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.