Starting to Get a Little Cool Around Here

[danalwyn]

I've been sick recently, which is probably being exacerbated by the fact that things are starting to get a little cool around here (since I'm from southern California I can skip the normal machismo and tell you that I find it a bit cool these days-although not cold yet). Unfortunately, I think I'm still a bit sick, which just tells you about the content of this entry.

So, I've decided to get a little more warmth around here, and what better way to do that than another attempt to solicit a batch of flames from my friends list?

However, seeing as I didn't get much on the flamey side the last time around, I've got to come up with something better. Last time I did Science and Academia. This time I'll add on to it one more topic to attack, Feminism. If this doesn't get me flames, I may have to resort to actually coming up with creative opinions of my own.

Actually, I have more than a passing interest in this topic. I'm especially curious to see if either virgi or mergle decide to show up and comment, as both of those ladies are much more familiar with the terrain I'm about to begin to traverse (they will also probably flame me to a crisp, since I'm not being very tactful, or coherent, these days-or so I've been told). I've also picked a time when Larry Summers has more or less faded from the headlines to avoid knee-jerk reactions. But I'll even take knee jerk flames if they're good.



First, a disclaimer. When I speak of men and women I am speaking of statistical averages. And we're also dealing with a wide range of cultural and behavioral factors. The statement that "Chinese children tend to do better at Chinese than American children" does not in and of itself connote vast differences in the genetic makeup of Chinese children as compared to American children. Nor does this imply that the American Steve will always be inferior in skill at Chinese grammar to the Chinese student Pang. This is merely a statement of statistical averages. The difference is important.

Second, a bit of background. For those of you who don't remember, Laurence Summers, President of Harvard, got in hot water for his comments at a conference on female representation in the sciences and engineering disciplines. In those remarks, he hypothesized that women may have significant genetic differences that make them less likely than men to succeed at science, hence their under-representation. Immediately he started a firestorm.

Despite the fact that he waded into the middle of very delicate and dangerous waters almost completely uninformed, unimpressive, and with the same sort of tact normally only associated with large grazing herbivores in china shops, physicists and engineers breathed out a sigh of relief. At last the issue, no matter how difficult to broach was on the table. The issue is essentially this; everyone knows that there is at least some, if not a lot, of sexual discrimination on the Science and Engineering side of the table. But there's always been a lot of under-the-table debate about whether, if we could magically remove this discrimination, if there would then be equal numbers of men and women in the hard sciences, or whether it would still be tilted in one direction. Basically, is biased gender representation solely a result of discrimination, or are there other factors to account for? Now, at last, no matter how calously, the debate was on the table. Perhaps we could get some educated discussion on this.

Instead, we got a fracas that we're still trying to pull together half a year later. I haven't seen any good results out of this, other than a lot of consumption of headache pills. Basically, we're back where we started a year ago. I agree that Summers needed to be shouted down publicly at the time, but once he repented in public, the issue should not have been sidelined.

The "discussion" made my head hurt. On one side there seemed to be grouped a great many people who saw themselves as champion defenders of feminism, leaping to battle by claiming that "obviously" if things were balanced half of all people in the sciences would be women without much in the way of supporting evidence. On the other side were the type of people who normally live under rocks, protesting being silenced by the PC stormtroopers, and claiming in tones of self-satisfaction how it was "obvious" that women were less genetically prepared to do science, which, since I know a great many female scientists and mathematicians who are very smart, did not sit very well with me either. And in the middle, a few lone voices asking, "do we have any evidence for any of this?"

So, rather than giving a totally unpopular opinion, since I don't have one that's actually informed, I'll just go through a few arguments used by both sides, and give my opinions on them. Remember, I only give opinions. I'm not paid enough to make up facts.


Women are not biased against in science because sexual discrimination is mostly gone from our society.

This argument blows like a brass band. I mean, we're talking about category 5, leveling the Gulf Coast sort of blowing here. It's good to point out one thing, that sexual discrimination is much more covert than it used to be, and thus it's lost a great deal of its effectiveness (witness the difference between being subtly discouraged from running for office, and being refused the opportunity to try), but it's still there.

For a similar example, take African-Americans. They perform markedly worse at both writing and math skills on standardized tests than almost any other ethnic group. Yet I believe, and so far have not been proven wrong, that this is not because of any biological or neurological reason. Rather this seems to be the result of a strain of anti-intellectualism in African-American culture. And it's not always overt either, having sometimes snuck in from the bottom. Just because nobody is making them sit at the back of the bus doesn't mean that they aren't disadvantaged, and just because it's their culture doesn't make one member of their group automatically at fault.

Women are obviously biased against, because there is such a low percentage of them in the physical sciences

This seems, to me, to be begging the question. Wasn't the whole point of this debate to discover whether, if given equal opportunity-truly equal opportunity-if there really would be equal numbers of men and women in the profession? If you're going to say that the unequal number mean that there's discrimination, then this sort of negates the whole point of asking if discrimination causes unequal representation.

Women are under-represented in physical science because they cannot deal with the nature of the subject matter as well as men

I'm not even going to dignify this one with a response.

It is clear that genetic differences separate men and women in the field of physical science

No. It is not clear. The research has been, at best, inconclusive. Certain aspects may give men an advantage, but nothing so clear cut has been defined. We have no idea how the human brain works. We're certainly not capable of figuring it out by making random speculation.

Declaring that there are genetic differences that preferentially treat men as opposed to women when it comes to science is akin to telling women that they are inferior, and is the same as embarking on a program of Nazi eugenics

While my esteemed friend, Mr. Godwin, beats the crap out of that argument, I would like to take a moment to say that when reasonable people say that there are preferential genetic features that differ in distribution between genders, they are speaking of both averages, and one particular point. There are other fields in which women would then hold a clearer advantage. Nobody is making accusations of being inferior around here.

For instance, the fastest way to get shot off the fast track in Physics is to have a social life. This does not mean that people who try to have social lives are inferior, it just means that they find it more difficult to do physics.

The problem is due to the lack of female role models. We need to increase the amount of female faculty in order to correct the problem.

I really, really, really do not like this argument. It has, to my mind several flaws.

First, it's circular. We need to recruit more female physicists, this is true. Where do we get them? From the ranks of female postdocs. And where do we get a post-doc? From a female grad student of course. Here's where the trouble really starts, because only between 10 and 20% of graduate students in physics seem to be female, and most modern hiring practices in physics reflect those numbers. Where is the vast grouping of physicists from which we are supposed to find our new assisstant professors?

More to the point, there isn't much differentiation between men and women at that level. It's not like with foreign students. When I see a foreign student, I automatically know that they are probably much more intelligent than I am, not just because of a better education system, but also because a foreign student in the United States was good enough at their job to be recruited internationally. A lot of Americans are sort of average physicists, but the foreign students who can make it to study in the US tend to be the cream of their nation's crop. However, I don't see the same difference between women at this level. If men and women were performing equally, but women were being siphoned off by social pressure, only the brightest women would be left, and they should be really brilliant. This does not completely invalidate the argument, it just means that you can't eliminate the problem by hiring women faculty, because by the time they reach the graduate student level, you've already somehow dulled their abilities.

And it also does not jive with other tales of success. Women have become much more prominent in the fields of medicine, law, and politics, without a sudden rush to create more female role models. In those cases there seemed to be a ground-up swell that broke through. This, so far, has not occurred in the physical sciences.

Bottom line, this seems to be trying to adjust the statistics without actually addressing the root cause of the problem. And although we do need more women faculty, we need to tackle the problem just a little bit closer to the root.

The "good ole boy" network keeps women locked out of citations and tenure-track positions

This may be true, but it is not universally true. The occurrence must be fairly low in particle physics, or else we would have noticed it around here. There is an informal network that leads to promotion, however it works much more on a student-teacher basis. For instance a graduate student who worked under a post-doc may go to work for that person as a post-doc should they get a professorship. A graduate student who does good work may be recommended to another associate in the same field. It's a natural social system that has built itself up over the years.

Most of the female professors I know in the field don't seem to complain about problems with getting citations, or with their research being laughed at for being done by a woman. Then again, particle physics is very different, because each research paper can have hundreds of names on it. The CDF research papers have several pages that they take to list their authors.

It may be true, but it should not be a blanket statement.

The variance principal explains a difference in interest level

I may partially agree with this one, but I don't like it. It would explain theorists though.

For those of you who don't remember the variance principal, it works something like this. According to theory, men have more spread in their intelligence and their mental abilities. If you could qualify intelligence as a scalar, a comparison of men and women would then give you more men in the top 10% of humans, but also more men in the bottom 10%. Women would be much more likely to hang around the average.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this, although I do note that the majority of geniuses I know have been male. There may be something to this, but then again there may not be.

Good scientists tend to be geeks, geeks tend to be male

To understand this one, you have to define a geek better. A geek is someone who is obsessed with a certain topic. Many people think that they are obsessed, when really they are only enraptured.

For instance, a good electrical engineer is easy to tell, they routinely take apart television sets and computers just to play with the wires. A good computer engineer spends Friday evening at home gleefully installing a new Linux build on his extra desktop for the hell of it. A mechanical engineer could probably cheerfully spend his entire weekend tinkering around with his car to get another few tenths of a percent of efficiency out of some part.

A good physicist, which I am not, thinks about physics at least once a minute, every minute. For the good ones, the real good ones, they are almost constantly thinking about it, whether they are in their office or not. They come up with strange revelations while watching TV on Saturday, or in the middle of the night on Wednesday, or sometimes while taking a shower. And they wear this almost as a badge of pride.

The making of an experimental particle physicist, for instance, traditionally involves something close to a year of sixteen hour shifts. That means that for a year you are basically focused on your work, and your work alone. No talking with anybody outside of work, no going out for long walks or taking extended vacations. It means, in its ideal form, every spare hour spent inside with only the muted voices of your labmates for company, hunched over some machine or computer trying to get one piece of your job done. I can do it if I have to. I can go for three or four weeks without exchanging a word with another living soul-I just don't like to. But the real good physicists think that this is great, these long hours of uninterrupted concentration.

There may be something in the average feminine nature that prevents this sort of obsession forming, or perhaps it is a socialized condition. It would be interesting for research to examine the topic. But so far I have seen a clear gender difference here. If you're talking about someone who was perfectly happy to spend their entire night uninstalling and reinstalling a troublesome piece of software in order to get their machine working just properly so it could do some cool hacking trick, the person is male more than 50% of the time. If you see someone spending a Saturday afternoon lying on their back under the hood of their car with a whole array of wrenches, that person is also usually male, and I'm not prepared to say that the biology of gender has no role in this without some actual evidence.

Unfortunately, I'm relying on anecdotal evidence here, which is not evidence at all. If anyone has any better study on this sort of behavior, I would love to hear it. Which is, of course, the problem. Nobody has evidence for stuff like this.

Education is biased in favor of boys/girls in this matter, so there is/is not discrimination

As I remember it, education was biased in the favor of big wanna-be drug dealers who would sometimes stop by to rough up the nerds. I don't remember any of it exactly being wonderful. Let's face it, the people who grow up to be scientists and engineers were not usually the popular ones at school.

Not to say that there's nothing to this argument, but nobody can decide whether current education favors girls or boys. A lot of people have been arguing this over the past few years, especially with the rising grades of women as compared to men in American education. Since there seems to be nothing approaching a consensus on what the difference actually is, I have no idea what's going on here, and hence am dubious of the argument.

There are biological differences between males and females that can explain this

I'm obliged to point out that there may be something to this argument. Critics often point out that the same arguments were once used to prevent women from learning at all, or to prevent blacks from entering academia, but both arguments ring false. Physically, there is no difference between the brains of men of different ethnicities, but there are actual physical differences between males and females. This implies that there is some difference. The Equality Over All crowd claims that the difference is negligible, the Send Women Back To The Kitchen crowd claims that the difference is immense. I'm wondering if we can figure out what the difference is.

Evolutionary Psychologists love this argument. They claim that men have better spatial visualization skills because they are adapted to serve as intermediate range hunters, and need to be able to keep a map of the local area in their head, as well as be able to manipulate it easily. I believe (although I'm currently sans sources on this matter) that the same theory predicts that women have better memories for finding the same location by local landmarks, a result of having to forage for foodstuffs in the same geographical area when they moved through it once a year. I'm not sure how much I believe this, because evolutionary psychology can be sort of a flaky field at times.

I will not assign blame for the science and engineering gender gap however. There's not enough evidence for that. But this seems to clearly be an area of neuropsychology that needs further research.



So what do I believe? Well, nothing, but if I had to pick something to stand by, it would be the following:

There are large differences in the average interests of males and females, which effect the gender ratio in science and engineering

Notice, I don't pretend to know whether those differences are sociological or biological. I don't have a clue about what the current research says, primarily because current research says nothing firmly.

This argument is near and dear to the hearts of physics TAs, who know that out of ten students (which is about your quotient for the year) who seem to have an interest in physics, eight of them are male. We don't believe that this is bias (although out own judgment, for male and female TAs both, is subject to our own internal bias), and, to be honest, we like female students better. This is because female students are more likely to come to office hours, ask questions, try to understand the subject, and generally make TAs feel useful instead of like lumps of coal. But all of us know that there's sort of a cringe reaction in there: "Physics? Why the hell would you do that?"

Corresponding to this is the rise of the "female majors", disciplines where the proportion of women to men is very, very high. Pre-meds tend to have a very high proportion of women, Communications is known for being almost an all-female major, biology is leaning fairly heavily toward women, and I think psychology is now about 75% female. This seems a bit peculiar, given free choice, women tend to cluster in certain majors on one side of the campus, like men tend to cluster on the other side. Obviously there's some sort of reason to this, and whether it's because of a subtle bias against trying to be a successful female physics student has entered into the system, or whether they just aren't interested .

This plays to the stereotype that men tend to be more focused on analytical skills (on average), and women tend to be more focused on language arts and communication skills. Is there any biological truth to that statement? That's a matter for social research. But I believe there's already been some indirectly confirming research. Consider another field I know something of with a very low female representation, military studies (by which I combine military science and military history). You would think that, according to some of the feminist models, that if all prejudices earlier on (of which there are a great many in that field) were removed, that the proportion of people interested in, say, tenth century siege warfare, would be equal. But there were other studies that showed that, even if unbiased, young boys are more likely to play with guns instead of dolls than girls are. This is a method of averages; certainly there probably should be more female military historians than there are, as many who might do a good job in the field are turned off rather early, but perhaps even if all bias is removed, men will remain dominant in the field.

Other evidence may lie in recent studies that say that children may learn better (on average, I would have hated it) if separated into single-gender groups. This implies, and the research may concur, that there are fundamental differences in the learning processes of males and females, possibly due to biological reasons. If this is true, it's not too large a jump to guess that there may be differences between the male and female thinking processes that are inbred and not socialized. I have no desire to resurrect the nature v. nurture argument, but we should at least remember that.

Of course, there's still a lot of discrimination in the system, some of it quite vicious. I've seen several students who would have made good scientists, engineers and mathematicians floated away from the subject simply because they thought it was not the sort of thing they would be interested in. I'm not sure where that bias entered in, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it could be the steady background of Hollywood and the mass media beating its ugly tattoo on our door.

At the same time, who can blame them? Who wouldn't want to sweat blood and tears, work consecutive ten and twelve hour days in the lab for weeks at time, never away from your office for more than a few hours, get paid minimum wage and basically spend ten years of your life as a lowly peon, in order to get a job that would result in people avoiding you at parties? The question is not so much why women don't do physics. It's why anybody does. That would be a fascinating study. If anything, the fact that women eschew physics is evidence that, if not more intelligent, women at least have more common sense. At least mathematicians can do those neat math tricks...

My best guess, there may be some differences that are either deep-rooted in culture, or in biology, that lead to women having more interest (on average) in language arts type programs. I don't want to believe this, because it feels very strange to me to be working in a gender-biased system, but if that's where the evidence points, I'll have to live with it. Bottom line prediction? At end of my lifetime, probably 60:40 split in the hard sciences at most.

So, what's next?

I don't know. Obviously, this is a topic that needs a lot of discussion, and by discussion I actually mean experimentation and dialogue. Both have to come together for a project like this where the terrain is so unknown, and the variables are so many.

Women's organizations have to continue to search for where bias is most evident in our socialization system, because that's what they've become experts at. We need concrete examples to tackle, one at a time. At the same time, there should probably be some biological research on the subject, although I don't expect that to be fruitful anytime this year.

At the same time, there probably needs to be some discussion on gender balance in undergraduate enrollment. And this must not be a one sided, or overly PC affair. Not only do we have to look at subtle bias by men against women (and some not-so-subtle bias), but we also have to look at the reverse, and possibly the reason why there are so few men in the "female majors". After all, if it's sexual discrimination to go in one direction, then it must be the same to go in the other direction. And we may also want to look at the difference in the overall gender ratio, which has been causing problems all over America recently. This is probably not a job for feminists alone, although it's mostly been left to them. They've got enough problems looking for bias against women, they can't be expected to look for bias against men as well. But someone has to look.

And maybe, before I'm old and dead, someone will have an answer. But I'm not betting on it.