believed they had less ability than they actually had. And almost without exception, the talented men I have known believed they had more.” I’m starting grad school for bioinformatics in the fall, and now I’m worried I’m not overconfident enough.
And aren’t bio grad programs trending heavily female these days? (Coulter used that factoid to dismiss the theory of evolution, I believe.)
Steve
That’s a pretty awesome anecdote. Maybe Darrell has a point about anecdotal evidence after all.
Andrew
RSA: For good reason! The work and educational environment for women in CS is absolutely brutal. Unfriendly at best, and more often openly hostile.
For a year or two in the 1980’s, more than half of CS undergrads were women! Women have decreased steadily since, and not even the IT boom of the 90’s brought their numbers up very much.
Ross
As a complete aside, I’m a grad student in neurobiology, and Ben Barres came to my school to give a presentation on his research about 3 years ago. Afterwards there was some snickering about the male/female thing, but everyone seemed to agree that he gave an excellent talk.
RSA
Really?! I wonder if it’s a CS culture thing. I don’t see it in my current department, or where I went to school, but as a male I’m not sure that I’d be able to see what was going on in in any case.
Mr Furious
Despite reading this post twice, I had to read the Drum link to catch the whole transgender part of the story…
Guess I’m dumb. For a man or a woman.
Pb
As a male in Computer Science, there may be such factors at work, but it was never an issue for me–I got hooked on computers early on, my parents were always supportive of me in whatever I did, (and I’m sure that–had they have had a girl–it would have been no different) I spent a lot of time playing around with them on my own, and I’ve never much cared about other people’s opinions on what I do, or let them affect what I do, about that, or in general.
HyperIon
regarding
this reminds me of what my sister observed when she was taking testosterone for a while. she said she had never felt so confident and powerful before in her life. she felt like she could do ANYTHING.
not to worry..if biology is destiny.
HyperIon
bingo!
just like some white folks can’t seem to see how being black might STILL have disadvantages. i mean, we passed all those civil rights laws. didn’t that fix everything?
everyone should have to be “the outsider”, “the other” sometime in their life to see how hard it can be. then TRY to remember that experience.
The Other Steve
Actually, that’s fantastic. My graduating class in 1991 only had 4% females, so that’s like a 4 fold increase!
The Other Steve
The most frequent argument I’ve heard against women in ComSci(one of them came from our developer manager here at work), and even Summers and such… has been that well women want to take care of kids, and therefore they really aren’t interested in science.
I’ve found the best counter argument is to state simply….
Shouldn’t we let people do what they want to do and are good at?
skip
I never get beyond thinking this is “une Discussion Byzantine.” So what if there are differences? I see it as the Olympic rings overlapping. If there are enough–in this case many– who are gifted and motivated enough, we should take care that there is no subconscious social engineering to exclude them.
In the past, they WERE written off, so we do owe them every consideration today.
ob
obvious point here, but:
This is part of why blind refereeing is so important in academics.
When symphony orchestras switched to auditioning behind a screen, they started selecting a lot more women.
It just seems very hard for people to overcome the biases they have based on knowledge of gender, appearance, and so on. It may be impossible for us to screen out the influence of those factors, even when we’re trying (“I *won’t* notice that it’s a woman giving the talk, I *won’t* let that affect me….”)
So, yeah, more blind assessment. And of course stamping out the vestiges of outright harrassment and hostility.