Women in science

Michael Hartl — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:30:00 -0800

The announcement last week that Larry Summers, the President of Harvard University, would resign his post took few people completely by surprise. He cited the continuing rift with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, highlighted last year by an unprecedented vote of no confidence in the wake of his remarks on women in science. Those familiar with Harvard politics knew that the controversial speech was largely an excuse for the disgruntled faculty to vent their spleen—their dissatisfaction with his brusque style long predated the row over women in science—but that doesn’t explain the international media brouhaha, with headlines to the effect that “Harvard President Says Women No Good at Science”. Why all the fuss?

Part of the answer is that “equality”—ill-defined, but nevertheless vitally important—is a deeply held article of faith, going far beyond the politically correct academic Left that dominates Harvard’s faculty. With the possible exception of “equality of the races”, no subject stirs quite as much emotion as a challenge to the “equality of the sexes”. Even to raise the issue is oddly taboo, and that’s precisely the maelstrom Larry Summers sailed into. As a long-time supporter of President Summers, my frustration wasn’t that he raised the issue, but that he apologized afterward. He had nothing to apologize for.

That there is a disparity between men and women in the sciences is evident to anyone with any experience in academic science. As a physics concentrator at Harvard College, I became accustomed to classes that were 80–90% male. When I entered graduate school in physics at Caltech, I was one of 31 incoming physics students; 30 were men. (Poor Samantha couldn’t cut class without her absence being duly noted by the professor.) According to the faith that Larry Summers challenged, this disparity is purely the result of socialization (“women can’t be scientists”) and discrimination. This article of faith is wrong.

One confounding factor is that women have been socialized away from science, and they have suffered systematic discrimination. But the same can be said for women in business, or law, or medicine. And yet those fields have seen women succeed in large numbers. It’s hard to imagine a more historically male-dominated profession than medical doctor—the source of a famous riddle about a man and his son in a car accident; upon arrival at the ER, the surgeon said “I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son.” I suspect that to many in America this riddle now only elicits a “Huh?” When nearly 50% of medical students are female, women doctors (my sister, an ophthalmologist, among them) are no longer an anomaly.

Of course, business, law, and medicine don’t have nearly 50% female participation, but they have far higher numbers than science. There’s something else going on, something more than the “high-powered job” effect identified by Summers. Sure, women are less likely to embrace the 80-hour work-week necessary to reach the top in many fields (though even that obvious assertion is controversial), but that hasn’t kept women out of the operating room. And sure enough, in his talk Summers put his finger right on it: men, at least at the extreme high end, are better at math and science than women.

The anecdotal evidence for this disparity, confirmed by cognitive neuroscience, is overwhelming, and points to a sex-linked difference in innate abstract reasoning ability—the mean ability for men is probably higher, but the standard deviation is definitely higher. In the sciences, female participation follows a predictable trend: the more abstract the field, the fewer the women. Approximately half of biology graduate students are female; there are plenty of female chemists; there are few female physicists, and most of them are less-mathematical experimentalists; there are only a handful of top-notch female theoretical physicists; despite women having higher average math grades than men, only a few top mathematicians are female. Something is going on, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist—whether male or female—to figure out that is has something to do with abstraction.

If this seems shocking, I understand. In high school one of my teachers brought in a newspaper article bemoaning the subtle, subconscious discrimination against women in math classes—discrimination not observed directly, but rather inferred from their lower performance on standardized tests. In a specious Sherlock-Holmesian process of elimination, the article argued that, in the absence of overt discrimination, the cause must be covert, unintentional bias. Challenging this inference, my teacher suggested that the disparity might be due instead to natural differences in mathematical ability. I was positively flabbergasted, and I thought my teacher’s suggestion was absurd. After all, I knew plenty of girls who were good at math.

At the time my reaction was understandable—though more heretical than average, I was still just a teenager—but I’m now embarrassed by my closed-mindedness. Any statement of possible fact, no matter how unsettling it may be, should be evaluated strictly on its merits; or, at least, if we are to suppress ideas because of their implications, let’s be honest about what we’re doing. Saying “men can’t be better than women at science—think of the implications!” confuses matters of opinion with matters of (potential) fact.

Eikonoklastes by Michael Hartl: Women in science

Women in science