Why There Are No Women in Science

A long-time reader tipped me off about a recent New York Times article poetically titled Getting the Most Bang Out of Quarks and Gluons. It's all about the really nifty guy-physics going on at Brookhaven National Lab and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC or "rick". Hah.) I'm not sure what I find most annoying about this article. Is it the doofus-y physicists pretending to be Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock et al. aboard the Starship Enterprise? (You may not be surprised to learn that there was no Lt. Uhura in the group.) "That's Captain Kirk over there," said Dr. Trainor, pointing…
The Chronicle of Higher Education daily update reports on this year's inductees to the National Academy of Sciences. A total of 72 members and 18 foreign associates elected this year - and guess what, they managed to find 9 worthy women. Yes, NINE. Is that not amazing? But fear not, friends. We are told: The number of women inducted is nearly half the record 19 elected in 2005 (The Chronicle, May 4, 2005). Nevertheless, the percentage of all members who are women has steadily grown to reach about 10 percent this year, an all-time high. The proportion should continue to grow as more…
The 5th Scientiae Carnival is up at Clarity. I've been so out of it most of this month that I had nothing to contribute to it this time. The carnival theme this time is why and how do you labor at what you do? There's lots of good stuff on the carnival, as usual. You might want to check out this horror story, I mean nightmare, I mean descent into hell and back, I mean tale of a graduate student's struggle to wrest her PhD from the slimy paws of her advisor and committee.
This is the first of several discussion posts for Week 3 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Margolis, Fisher, & Miller (MFM), and Ginorio, Marshall, & Breckinridge (GMB). (Summaries are available here.) "Feminism is not a unitary concept", Ginorio, Marshall, & Breckinridge (GMB) tell us. There have been many efforts to categorize different types of feminism. GMB refer to one of the most well-known, Alison Jaggar…
Well, just when I think I might be getting the migraines under control, I go and lose a whole week due to some mystery illness. It wasn't a cold and it wasn't the flu, but it sure did nail me to the floor for a week. I'm just getting back on schedule in my life. I'll try to get the Joy of Science summaries posted tomorrow but discussion posts may not be till Thursday. Anyway....I wanted to call your attention to a nifty post on the "life as a leak" subject over at Fairer Science. And back on March 20, Science Woman wrote a post on Why We Leave that is very good. The discussion in the…
X-Gal Meg Murray hasn't completely leaked out of the pipeline yet. She's taken a lectureship instead of a tenure-track position, and she writes this in a column titled Too Few Choices: Defining success is a tricky thing. Would I consider myself successful if I had moved my family across the country for my career, making my husband miserable and decreasing our standard of living? We now have a high quality of life (income aside) in a location where our kids are happy and where my husband (who provides the bulk of our income) has limitless career opportunities. Is that success? I don't know. I…
This post has gotten so long I'm going to have to break it into pieces. Here's the first installment. You've read a million stories about the leaky pipeline. They all start out more or less like this: It is no secret that women are under-represented at every level of the science and technology (S&T) system. Statistics clearly show that, much like a 'leaky pipeline', women steadily drop out all along the system. Nor is it difficult to identify the causes of the leaks. They range from gender-based biases in hiring, evaluation, and promotion; to inadequate institutional support for…
Absinthe has asked me to do a mirror post of her post on this issue. So, here it is. Several months ago I told you about the Kay Weber v Fremilab lawsuit in my post Class action lawsuits. If you read the link to her federal court Complaint contained in that post, you will see that she lived through a decade of appalling sexual harassment and even more appalling retaliation when she complained to the lab (she was successively demoted over the course of a decade from being one of the top women at the lab to eventually working under the supervision of a tech...she was ultimately fired…
This is the second of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Silverman and by Wenneras & Wold, as well as the NSF report "Beyond Bias and Barriers". These readings deal with two major issues that dog women throughout their careers in science and engineering: the wage gap and gender bias in peer review. Lest you think the data in the Silverman piece are out of date, consider the…
This is the first of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Eisenhart & Finkel and Brainard & Carlin. "Women (Still) Need Not Apply" by Eisenhart and Finkel and "A Six-Year Longitudinal Study of Undergraduate Women in Engineering and Science" by Brainard and Carlin seem to be in conflict with each other. Can "compensatory strategies" like women in engineering (WIE) programs make…
Welcome to the first day of our course on "Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science". This post will be a presentation of the summaries for each of this week's assigned readings. If you were not able to do the readings or couldn't get access to the books, I hope this post will give you a good flavor of what the week's readings were all about. You can reference the course syllabus for more details about the readings in the whole course and the course structure. Here's the initial post about the course. And here are some guidelines about how I'll post on readings and what we should strive…
What is diversity? People talk about it all the time. We say we want to increase diversity. We want to have more diversity on our faculty or in our workforce. We want to manage diversity for success. We have diversity programs and diversity training and diversity workshops. So we must know what diversity is, right? Isn't diversity what those Other people have? You know, sort of like a disease. Everybody but white males has Diversity, and if we get more of those Others, we can catch some Diversity. (Though we may have to Lower Our Standards to get the Diversity.) I have never been…
Another AWIS Washington Wire in my inbox today. Here are a few tidbits I thought looked especially interesting: Why Aren't More Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate the Evidence This 248-page book is a collection of 15 essays by experts on gender differences in ability. They consider the question of why more women are not pursuing careers in science, engineering and math, considering innate differences, societal discouragements, differences in aspirations and other key factors. This book should challenge readers' emotional and political biases through empirical science. This looks…
Mollishka writes to ask plaintively: "Feminist theory of science"?! Other than a nice set of buzzwords, what does that even mean?? So I thought, why not go ahead and launch the Basic Concepts idea now? On the super-secret Scienceblogs back channel, we have been discussing the idea of each doing a series of "Basic Concepts" posts on our blogs; some of my SciBlings are already doing them. You know, choose a few fundamental concepts or terms in your field, write a post describing/defining/delineating their use, label it Basic Concepts, and voila! A series is born. We thought that in…
Female Science Professor describes the amazing (and amazingly depressing) power of invisibility women in science seem to possess - at least when Distinguished Schmucks are visiting the department: A male colleague and I walked up to the Distinguished Visitor in the hallway, and the visitor stuck out his hand at my male colleague and gave him a manly handshake; they introduced themselves to each other. For some reason, I assumed it was my turn for a handshake and introduction. Social horror! He ignored me. I dropped my hand, but I introduced myself anyway, saying something like "I'm on your…
Hunt Willard spoke at the NC Science Blogging Conference about "Promoting Public Understanding of Science". Willard is the director of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. He made a distinction between getting people to actually understand the science itself - which he felt was really hard to do - versus getting them to understand the implications of science. He felt it was very easy to get people on the bandwagon with implications. I'm not sure, however, that you can do an adequate job of getting people to understand the implications of this or that bit of science without…
I think my favorite part of the day at the Science Blogging Conference was when Dr. Free-Ride gave her talk. It was titled "Adventures In Science Blogging: Conversations We Need To Have, and How Blogging Can Help Them". I am hoping she will turn this into a paper and publish it somewhere so I don't want to steal all her thunder. But I do want to share just a bit of what she talked about. Dr. Free-Ride talked about the need for community and communication as key ingredients for human beings to flourish. She also drily noted that since, when she last checked, scientists are still human…
Everyone says "encourage your daughters to stick with math and science". And you want to do it. You're proud of your daughter, you want her to have every option in the world open to her. But what do you do when she resists? A worried dad recently wrote with just such a dilemma: Slightly off-thread but my daughter is determined, against the evidence, that she's no good at maths. She mentions this from time to time, for example when she's doing her maths homework. "I'm no good at maths" "Your teachers seem to think you're doing rather well. Your last report was excellent" "[changes…
How do you effectively encourage young girls to stick with their math, science, and computer studies in high school? How do you effectively encourage them to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics? There's no one perfect approach; you need a full toolkit that allows you to mend all the malfunctions and rip down all the roadblocks that gender roles, peer pressures, familial or societal expectations, and poor or misguided teachers can throw at a girl. The editors of and contributors to She's Such A Geek! thought one good tool to have in the arsenal would be an…
The latest installment in the X-Gals series is out: Life As A Mother-Scientist. Subtitle: The X-Gals, a group of nine female biologists, see a direct correlation between their productivity and their child care. Note that last phrase: the link is not between productivity and having children. It's between productivity and child care. Access to it, quality of available child care, sudden unpredictable collapse of previously arranged child care, difficulty of obtaining child care for very young infants or sick children, and so on. When good child care arrangements are in place,…