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Chris Mooney is a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and the author of three books, The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine biologist and author at Duke University. Sometimes she's a classicist, radio jock, or congressional staffer. Never sure what's next, she continues to enjoy the journey. For more information, visit her website.
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Science Debate
« Is Medical Education Wasted On Women? | Main | She'd Rather Be Smart Than A Movie Star »
Category: Women in Science
Posted on: April 15, 2008 1:24 PM, by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum
Back to taking on the science literacy gender disparity...
Correct answers to scientific literacy questions, by sex: 2006
(by percent)
The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True)
Male 85
Female 75
All radioactivity is man-made. (False)
Male 77
Female 64
The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27*
* that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly
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Comments
Was this survey designed by guys in the first place? The phrase "man-made" is not exactly neutral in a survey assessing gender differences (although if that language was problematic it looks like it helped the women in this case). The term "explosion" is not an indisputable description of the inflationary origin of the universe. Etc...
Posted by: Nick (Matzke) | April 15, 2008 1:56 PM
The survey saddens and concerns me.
Posted by: Doc | April 15, 2008 1:59 PM
I'm not sure I'd say true for the last one. Calling the Big Bang a huge explosion is highly misleading.
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | April 15, 2008 2:16 PM
Female biologist here.
I would have probably put 'false' for that last one, just because the answer seems way, way too simple. And maybe it is just that simple, I guess I got it wrong.
Posted by: blue | April 15, 2008 2:25 PM
Maybe females are actually better educated when it comes to both the known facts of cosmology and the various problems with cosmological theories?
First off, Big Bang defenders point out that the BB was not an explosion, but a sudden expansion of space-time (so even just on a technicality the answer is false).
Second, the unknowns are incredible. We are the Mr. Magoo's of the universe. Perhaps female respondents were more likely to take this into account rather than brashly assume that we have already sorted out the "answer in the back of the book".
Third, the Big Bang has been in serious trouble since at least 1998, when we found out that red-shift patterns indicate that not only is the universe expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating, against every prediction of the BB.
Of course, defenders were quick to add all kinds of dark matter and energy to solve this problem, but the fact remains that this is a finding that the BB did not predict and does not explain. On earth, we would get rid of such a failed theory. In cosmology though.....
Posted by: Jason Failes | April 15, 2008 2:34 PM
As an aspiring astrobiologist, I love what Jason wrote:
I suspect language is indeed problematic in this question, and also--dare I say it--that religion may have some influence.
On the gender disparity, yesterday Charles suggested this lecture by Rebecca Watson of skepchick.org which I found extremely interesting...
Posted by: Sheril R. Kirshenbaum | April 15, 2008 2:46 PM
I am shocked that so many women are still holding out for evidence of Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmology hypothesis.
Posted by: Eric Roston | April 15, 2008 3:12 PM
I know of few instances in which a theory would be discarded based on a single difficulty unless there's another theory ready and waiting that explains the difficulty, which is not the case in cosmology. For every problem with the Big Bang, there are ten with Steady State.
Posted by: Kevin W. Parker | April 15, 2008 3:28 PM
Maybe females are actually better educated when it comes to both the known facts of cosmology and the various problems with cosmological theories?
this is why there are so many more women who complete degrees in physics & astronomy. oh, oops, that's not true.
yes, saying that the big bang is an explosion is pretty much not even wrong. but does anyone really think that the higher "false" answers from females are due to greater cosmological sophistication about the nature of space???
next time we see males performing poorly in reading i'll argue that it's really due to the popularity of experimental narrative fictional techniques, so the tests aren't capturing their subtle and nuanced comprehension skills.
Posted by: razib | April 15, 2008 3:39 PM
and if any of you really believed that female cosmological sophistication is the primary reason for these data, i await your support for physis & math programs targeted toward all those unsubtle males, since females are already ahead of the game. right?
let's keep it real.
Posted by: razib | April 15, 2008 3:41 PM
I'm with Joshua - it's misleading to say that "the Universe began with a huge explosion". That is a caricature of Big Bang theory. I'd have found it difficult to answer that question. I'd have assumed that anyone who has read nothing about it would answer "true" and anyone who knows anything about contemporary cosmology would be very tempted to say "false". To be fair, I probably would have said "true" in the end, but it's still a bad question, and that makes it hard to draw inferences from how people answered.
Posted by: Russell Blackford | April 15, 2008 11:05 PM
Merriam-Webster's second definition for explosion is "a large-scale, rapid, or spectacular expansion or bursting out or forth". The big bang was certainly a large-scale, rapid, or spectacular expansion and thus an explosion by that definition.
Posted by: Lexivore | April 15, 2008 11:29 PM
parenting parenting parenting: toys and books are gendered extremely to skew boys toward an interest in science... take a look at the "recommended" toys for boys and girls on most toy web sites.
by the time science comes up in school, girls are less confident and less interested. in some cases, teachers give boys more encouragement in subjects like science (though it's usually already too late).
Posted by: miko | April 15, 2008 11:45 PM
Dammit! 3 out of 4 women don't know that the Universe began with the Big Bang? I need to do my job better!
Posted by: Ethan Siegel | April 16, 2008 12:56 AM
I'd have found it difficult to answer that question.
why are we talking about this? most people are stupid, they don't know the diff. between inflation or non-inflation, etc. they don't that the universe doesn't have a center and so forth. a very small proportion of individuals (male and female) would stumble around the non-trivial semantic point that the big bang is not precisely an "explosion." but that's only on the margins, the bigger reality is that most people are stupid and have a weak grasp of cosmology.
fixating on the not-even-wrong aspect of the q
Posted by: razib | April 16, 2008 1:49 AM
Hmm. No. Dark matter was 'added' quite some time ago, for the very simple reason that multiple different lines of evidence suggested its existence. It was not introduced to explain the current acceleration; indeed, it couldn't, since it has the same effect as any other mass; it tends to decelerate the expansion of the Universe.
The equations governing the Big Bang always allowed for the existence of something like dark energy, and this has been known since the beginning. Inflationary models, which pre-date the observations you refer to by a couple of decades, get their accelerated expansion in precisely the same way the current observed acceleration is explained. What's new is precisely the observations that such an effect is still in play, rather than confined to the earliest stages of the Big Bang. And here, again, there exist multiple lines of evidence which line up rather nicely.
Posted by: MartinM | April 16, 2008 9:44 AM
While an even smaller proportion would be perfectly happy with 'explosion,' but would quibble over 'began.' And possibly 'Universe.'
Posted by: MartinM | April 16, 2008 9:50 AM
I do take razib's point, but it seems prima facie unbelievable that three quarters of the women in this survey hadn't heard of the Big Bang. I don't think I know anybody of either sex who is that ignorant.
I agree that the explanation can't be that all these women were super-sophisticated about how the Big Bang should best be described. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if at least some had a naive sense, from something they'd heard or seen on TV or whatever, that "Big Bang" is some kind of, like, metaphor or something and it wasn't, like, you know, really, like, an explosion type explosion. (I'm trying to channel this mentality, perhaps not successfully.) That would be my first thought as to why a lot of people who are not at all sophisticated about science would nonetheless give the arguably-correct answer "false".
But yeah, in the end I guess it's mainly, even if not entirely, appalling ignorance about the emerging scientific picture of the universe we find ourselves in. I give in. Sigh.
Apart from the gendered nature of the data, these science literary results really do seem to show that many or most people just don't see themselves as living in the same universe that people with at least basic scientific literacy see themselves as living in.
Posted by: Russell Blackford | April 16, 2008 10:35 AM
Just a question to those here that have a problem with the word "explosion"....Do you have the same problem with the word "inflation"? I'm glad someone gave a definition of the word explosion which seems to fit.
Posted by: BAllanJ | April 16, 2008 11:27 AM
but it seems prima facie unbelievable that three quarters of the women in this survey hadn't heard of the Big Bang. I don't think I know anybody of either sex who is that ignorant.
1) some of them might know what a big bang is, but reject the idea because they're stupid.
2) who you know is pretty irrelevant. almost no one hangs with a random slice of the population. 20% of the white american population things interracial marriage should be against the law; i doubt i know many of those people. 95% of the population in the USA believes in god or a higher spirit; probably around 30% of the people i'm close too do. so?
Posted by: razib | April 16, 2008 12:48 PM
Yeah, razib, I know - which was one reason why I said "I give in." :)
Posted by: Russell Blackford | April 16, 2008 7:03 PM
I am not a MOND advocate, nor a steady-state model adherent, nor a fundie, nor undereducated, nor, as Razib would put it, "stupid."
I'm just someone who's read everything he can on physics, cosmology, and the BB theory and come to the conclusion that it just doesn't add up:
The history of the BB is littered with incorrect predictions, ad hoc additions, and sloppy claims of victory when accurate "retero-dictions" were finally hammered out.
We have observed no "age of darkness", and it doesn't look like we will any time soon.
Large-scale structures are too large to have been formed in only 14 billion years.
The CMB is virtually indistinguishable from black-body radiation, and there are several indicators that it is influenced by celestial objects in the "foreground".
If dark energy, or something about the nature of space-time itself, causes galactic scale structures to repel, why assume a time when they were all in one place to begin with? Moreover, if universal expansion is accelerating, and we project that back in time, we do not get a moment of superfast inflation, but rather an asymptotic approach to zero velocity the further back in time one goes.
Our observations are terrible (compared to the observations we would like to get. We make large-scale errors like this all the time:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050601082015.htm
http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2163), our assumptions often badly incorrect, our theories woefully incomplete, and the BB is itself a one-off historical event that we cannot observe directly.
Again, given all this, why do we assume we have the "answer in the back of the book" with the BB?
Because we like to have an answer, any answer, even a wrong one, rather than live with the uncertainty of withholding judgment until something definitive comes around. Because we like to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and our imaginations are limited as such by our terrestrially-evolved human brain.
As with most things in nature, the real answers concerning cosmological origins are likely to be both completely unexpected and far more elegant than what we have today.
Posted by: Jason Failes | April 17, 2008 1:38 PM
Whoops, you will have to remove the ")," from the second html to get it to work right. sorry.
Posted by: Jason Failes | April 17, 2008 1:41 PM
The girls spend too much time blogging and chatting. They just need to spend more time reading science news, scientific papers etc.. If browsing arXiv is too boring, then why not read the physics arXiv blog? :)
Posted by: Count Iblis | April 19, 2008 7:38 PM
Aldous Huxley published his most famous novel Brave New World in 1932. The book is a cautionary tale of a dystopian future version of London, Huxley's hometown, in the year 2540. The book's vision is of a country ruled entirely by the government, and all conflict, suffering and ultimately, all free thought is against government's regulations. In brief, it's about what the world would look like of no one was able to choose for themselves, voice their opinions, or live how they saw fit, all being hampered by a governments' iron fist. Huxley was criticized for his work, and still is to this day. Whether or not it was controversial, parallels exist in modern America, although not nearly as pervasive. The American government and state governments are beginning to impose many restrictions through legislation. For instance, certain areas in Los Angeles are off limits to fast food restaurants. Burger stands aren't the only businesses starting to be zoned out; payday loan lenders are also feeling the pinch. Many state and national legislators are pledging to do away with this vital services if elected. They're trying to get elected to serve their own self interest. Where do we, as people, draw the line at where the government can't tell us what to do?
Posted by: David Johnston | October 21, 2008 5:50 AM