April 2010
Over the past decade the National Science Foundation
has funneled $135 million into a "gender bias program" called Advance. Its
stated purpose: to advance women in science. In practice it does little to help
women, but its potential to inflict lasting damage on fields that drive the
American economy–engineering, physics and computer technology–is enormous.
Virginia Valian, a feminist psychologist at Hunter
College, is credited with providing Advance with its "conceptual tools." With
the help of a $3.9 million NSF grant, she and her colleagues developed the
Gender Equity Project, which sponsors workshops aimed at transforming American
laboratory culture. According to Valian, the compulsive work habits,
single-minded dedication and "intense desire for achievement" that typify elite
scientists not only marginalize women but also compromise good science. She
says, "If we continue to emphasize and reward always being on the job, we will
never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better
scientific work." A world where women (and resocialized men) earn Nobel Prizes
on flextime has no basis in reality. But the Advance program is not about
reality.
For many years NSF has sponsored admirable programs
that truly help and encourage women scientists. But a 1999 MIT report alleging
pervasive sexism persuaded NSF officials that encouragement was not enough: The
culture of American science had to change. Scholars in the National Council for
Research on Women were ready with an avalanche of advocacy research describing
the "hostile environment" women face in the laboratory. One NCRW author lashed
out at the "manliness of the scientific enterprise" with its obsessive
single-mindedness, competitiveness and antagonism to family life. By 2006 former
Clinton Administration official Donna Shalala would testify at a congressional
hearing that gender bias in the laboratory was a national "crisis" requiring
dramatic federal action. "Our nation’s future depends on it."
But evidence for bias against women in science is
weak. In a 2009 collection I edited, The Science on Women and Science,
distinguished scholars such as Simon Baron-Cohen, Jerre Levy and David Geary
point to data that suggest men and women, on average, have different career
interests and propensities. Women are underrepresented in engineering but more
than hold their own in sociology and biology Ph.D. programs. Is this because
engineering departments discriminate against women while biology departments do
not? Or is it because more women choose not to spend their lives with inanimate
objects?
In another recent book, The Mathematics of Sex,
Cornell researchers Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams politely demolish studies
that are presented in NSF workshops as settled science. They note, for example,
that the MIT report that inspired Advance was based on data never made public.
Data from a much-quoted 1997 Swedish study "proving" sexism in peer review have
somehow gone missing. The NSF itself sponsored a study in 2009 that admitted
"that, at many critical transition points in their academic careers (e.g.,
hiring for tenure-track and tenured positions and promotions), women appear to
have fared as well as or better than men."
There are brilliant women working in all areas of
American science, and there is a need for reasonable and sound initiatives to
help them succeed. But these efforts must be respectful, not contemptuous of the
culture of American science. They should take into account the true state of the
research on gender and science–not just the assertions of impassioned
activists.
Advance marches on. Now any engineering, physics,
math or computer-technology program that moves too slowly toward gender parity
is inviting a government investigation and loss of funding. The nation’s leading
programs are under pressure to adopt gender quotas and to rein in their
competitive, hard-driven, meritocratic culture–a culture that has made American
science the mightiest in the world.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She has written and edited several books, including The Science on Women and Science (AEI Press, 2009).
Forbes.com, March 1, 2010.
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