April 2011
If women are so equal, why aren’t there more of us in science
and, for that matter, in politics? On the 100th anniversary of International
Women’s Day, I got an earful about this stuff. The gender lopsidedness in
certain fields obviously proves that, despite women’s impressive gains, we still
have a long way to go before we can declare victory in the battle for women’s
rights.
The trouble is, it’s not at all obvious why these gaps
persist, or what should be done about them. The hackneyed old complaints about
systemic bias against women no longer seem convincing. Yet, other hypotheses can
be downright dangerous. Just ask Larry Summers, the former Harvard president who
was ultimately ousted after he speculated that the preponderance of men atop
certain math-heavy fields might partly be explained by the higher variance of
male IQ scores at the extreme top and bottom of the Bell curve. Kapow! Instead
of defending his right to think freely, academics demanded his head.
But now, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams argue that it’s time
to change the conversation. As academics at Cornell University – they’re married
to each other – they’ve been studying the science gender gap for years. And
they’ve concluded that the last thing we need is more gender sensitivity
training. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, they say the bias alleged against women in science simply doesn’t
exist. The scientific gender gap is largely due to different job choices.
“We often hear that men have a better chance of
getting their work accepted or funded, or of getting jobs, because they’re men,”
Prof. Williams says. But they found no evidence of systemic bias in
interviewing, hiring, reviewing or funding. If anything, female PhDs had a
modest hiring edge. “Universities expend money and time trying to combat this
rampant alleged discrimination,” she says. But, in her view, they’re wasting
their time and money.
Yet, certain barriers remain, and they’re real. The principal
barrier is the same one that other professional women face. A scientist’s prime
reproductive years coincide with her prime research years. Female scientists
often take more junior positions not because their manuscripts were rejected but
because they choose to give priority to their families. About 80 per cent of
both male and female graduate students believe that working full-time is
“important” or “extremely important.” But nearly a third of women (against just
9 per cent of men) also believe that working part-time is “important” or
“somewhat important.”
Family considerations aren’t the only reason women make
different career choices than men do. Women tend to prefer jobs that involve
interacting with people rather than with data. Many would rather teach than do
pure research. And far more women gravitate to the “human” side of sciences
(medicine and the biological sciences) than to the math-intensive side (computer
sciences, engineering, physics). These preferences may be a result of cultural
stereotyping, but they also seem hard-wired. Should we be equally alarmed that
women now outnumber men by 3 to 1 in veterinary school? Maybe not.
Prof. Williams, who has three daughters, advocates doing
more. She wants to ensure that girls are encouraged to go into science and are
exposed to plenty of positive role models. She wants the tenure system tweaked
to make it more family friendly. But she also says we should stop trying to
figure out the “right” career path for women in science, and start asking how
happy female scientists are with their choices.
In other words, it’s a lot more complicated than blaming men,
or stereotypes, or culture, or tradition. Why don’t more women go into politics?
I can think of lots of reasons, not including sexism or systemic bias. How about
the excruciating difficulty of combining family life with a political career,
especially if your family is a thousand miles away? What can we do about that? I
don’t have a clue. All I know is, the answers aren’t as easy as we like to
think.
Globe and Mail, March 10, 2011.
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