I’m recycling another post from the ancestor of this blog, but I’m adding value by adding some newish links to good stuff on other blogs.
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How much does it matter that certain groups (like women) are under-represented in the tribe of science?
I’m not, at the moment, taking up the causes (nor am I looking for any piss-poor “Barry Winters”-style theories as to the causes). At present, the bee in my bonnet is the effects.
And this is not a hypothetical situation. This post at Thanks for Not Being a Zombie links to an article from the New York Times with some sobering statistics:
Even as the number of women earning Ph.D.’s in science has substantially increased – women now account for 45 percent to 50 percent of the biology doctorates, and 33 percent of those in chemistry – the science and engineering faculties of elite research universities remain overwhelmingly male. And the majority of the women are clustered at the junior faculty rank.
You’ll recall that I’m one of those women with a Ph.D. in chemistry who is no longer a chemist.
(And, if you managed to miss it somehow, you really need to read Zuska’s three part series on “Life as a Leak”.)
Many of us have really good reasons for leaving science and engineering (even if we sometimes torment ourselves over the consequences of those choices). The big question is, what effect does it have on science and engineering, both as professions and as producers of knowledge and technologies, that so many of us leave?
There are some fairly predictable outcomes. For one, it may make the environment for women considering careers in science and engineering a bit less attractive, there not being so many other women. Not that it’s necessarily a deal-breaker. Some women don’t care that much whether there are other women in their field. (Some women actually enjoy it, I’m told, because it makes them special. Some women like it so much that they’ll actively discourage other women from getting into the field. Whatever.) And some women are so driven by the questions that keep them up at night that they find themselves having to pursue them even if these questions are best pursued in a field that is male dominated. This is not to say one won’t be lonely while pursuing them. It can be really hard to be in a field where you don’t have too many connections to people who understand you in particular ways. (Dude, analytic philosophy is pretty male dominated. And, even if I were a man, the fact that none of my colleagues have little kids, as I do, would still make me feel somewhat isolated.)
It seems that increasing the number of women scientists and engineers, especially at the senior level, would exert a positive feedback, leading to a further increase in the number of women entering science and engineering. Perhaps each woman who leaves makes it just a bit harder for the next woman to break into the field.
(But, it’s not like we’ve left in disgrace — we haven’t flunked out or been fired. We’ve balanced our interests and responsibilities — all of them — to make the best decisions we can. If anything, we stand as evidence that women do have the aptitude and talent to take on science and engineering. But aptitude and talent for X is not the same as desire to do X for the rest of one’s professional life.)
A big question is the extent to which the direction of knowledge and technology production is affected by the relatively low numbers of women scientists and engineers. It’s hard to know what the answer is here. But, we can make some guesses. (Male birth control pill? Still waiting. Viagra? You betcha.)
An even harder question is whether the tribe of science might come to different conclusions when faced with the same world if that tribe is a men’s club rather than a group of men and women in equal number. The standard story has been that there’s just one scientific method, and that anyone who’s read the manual can apply it, rather mechanically, to get the same answer as anyone else applying the same methodology. This would mean, of course, that it wouldn’t actually affect the kind of knowledge you produced if it happened that there were only men doing science. But anyone who has actually done science knows that there’s a lot more interpretation that goes into figuring out just what it is you know. What pushes us toward the interpretations we come to? Who the heck knows? It seems like controlling for all sorts of potential influences on our interpretations (such as being male, or being female) might be a sensible part of setting up a good experiment.
But the ideal of science as a completely objective, user-independent tool with which to generate Truth has a tight hold on the imagination. For example, in a versions of an “Academic Bills of Rights” that was before the Florida legislature, the sciences are clearly marked as having a special status among academic disciplines. The text of Florida HB 837 Section 1004.09 (1) (via Brian Leiter) says:
Students have a right to expect a learning environment in which they will have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinion pertaining to the subject they study. In the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, the fostering of a plurality of serious scholarly methodologies and perspectives should be a significant institutional purpose.
(Bold emphasis added.)
This makes it sound like there is exactly one “serious” scholarly methodology and perspective in the sciences. And if that’s the case, it really shouldn’t worry us what the composition is of the community applying it.
So, who cares if there aren’t more women in science and engineering?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready to stop worrying about this. (At the same time, I’m not exactly ready to take my lab coat out of mothballs.)
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Related reading:
Abi at nanopolitan has an interesting discussion of the ways the different institutional and cultural factors at play in different countries play into women’s participation in engineering.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready to stop worrying about this.
Nor am I.
I’ve seen too many individuals negatively affected by the differential climate for women. It’s clearly a problem, because it’s a problem for those individuals. It’s probably the biggest climate/culture problem facing at least Physics, but there are a lot of other big ones out there.
-Rob
I’ve been thinking a bit about this, and it occurs to me that there’s an amplifier in action — like a signal cascade where a small change in something early in the chain can result in a huge change in the signal at the end.
Research is already a tough gig: the difficulty of the primary task (solving problems) is compounded by the intense competitiveness of the culture. I don’t have any recent figures ready to hand, but my understanding is that somewhere between 75% and about 90% of postdocs do not make it to tenure or equivalent — because there are 3-10 times as many postdocs as there are positions for them to be promoted into.
Now — against that background — I’m a male scientist. How much EXTRA shit would have to be heaped on my plate before I’d quit eating? Not much, I assure you. I’m about full already. And women get, by my reckoning, a lot of extra shit piled on; it’s no surprise to me that by the time you get to the senior ranks there are hardly any women left.
I think that’s why a lot of people seem to have trouble connecting the effect (heavy clustering of women at junior rank) with the cause (“yeah, there’s discrimination, but surely not enough to explain such an overwhelming inbalance”). But it doesn’t take much to push a postdoc out of science, regardless of sex. The extra shit that gets piled on women (go read Zuska for about a million depressing examples) is MORE than enough for most.
Having packed my bags and left the world of pharmaceutical research after having been asked 3 times to move myself and spouse to Cincinnati, I can relate to the lack of support for women in science (both in the industrial and educational settings). Maybe I would have been happy to go if I had been single, or a woman with a spouse who could easily pack up and go at the drop of MY corporate hat, but the third invitation came shortly after I announced that I was pregnant with twins at the ripe old age of 40. My then-employer, frequently touted in all the business journals and NY Times/Wall Street Journal surveys as being a really supportive company for “family values” and working couples, COULDN’T understand why I wouldn’t go where they requested (and damn the spouse, was the unsaid follow-up to that).
I can imagine what other women in the company went through when asked to pack up, I know of several marriages that dissolved once the family relocated to Cinci; a few folks went into counseling after the move, thinking that everything would be OK once they got settled, only to leave the company a year later….you get the idea. The lack of support for these folks was unnerving to say the least and painful for someone then outside the company to hear about from my tenuous new position as a business owner in a location far from any and all potential clients.
However, I survived and flourished, thanks to mentoring from two friends who had also escaped a few years earlier. I now spend some of my time in pro bono work for my editing and writing organizations, teaching courses and helping other not-quite-ready-for-primetime freelancers (female AND male) to see that there are opportunities out there that don’t involve caving in to the corporate mindset.
Yes, I wish that I could go back to the lab, but I realize that the environment that I grew up in is long gone. The scenario of someone without a PhD and postdoc work getting anywhere in a research setting has passed me by, and I’m OK with that. I’ve got a great spouse, two gorgeous 10-yr. old boys, and a job that I wake up to happily every day. What more could I ask for?
I have no idea if this has any real bearing; I’m just throwing it out and see what you think. An academic career is by and large, a crap shoot. Assuming you’re competent and driven, you are still competing with dozens of others for the same position, project funding and so on, and who gets it is to an appreciable degree a matter of chance (again, emphasizing this is among those already well-qualified on their merits).
And overall, women as a group are more risk-averse than men, and that is probably amplified by more women being single parents than men (more responsibility means less risk-taking). So on those grounds alone you’d expect a disproportionate number of women to leave the academic career track at each level, as they realize they don’t like the odds.
So is that grounds for thinking this is OK? Nope. It’s yet another reason to rethink how the academic career structure is set up (a structure that by the way penalizes the less risk-taking men as well).
Gender diversity yes, but not because of some “woman’s way to do science” in my view.
I’ll make a sports analogy since I know people like Zuska love them so much.
Early (and not so early) part of last century, there was some gatekeeping discrimination with respect to who could engage in US professional athletics. In baseball in particular since there were contemporaneous segregated leagues for white and black men, we can see with hindsight that it is likely that the “best” were not playing the “best” but were distributed across these leagues. Not to mention all the players from different countries that were not accessed by the “system” at times past but are now. The serious fan can see trends where opening up the population base for many sports on the basis of race, class, nation of origin, what have you, led to getting better players across the board thereby improving the sport. Rare talent is…rare. The best way to assemble the best of the best is to cast a wide net. The worst way is to systematically exclude groups of people. Baseball, basketball, football, boxing, tennis, golf, cycling, ice hockey…pretty difficult to think of a sport that doesn’t have at least one big star who in times past would have been kept out on the basis of discrimination of one type or another.
The difference in science is, of course, that it MATTERS that we get the best. From a certain sporting perspective parity is more important than excellence, this is why mechano-racing has so many parity rules and why Miss Budweiser killed hydroplane racing. But we have no interest in giving microbes and degenerative disease a fighting chance, we want the scientists to be the Damn Yankees and illness the Senators.
You won’t find me espousing the “women do science in a special way just ’cause they’re women” theory, either. I don’t believe there is anything essential about women that would make them inherently do science differently. I do, however, believe that people with different sorts of life experiences bring different perspectives to bear on research, and I think this affects (1) the questions they find worthy of posing and investigating, (2) the methods they think most useful and appropriate for investigating those questions, (3) the frameworks they bring to bear in interpreting the data that results from their investigations, and (4) the way they present their results to the world. I think if scientists were 50-50 male-female, we’d likely see things done differently. I’m not saying they’d be done in a feminist manner, because there is no guaranteeing that any significant portion of those men and/or women would be feminist. But women’s experiences would be coloring and shaping science much more extensively than they are now.
DrugMonkey’s sports analogy is more on target than he/she realizes…let’s just consider what has happened with women and sports since Title IX. We have many more women participating in sports, and many more top women athletes, and women are performing at levels they never could have dreamed of in the past – all because Title IX opened up their access to equal participation in sports. The only thing I would differ with DrugMonkey, is on the notion of “rare talent”. In sports and in science, I do think there is something to the idea of some degree of native talent, but in most cases it is far outweighed by practice, study, coaching, mentoring, training, teaching. We know that top athletes don’t get to the top just on native talent – they practice and train like mad; look at Tiger Woods. Great scientists are made, not born. If we open up the gates and let more people, more kinds of people in, we can make more great scientists, and they will bring with them a larger range of life experiences and perspectives. They will see different sorts of problems that need solving; they will think of different kinds of approaches and interpretations. Diversity is good for ecosystems, and it’s good for science, too.
Zuska: Your standardized “diversity” argument is more or less equivalent to my shorthand version. That we would somehow get a different result by being more inclusive. My point is that we don’t even need to go that far. Diversity improves even the “same” science, we don’t need to posit hypotheticals regarding what group membership is going to convey in terms of new approaches. (And in fact I submit to you that such an approach is a trap because someone will just ask you to prove it.) Tiger is not a great golfer because he brings the cablasian (or whatever the f his dodge is, as huey says, “which makes you as black as richard roundtree in shaft out of africa”) “framework” to golf. Venus and Serena didn’t bring the Compton perspective to tennis either. Yao doesn’t play hoops from the “chinese experience”. Lemond’s bike didn’t go fast because of his “American style” methods (ok, ok, there was that one Tour with the time trial equipment and 8 sec thing but the rest of the time…). i don’t see danica patrick espousing feminist car driving theory.
we do not need to resort to “alternative approaches to science” to make the argument for diversity.
btw, I don’t know where you got the impression I think that rare talent does not need the influence of the appropriate environment to flourish. This is an integral part of my point.