La Difference Isn’t Rocket Science
You might think that the hard sciences would be resistant to the unscientific notion that equal opportunity necessarily leads to equal outcomes. Alas, no, as Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers discovered when he suggested that perhaps women are “underrepresented” in science because they’re innately less interested in the subject. The very notion caused a female MIT science professor to walk out on Summers’ speech. His ideas, she said, made her “physically ill.”
Anti-suffragists used to claim that because women’s minds are ruled by our reproductive organs, we’re too irrational to vote responsibly. Tactics like getting the vapors when encountering a disagreeable idea don’t offer a powerful argument to the contrary.
The National Science Foundation has funded a three-year grant called Gender Equity in Math and Science; projects include tracking “gender discrimination” against female professors or trying to persuade high school girls to major in computer science instead of, say, law. Never mind that college women now outnumber college men, or that high school girls in general get better grades and test scores than high school boys. Feminists have a knack for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, so until women reach a utopian 50/50 parity with men in math and science careers (whether they want to or not), the party line says we’ve got a problem.
This is a real bee in the bonnet of educators now. But girls, like boys, have a way of resisting what adults think is good for them. I glimpsed this up close a few years ago when I visited a special summer camp that a female software CEO had set up to encourage Silicon Valley high school girls who were interested in technology. There I witnessed a perfect little paleo-feminist versus post-feminist moment: One of the earnest, gray-haired female professors was advising the girls what to do if a job interviewer asked inappropriate questions like “How soon do you plan to have children?”
That would be illegal, of course, but the professor advised the girls not to argue about it but to say something like “I think what you’re asking me is if my job will always come first, and the answer is yes!”
There was a silence as these words sort of hung in the air. Finally one girl raised her hand. “Can you just decline to state?” she asked tentatively. “Because I kind of have a philosophy that family comes first.” Not exactly the sort of sentiment the female role models in the room wanted to hear.
What with all the funding and the proselytizing, girls are anything but discouraged from careers in science now, and I’m skeptical of the notion that doors were always slammed in their faces.
Even in 1950, no one stopped my mother from studying science, although (as she always said later) maybe they should have. She spent her spare time reading Milton in the library but insisted on majoring in science, to be different. A silly reason, obviously. But I’m afraid the only other she ever offered wasn’t any better. The University of Manitoba science department had the best sports “yell,” she said. Years later she was still able to recite it verbatim: “Hot damn, holy hell, have you heard the science yell? We want, God knows, more beer, less clothes.”
A bigger problem than gender equity is the general incompetence of science instruction, beginning in the lower grades. I still remember having to explain to one of my daughter’s elementary public school teachers, during a marine biology project, that a jellyfish is not a mollusk. But scientific illiteracy afflicts men as well as women, and it only starts in the schools.
Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist and professional debunker, argues in his book “Voodoo Science” that such ignorance is spread by the media, which feel no embarrassment at their lack of rudimentary scientific knowledge -- basically throwing up their hands and letting any old fool have his say as long as it ups the ratings.
The most pervasive unscientific assumptions crop up at that well-traveled intersection where pop culture meets public policy. Over the years I’ve heard fellow journalists say all sorts of unscientific, silly things, especially when it comes to the notion that masculine and feminine behaviors have any basis in biology. No, no, my media colleagues say, it’s the culture. That’s why women are underrepresented in science. So are stallions rarely used as riding horses because the mares get their more docile nature from leafing through those “How to Please a Man” articles in Cosmopolitan? (And do geldings behave the way they do because they subscribe to Eunuch Living?)
Maybe the NSF can fund a grant to find out.
