RESEARCH : Views on Women in Workplace Get Canadian Scientist Into Hot Water

Can working moms really nurture their kids? Just when concerned North American women concluded that lawyer-mother Hillary Clinton had settled the point by publishing a cookie recipe in Family Circle magazine, a Canadian scientist is returning to it with a certain abandon.

University of Alberta chemist Gordon Freeman is tussling with Canada’s National Research Council--this country’s largest research body, the publisher of 13 top-flight scientific journals--over the women-in-the-work-force issue.

Freeman has done studies convincing him that many of the social problems plaguing the young of Canada and the United States--from drug abuse to cheating on exams--can be traced to the mass entry of women into the career world. The National Research Council is going to surprising lengths to debunk his ideas.

In the latest engagement of the Canadian Mommy Wars, the council is planning to publish a science-laden journal devoted solely to attacking Freeman’s conclusions.

“Do you really think they’re going to do it?” Freeman asked excitedly from his office in Edmonton. “I can hardly wait.”

“I have mixed feelings about it,” sighed Bruce Dancik, editor in chief of all scientific journals for the council. “The one person who benefits (from further scientific discussion) is Freeman.”

All this started in 1983, when Freeman--a specialist in the behavior of “non-homogeneous systems”--took up teaching Chemistry 101 after a four-year hiatus. “I noticed something different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it,” he said.

When he held midterm exams the following spring, it suddenly hit him: Rampant cheating had broken out among the university’s students. Up and down the lecture hall, test-takers were merrily whispering, conferring and showing each other their blue books.

A shocked Freeman opened up his office to any student who wanted to come in and talk. Many took him up on his offer, he says, and over the next eight years he spent thousands of hours listening to them.

“I started to find out about people,” he says. “I started to learn about their families. The only thing I could correlate (the cheating) with was whether they had both parents out chasing money. I asked a lot of them, ‘Who taught you ethics?’ and some of them said, ‘No one.’ ” The bedrock problem, he concluded: Their mothers weren’t at home.

Out of this informal research, Freeman wrote a paper on the breakdown of the family, called “On Ethical Behavior and Societal Chaos.” He delivered it at a conference of ethicists in Long Beach, Calif.

Then, in 1989, Freeman was putting together a conference on his scientific specialty. He invited scientists from all disciplines, chemistry to sociology--since, he says, a non-homogeneous system can be found in human society as easily as in a beaker of solution.

The National Research Council had agreed to publish papers from the conference in its Journal of Physics. When one paper didn’t show up--Freeman rails that its author is yet another of life’s cheaters--he sent in his “Ethical Behavior” paper to take its place.

The journal published the paper in September, 1990, and Canadian feminists, academics and traditional mothers have been in an uproar ever since.

Freeman has, inevitably, become a talk-show regular. And he has gone on to develop a seven-point program for social reform, including everything from tax deductions for stay-at-home mothers to a campaign to promote premarital virginity.

But angry Canadians have descended on the National Research Council and the University of Alberta, demanding that the Journal of Physics republish the entire offending issue--without Freeman’s article.

Dancik rejected that idea, saying it reminded him of “Nazi techniques of trying to control information.” But he did overhaul the council’s manuscript-screening processes and forced the journal’s editor to resign.

And he agreed to put out the forthcoming special issue on Freeman, with articles by social scientists, letters from readers and an explanatory text from Dancik himself on how the whole affair came about.

Why bother? “No social scientist would look at (Freeman’s article) and think it was legitimate science,” Dancik admits, but he adds that he owes it to critics “who really didn’t want to let this thing stand as it was.”