The wherefores and whys of women in science
From the desk of Jane Galt:
The left wing blogs are now debating whether Harvard president Larry Summers should be shot, drawn and quartered, or just ridden out of town on a rail, for suggesting that a reason for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences might be genetic differences between men and women regarding ability, rather than discrimination.
Is there discrimination in the sciences? I have no idea; was sequestered over in the highly feminine Land o' Literature during my college years. I find it interesting that Matthew Yglesias, who was in honors track science at a highly selective prep school in the late nineties, says that there was definitely bias against women in his classes. I find it interesting because I was in honors track science at a highly selective prep school a decade earlier, and noticed no such thing.
Kevin Drum's commenters seem to be roughly typical of the debate going on. My thoughts:
1) [Wicked schadenfreuede] Interesting, isn't it, how many of the liberals proclaiming that it's utterly ridiculous to think that a department running 95% leftists might be, consciously or unconsciously, discriminating against those of a more right wing persuasion, find it completely obvious that if a physics department is 80% male, that must be because they're discriminating.[/wicked schadenfreude]
2) The response to the possibility that women have genetically different abilities is not exactly the free-thinking, scientific mindset that the left likes to effusively praise itself for when it is considering the subject of, say, the teaching of evolution in schools. The dialogue with many of the pissed-off female scientists, including the one who stomped out on Larry Summers, seems to be going something like this:
Q: Do you think maybe some of the differences between men and women's progress in science could be caused by genetic differences in ability?
A: You're an [expletive deleted].
Replace the deleted expletive with "heretic" and you have the Catholic Church's response to Galileo.
3) People plying their anecdotal stories about scientific women they know, or survey data showing that women on average do better on math tests, do not seem to understand the difference between the means and the tails. Women could have, on average, equal math ability with men, but if they are clustered in the middle of the distribution, and men are more likely to be found at both extremes (the mentally retarded and the Einsteins), then places which recruit only at one extreme of the distribution, such as, say, Physics departments, are going to end up with a vastly disproportionate number of males.
4) People who are arguing that it's stupid to generalise from means or distributions to individuals are stupid are right, but only in a trivial, irrelevant way. The particular discussion at hand revolves around the fact that there are fewer women than men in many scientific disciplines, particularly, it seems to me from the outside, the ones that involve a great deal of rather abstruse math. We are looking at a population, not an individual, and it is entirely proper--nay, necessary--to discuss group averages. That we cannot divine any individual's ability from those averages is true, but irrelevant; we're looking at the group.
Look at it this way: I am 6'2 (1.88 metres), which puts me four standard deviations from the mean height of American women--approximately one tenth of one percent of American women will be as tall as, or taller than, I am.
Could we use the average of the female population to predict that I am not 6'2? No! I am 6'2. We would get the answer wrong if we tried to use the average predictively.
Could we use the average to bet, sight unseen, on whether or not I am taller than 6'1? Yes! Only 0.3% of the female population is taller than 6'1. If you had to bet, you'd bet against it. Of course, in my case you'd be wrong--but it would still be the right way to bet.
But do we need to bet? No! We can measure me. Similarly, physicists considering female candidates have lots of other means to assess their physics ability. They don't need to look at whether or not she's female.
But if we were looking at an organisation that only hired people who were taller than 6 feet because they needed them to reach very tall shelves, most of the employees would be men. We might infer discrimination, but we'd be wrong. It's just that innate differences would produce differing results for men and women. And if I showed up and they refused to hire me because I'm a women, and women have a very low probability of being that tall, that would be discrimination, because they can look right at me and see that despite being a member of a group with a lower mean height, I myself am in fact configured like a beanstalk.
5) The above does not mean there isn't discrimination in science. Conservatives are too quick to dismiss the fairly compelling evidence that women and minorities are unfairly "discounted" in the hiring process. Blind auditions for musicians have radically altered the number of female musicians who are hired. I've no doubt that the majority of the people listening to the auditions believed that they were being impeccably impartial, caring only about the music--but the fact is that when they were denied access to non-musical criteria, their decisions changed substantially.
6) There are also social factors to consider, and here I think conservatives also fail to acknowlege real issues. I went to a fairly sexist high school, one that was 2/3 male (it had only gone co-ed a couple of decades ago). There was absolutely pressure on women to appear dumber, more interested in "soft subjects" than in math or science. I've no doubt that this influenced my decision, at least somewhat, to drop AP science in favour of more English classes.
7) That said, it's not clear what universities are supposed to do about this. Blind auditions aren't really practical, since some of the hiring process takes place in the form of who knows whose advisor. On the other hand, faculty might consider dropping the interview from the hiring process, since according to my business school professors, studies show that interviews have absolutely no predictive value as to how well a candidate will do. People think they're getting better information, but in fact they're just getting different information. If some of that information is race and gender, and the rest is useless, why not drop it?
But I don't know how anyone--universities, graduate departments, or even grammar schools, is supposed to change the pressure that girls face to alter themselves so boys will like them. I can't think of a single thing my school ever did to make us one whit less likely to discriminate, use drugs, have unprotected sex, eat undercooked meat, or any of the other myriad of habits they wanted to change. And I suspect that this sort of pressure dwarfs the assorted anecdotes of suspiciously irredentist science teachers who tell girls they're not going to do well at science so why not twitch their fannies over to Home Ec where they belong?http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005134.html |
