When you imagine a scientist, what do you imagine? The first image that I see, despite never having seen it in real life (thankfully!), is the traditional “mad scientist”. The white lab-coat, crazy hair, glasses or goggles, holding a flask or test tube containing some dangerous-looking substance. This scientist is, inevitably, male (and white, but that’s a subject for another day).
The lack of women in science has become a cause for concern for many people. Discussions of how to fix the “leaky pipe”, where female students are lost at a disproportionately higher rate than their male colleagues at postgraduate level and beyond, have become increasingly frequent. Some of these potential fixes were discussed a couple of years ago here on this blog.
But why do we want more women in science? Surely science, being so objective and rational, has little need for political correctness? If there aren’t many women in science then that’s just an indication that they aren’t smart enough or don’t want to put in the work required to reach high academic positions and by trying to increase the numbers artificially we’ll end up with poorer science and the advancement of knowledge will slow to a stand-still.
This may sound like hyperbole but it’s not far off what has been argued. Larry Summers, then-president of Harvard, argued that women were less intelligent than men due to genetic differences and that childcare burdens meant women weren’t willing to put in the long hours necessary to advance their careers. The lack of science to support these statements is disturbing from someone in his position. The genetic differences are negligible and the experiences of transgender people show that people’s assessment of intelligence is often linked to their perception of gender. As to women shouldering the burden of childcare, well, personally I see this as an opportunity to make this burden more equal, rather than punish the women for having the temerity to reproduce (a man was involved in this reproduction as well, after all).
Getting back to the question, why does it matter if science is largely dominated by men? A scientist is a scientist and their gender shouldn’t matter. While it’s unfortunate that women have not been welcomed into science, it hasn’t affected what science has been done. Has it? Well, chances are, it has.
A recent paper published in PloS Biology looked at the studies into genital evolution. The paper, by Ah-King and colleagues found a distinct bias in the focus of these studies towards male genitalia and away from female genitalia that was not explained by any obvious cause such as ease of study or taxonomy. Given the tenor of this piece you’ll be forgiven for thinking that I’m going to say “but when they looked at the sex of the researcher they found that women studied vaginas while men studied penises and as there’s more men in science that’s caused the bias” but the researchers looked at this and found that men and women had a similar bias towards researching male genitals.
So does this mean that this study actually goes against my hypothesis that the sex of the researcher matters? I don’t think so. This study can’t be taken in isolation, it must be taken in context. The context is that ever since Darwin, males have been perceived as the dominant sex and the ones driving sexual evolution with the females as little more than passive receivers of sperm. While this is now known not to be the case, such attitudes take a long time to die. The researchers discuss this explicitly:
“. . . [we] suggest that the bias reflects now outdated assumptions about the unimportance of, or lack of, variation in female genitalia in sexual evolutionary dynamics.” (p6).
This highlights the problem, not only of not having women in science now, but of having a historical absence of women. As the subject has historically been studied and taught by men to men, many unfounded beliefs have taken hold. The belief that males are inherently more interesting to study is just one example of this. These beliefs become so pervasive that everyone believes them, and may explain why women have the same bias towards studying male genitalia that men have.
The lack of women in science means that unfounded beliefs such as this go unchallenged for so long that they become core tenets of disciplines and trying to overturn them takes immense effort. It allows scientists to say that women are less intelligent than men and use their absence as evidence, in the same way that some use the absence of minorities as indications of their intelligence, ignoring the systematic biases that prevent them from attaining a position of authority within their field, or even entering it in the first place. Neil Degrasse Tyson beautifully summed up the barriers to entry presented to women and minorities, none of which are to do with intelligence and all are to do with cultural expectations and the resistance experienced when you try to surmount those expectations.
Increasing diversity has innumerable benefits and no real downsides (though it may have perceived ones, particularly for those whose positions of authority are being challenged). In a recent NERD club we discussed the benefits of mobility, which included being exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things in different departments. This exposure to new ideas can also come through increasing the pool of people from which scientists are drawn. When most of your scientists are male, they will be, on average, more interested in male genitalia than female. When most of your scientists are from the western hemisphere, the majority of the research will be biased towards those countries. Increasing diversity increases the field of interests scientists have and will actually accelerate our scientific knowledge. Diversity makes better science.
Author: Sarah Hearne, hearnes[at]tcd.ie, @SarahVHearne
Image: Wikicommons