Regular readers of this blog know that I periodically muse on the question of why there aren’t more women in science. But since I’m not, say, an anthropologist, my musings have been rooted mostly in my own experience and the experiences of people I know.
Well, the Summer 2006 issue of Washington Square, San Jose State University‘s alumni magazine, has an article — including interviews of an anthropologist and a sociologist — entitled “A difficult crossing: Obstacles that keep women from science” (pdf). Some evocative anthropological insight from that article after the jump.
The notion of math as a masculine domain produced surprise, laughter and bewilderment in [anthropology professor Carol] Mukhopadhyay’s Indian survey respondents. “They rejected the concepts of inherent gender differences in mathematical ability,” recounts Mukhopadhyay. They attributed girls’ lack of mathematical achievement to laziness or a casual attitude toward school. One of the respondents, an Indian sociologist, said: “It is not that they are not bright — they don’t see any need to work hard.”
In America, going to school is a self-awareness enterprise, according to Mukhopadhyay and [sociology professor James] Lee. “If girls get a C in chemistry or math, they don’t tough it out because they can say ‘this is not the real me’ and look for another major,” says Mukhopadhyay. Lee agrees. “It’s easier for women to drop out of science courses because they are supported by family members who tell them it is okay to do something else,” he says.
In India, however, girls don’t go to school to discover who they are. “Their goals are pre-decided — if they come from a socially elite family that allows them to pursue the sciences, it is because those fields pay a lot, they can marry well and they’ll bring prestige to the family. And if there’s something they really like, they can do that on the side.”
Based on her research, Mukhopadhyay concluded that in the United States, as in India, external and often social influences, rather than internal identity issues, may steer girls away from science and related fields.
“In the American context, however, it is male peer pressure combined with the culture of romance that leads some girls to act dumb,” says Mukhopadhyay. “Perhaps, marriageability considerations are academic barriers for Americans as well as Indian girls.”
A question to me readers (especially the handful of you reading from India): How well do these observations fit with your own experience? And, does it feel like the social influences on women’s choices are reasonably stable at this point, or is there some perceptible movement (and if so, in what direction)?
I think the social influences component is probably pretty low these days. Most secondary school teachers graduate from Education departments that don’t believe in any innate male-female differences, and that emphasize encouraging girls in math / science (obviously a good thing). In fact, females won proportionally more Nobel Prizes in the sciences during the 1st half, not the 2nd half, of the 20th C, despite greater social pressures & suspicions before women’s liberation.
My take on that is that some of those early female scientists really wanted to be doctors, lawyers, or businesswomen / bankers, but had to settle for science. Say what you want about scientists, but mathematicians aren’t going to discard your proof if it’s sound, nor scientists your interpretation of data assuming the reasoning is there. The professions, by contrast, aren’t empirical and involve a lot of territorial protection & verbal BS-ing, so it’s easier to keep females out. Once the barriers to the professions were lifted, proportionally fewer females went into the sciences since now they could pursue what really interested them.
A good foil is an intellectual/artistic discipline where females are more encouraged & motivated to excel in it, while males are either not interested in it or are shunned if they go into it — fashion design.
Here is a quantitative survey I did of the fashion design world. Despite the fact that most of their male competition is gay (and thus, drawn from 3% of all potential male competition), females are still less eminent in the fashion world than males, yesterday and today. Despite “fashion” connoting utterly fickle subjectivity, most people agree on who’s important and who’s not, as with classical music or physics.
So, even when social pressures are tilted in their favor, females are outperformed by males. That’s probably b/c, for “eminence” in creative / intellectual fields, many factors interact multiplicatively (and so, are log-normally distributed). Most of these factors favor males, either by greater variance resulting in tail difference only (like g), or by difference in medians favoring males (like personality trait Disagreeableness). And b/c the interaction is multiplicative, these advantages for males are compounded as savings interest is, while the disadvantages for females are compounded like credit card debt.
In the end, I don’t see what the fuss is about, though. Top levels of scientific & artistic fields don’t necessarily make one more happy, glamorous, wealthy, or whatever else. You basically hang around w/ a bunch of nerds all day getting into civilized fights about whether or not you should add a shock variable into your equation, or whether or not your terminal flourish needs an augmented fifth chord or not. I doubt the typical female envies such a station, even the typical female w/ a 130 IQ and good motivation.
I came of age in the late 60’s/early 70’s in Southern California and was pushed/mentored by a number of teachers in my elementary, junior high, and high schools. But institutions often had other ideas about where women could apply themselves — I ended up as a lab scientist because at the time when I was considering schools to study to be a veterinarian, UC Davis would not take female applicants for the veterinary program, and I couldn’t afford the out-of-state tuition at a school that would take women students.
As a biochemist working in Big Pharma, I can attest that it seems that more scientists coming to work at my company are hailing from India and China. The gender split seems about equal and the Ph.D to non-Ph.D ratio seems about even as well (no scientific survey was performed, this is just my observation).