Zare, who offers a Cultural Revolution-style confession of his own sins of unconscious racism and sexism, argues that women in science are still held back by subtle discrimination. As proof, he cites a 1997 Swedish study showing that female applicants for postdoctoral positions are rated less favorably than male applicants. Says Zare:
Many regard Sweden to be a progressive country and the behavior of committees in 1997 to be not much different from what might be expected today. The conclusions that discrimination exists and is entrenched in our judgments seem hard to deny.
But maybe Sweden is a little too progressive. The generous parental leave policies and other support structures that enable women to stay in the workforce but drastically curtail their work commitments once they have children create a situation in which many women are no doubt viewed as suspect when it comes to their future productivity. (Many of these programs are also available to Swedish men, but they are far more likely to remain employed full-time while raising a family.) Can we universalize from the Swedish findings? A few years ago, a British study -- which admittedly measured different things -- found no evidence of discrimination against women scientists in the awarding of research grants and postdoctoral fellowships. The study did find that women scientists who had young children, or had taken a break from their careers for family reasons, were considerably less likely to apply for grants.
So, once again, this brings us to the work-family conundrum. And Zare actually acknowledges this, noting that the slow progress in achieving gender parity on the faculties of leading science departments has to do with
the failure to take into account the asymmetric burdens of childbirth and child care as well as elder care, and the failure to structure faculty jobs to better reflect a balanced lifestyle. ... Currently, the reward structure of the academic rat race in science, engineering, and mathematics presents a real barrier to women choosing a career in academics. We must dispel the notion that working day and night equates to productivity. Many of us know coworkers with limited time available who nevertheless make outstanding contributions to the success of a research project.In my 2001 Salon.com article on women in science, I commented on somewhat similar proposals:
A 1993 article in Science on women's attrition from scientific fields deplored such "outmoded stereotypes" as "an emphasis on scientific knowledge independent of real-world uses and an image of scientists as obsessed with science to the exclusion of other human endeavors."
But what if trying to jettison these "stereotypes" results in the loss of something essential to scientific pursuit at the highest level?
It seems fairly indisputable to me that by and large, if two people are equally talented, smart, and hardworking, the one who gives 80% of herself to her work is going to achieve more than the one who gives 50%. I'm all for changing societal norms to make it easier for ambitious and talented women to relegate the role of primary caregiver and homemaker to their husbands. But lowering the standards so women can succed is not an answer, it's an insult -- to both science and women.
31 comments:
The key question, in my mind, is how many hard science and mathematics positions are there in the world?
I can't picture there being that many. Plus, there must be great, global competition for these positions. Because, if there is one type of immigrant countries will accept, it is science and engineering doctorate candidates and post-docs. Large changes to the ratio of male to female science and math scholars in the US may mean nothing compared to the incredibly large number of male science and math scholars around the globe (I'm looking at India and China in particular.)
In any case, the complaint about the lack of women in "hard" science and math ignores the surplus of women in biology, biochemistry and other increasingly important scientific fields. (Maybe surplus isn't the right word, but I can't think of a better one right now.)
Anyway, as a man, I will be pilloried for thinking there are inherent biological advantages for both sexes, so I'll get back to work.
The use of Title IX to force gender parity would be tragic in so many ways. This idea has been kicking around for a while now. In January of 2001, right after I began my faculty position in biology, there was a guest lecturer, a woman chemist, can't remember her name or where she was from, who was proposing the very same thing. I'm sure I made my brand new female colleagues a bit suspicious when I criticized the idea.
I realize as a biologist I am in a privileged group of women as far as discrimination goes. While no department at any research university likely has 50% women, 20-30% is increasingly common in my field, and in my experience that would be the critical mass needed to remove a "gendered' component from the otherwise unpleasant world of academic politics. So I can't claim to speak for mathematicians, physicists, chemists and engineers. But in my world, real discrimination has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Not to say it is a perfect world, for women or anyone else. However, I do believe that the kinds of gender barriers that can be "engineered out" are fading, and what remains is largely resulting from individual choices.
I will commit the Summers-esque sin of using the word aptitude as part of the explanation for why there are fewer women than men in the hard sciences. But this is not a slur on women. I'm pretty freakin' smart, I've made some important contributions to my field, but I struggled to make a B in college physics and at this point in time I could not do a differential equation to save my life. I "prefer" biology because I'm better at it. We scientists very often make casual remarks about how our colleagues' personalities are reflected in the kind of science they do. The scattered, disorganized, brilliant types tend to publish infrequently, but produce substantial, high-impact work when they do. The steady, conservative, tidy, even-keeled types produce several solid but not earth-shattering manuscripts per year. Well, is not gender a component of personality? Will it not therefore contribute to the kind of science one does?
It is striking that the men who support these initiatives are well established, have probably benefited from discrimination that has historically existed, and have absolutely nothing to lose from insisting on gender parity in hiring for future funding. I'd like to see what they would say to the proposal that we make this retroactive-that we start firing men if we have to in order to ensure male female parity at all academic ranks.
I don't want to dismiss the problem of the disproportionate share of the work-family juggling that goes to women, and the impact that this has on women’s careers. In fact, I have quite a bit to say about that, which I will save for another time.
JW, I've seen a female grad student driven out of a PhD program because she wouldn't sleep with a prof. Another was expected to host her supervisor's parties. I've heard profs tell female undergrads that they didn't belong in physics.
Even if incidents of the first two types were common it still wouldn't explain why women are underrepresented in the sciences, unless you have some reason to believe that male physics professors are more likely to demand sex than, say, male literature professors are. Until the last generation almost all professors were men, yet women were able to make rapid gains in almost all the fields.
Where are males treated like this?
So far as being told that their gender makes them unsuited for the field, I've heard of this happening in child psychology, education, and sociology (race was also cited in the latter case). More common is hearing not that men are unqualified, but that women are *better* qualified; I've heard that about just about every field involving children, understanding of motivations or emotions, and consensus-forming.
Women are underrepresented in the sciences because they have been (less so now) told that they don't belong there
The problem with that claim is that the abuse you claim women were subjected to 20 years ago was also present, to at least as great an extent, in fields like business and medicine. Yet women are much better-represented in those fields. You can't explain a lack of women in the hard sciences by invoking sexism without demonstrating that male scientists are misogynistic in a way that normal men aren't. A corollary to your theory would be, for example, that while physicists are strongly sexist, mathematicians are far more so -- indeed, given how rare female mathematicians are, they must be some of the most sexist people in the world (I'm pretty sure women are more common in the Marines than in math departments). So does math cause sexism, or are sexists disproportionately drawn to study math?
it is important to understand just what women face.
Perhaps personal anecdotes about the 1980s are not the best way in which to do that? For example, I knew white students beaten by black students because of their skin color, and white students subjected to unfair treatment by black teachers as revenge for perceived white crimes against the black race. It would, however, be inappropriate for me to generalize from this and blame modern white kids' problems on black racism. My experiences are neither current nor particularly representative.
..indeed, given how rare female mathematicians are..
In the US, that is. In my statistics graduate training, the overwhelming majority of students was female... and Chinese.
Z
Chinese culture was very misogynistic. However, particularly in the cities, Chinese culture is undergoing very rapid change. You should visit. It is very enlightening.
However, last I checked (which admittedly was just prior to 9/11), engineering and physics programs in the US were still pretty filled with Middle Eastern and Indian men. Those cultures are still very misogynistic, but I imagine that Indian culture is changing, too.
Z
Chinese culture was very misogynistic.
Um, if by "was" you mean "as of at least the late 1990s" then the use of the past tense might be justified. Things might have started significantly improving in the last five years, but any Chinese woman now in college grew up in a society that openly considered female children inferior to male children.
Here's some food for thought -- since China put its "one child" policy in place, the gender imbalance between male and female children has steadily *grown* with each passing year, from approximately 1.08 male births per female birth in 1980 to around 1.2 males per female today.
The increasing scarcity of women might give them greater effective power (supply and demand and all that). But the fact that the rate at which girls are aborted in favor of boys is *climbing* suggests that the underlying attitudes aren't changing much at all.
rob,
I don't have a theory - I was trying to describe my experience.
You said "women are underrepresented in the sciences because they have been (less so now) told that they don't belong there." That's a theory, not a personal experience (since you don't have personal experience with more than a handful of the hundreds of thousands of "missing women"). My point is that sexism doesn't explain the imbalance because there doesn't seem to be much correlation between the lack of women in a discipline and the sexism of the people who teach or study it.
I'm sure you could find examples of this (one could find examples of almost any attitude), but you make it sound like a trend.
*Both* of you are attempting to take personal experiences and a few examples and generalize it into a trend.
That gender imbalance in abortion relating to the one child policy happens mainly in rural areas, not in cities, and tends to happen among farmers. The reason for this is that women traditionally went to live with the husband’s family. So if you are a farmer and have a girl, you lose help with your farm the second she marries. If you have a boy, you keep the help and add a wife as soon as he marries. The incentives exist to have a boy.
If you live in the city, it doesn't matter whether you have a boy or a girl. Either will support you when you are old, provided they are successful in the working world. That child is your only shot of being supported when you are older, and the way the system works, that child's career options are permanently limited if they don't pass the exam to get into high school. Thus men AND women are put under brutal pressure to compete academically. The competition to get into college is just as fierce. Plus, a Phd in a field where there are a lot of job openings in the west(careers in math) is an automatic ticket to a big paycheck (relative to Chinese salaries) and even citizenship if you want it.
For a European or American woman, you could make as much or money doing something else, and the Phd route makes it difficult to have a family. The incentives are reversed.
Z
FYI - here is an article about research on the effect of marriage on scientific careers:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2006_05_26/scientific_success_what_s_love_got_to_do_with_it
Cathy, you are starting from the assumption that the alternative to "my work substitutes for having a life" is dumbing down. I wonder how many of those killer workweeks are really about excellence in the sciences, and how many are about impressing your superiors with how much 'face time' you put in.
To put it another way, which employee would you rather have--the one who gives 80% of her time and does an average job, or the one who succeeds brillantly putting in 50% of his time?
I do agree that it's more important to make change in the home--but let's be honest, men are not going to stop doing what they like because women stop doing the lion's share of the family work. What'll happen is what's happening already: smaller families and more families with no children at all.
To put it another way, which employee would you rather have--the one who gives 80% of her time and does an average job, or the one who succeeds brillantly putting in 50% of his time?
It would depend on what the job is, really. Many jobs -- especially management -- require more effort than they do brilliance. There's an awful lot of boring but time-consuming work that has to be done but can't particularly be gotten around with clever thinking (such as tracking whether a project is on schedule or not).
Besides, the real parallel isn't between the genius who works 8-hour days versus the drudge who works 15-hour days. It's between the genius who works 8-hour days, the drudge who works 15-hour days, and the genius who works 15-hour days. The third one is the one who gets the promotions, and the first one is the one who gets to actually see his kids grow up.
I don't think the point is whether or not there is or was or has been discrimination against women in science-clearly there has been, and still is, though the extent of that overt discrimination is open to debate and likely highly variable between disciplines and departments. The point is, would a heavy-handed Title IX approach be an appropriate remedy for ending discrimination?
No, in my opinion. Though it might be an appropriate way to further engender hostility and resentment toward women scientist. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
And anyway, is gender parity possible, desirable or even necessary?
Again drawing on my experience in biolological sciences, where women have been receiving about 50% of all Ph.Ds. since the early 80's but have failed to achieve parity at higher academic ranks, I'd have to say that all that is needed is a critical mass. In my experience, having about 20-30% women in a field or department, and a few good women leaders in the field or department can create a "gender-blind" environment where individuals are evaluated on their contributions and accomplishments. I do find in such an environment there is an appropriate level of sensitivity to the fact that women may have a disproportionate share of the home responsibilities. I may just be extremely lucky, or extremely naive.
I realize that in other fields such as chemistry, physics, math and engineering, where women are making gains at a much slower rate, waiting for the old guys to retire is not a viable option. But really, neither is denying federal funding to institutions that don't achieve parity in hiring.
In the data-is-not-the-plural-of-anecdote-but-I'll-toss-this-out-anyway category: I've been on two faculty search committees in the past five years, and what I've seen has been rather amazing. The applicant pool is about 70-80% male and 20-30% female. If you break the pool into top quarter, second quarter and bottom half, the gender ratio stays the same. We interview from the top quarter only, so that means the interview pool is only 20-30% female. If we wanted to make that 50% female, we'd have to dig into the second quarter form women, while leaving behind some of the men from the top quarter.
Can anyone give me any reason why we should do that?
It would depend on what the job is, really.
Exactly. Which is why, although I agree that a Title IX approach is a bad idea, it's silly to pretend that this is just a matter of women preferring diapers over dollars.
It's between the genius who works 8-hour days, the drudge who works 15-hour days, and the genius who works 15-hour days.
The problem is when the work requirement is the 15-hour day, regardless of the level of genius or work involved. The 15-hour genius may get the most promotions, but most employers will promote your 15-hour drudge over your 8-hour genius because the drudge puts in more hours. This is especially true in fields where time is billed and is therefore literally money.
The real problem with this system is that a lot of people are going to choose work over family. In the old days, this meant the husband chose work and left family to the wife. Women are increasingly rejecting that bargain, which means more paid family help and fewer or no children. That's fine, as long as conservatives whining about the 'birth dearth' are willing to STFU about the effects of their beloved free market on The Family.
mythago,
"The problem is when the work requirement is the 15-hour day, regardless of the level of genius or work involved. The 15-hour genius may get the most promotions, but most employers will promote your 15-hour drudge over your 8-hour genius because the drudge puts in more hours. This is especially true in fields where time is billed and is therefore literally money."
This really isn't true in science. Productivity is not measured in billable hours, but in productivity, meaning grant dollars and publication numbers, including some weight for impact factor.
But while output is not always equal to hours, it very often is, especially at the beginning of an independent academic career (and prime reproductive years for women). It's not about a supervisor seeing face time-this is an amazingly unsupervised enterprise. It's about how many $$ and publishable units are produced.
ada, I know that science differs from professions where time and money are the same thing--but even with a lack of supervision, is tracking a worker's time really never done? I'd guess that it depends more on the endeavor and the type of science; it's a lot easier to track lab hours than how long somebody spent in the library doing research, for example.
If A and B both bring in the same amount of grant money and publish the same number of articles, but A is known to spend few hours in the office in favor of family time while B is a known 'grind', do their supervisors really value and rate A and B equally?
(I'm also a little baffled by the 'prime reproductive years' argument. It's not like a woman's uterus shuts off when she hits 30.)
Mythago
"If A and B both bring in the same amount of grant money and publish the same number of articles, but A is known to spend few hours in the office in favor of family time while B is a known 'grind', do their supervisors really value and rate A and B equally?"
No, in fact the supervisor is going to value A more, and then say something like: "Now imagine how much more you could do if you just worked as many hours as B". But like revenant says, it's not just A and B who are considered, but C, who works B's hours with A's efficiency.
As for prime reproductive years, first, it's not 30, and second it's not just about the uterus shuting off-you actually have to raise the kids that you decide to have. I'm not being flippant or nasty here (written communication is sometimes so hard-if I were saying this out loud, my tone would be friendly and civil). But here's the stats: In life sciences, the average Ph.D. time has expanded to seven years, the postdoc time to six, and the age at which an assistant professorship gets the first federal grant is something like 39 or 40. So the years from 30-40 are the years when you need to produce the goods for the bean counters.
Speaking personally, being pregnant had very little negative effect on my productivity, and probably even a positive effect, since I was super-motived to get stuff done by a deadline. But taking care of an infant knocked my career on its a**. Well worth it to be sure, and if I had a chance to do it over I would have done it the same way, but it's still a career stress.
So two things from this; First, if I didn't have so much invested in my career, I'd probably downsize or quit or make a fundamental career shift. I'm guessing a big part of the reason that we don't have gender parity in science is that many women just decide that this is not worth doing under these circumstances. I may end up being one of those women, or I may squeak by. Second, during the first two years of my child's life, when I was rightly focused on being a good parent and taking good care of my child, I know I was not really doing good science, not really justifying the grant money I'm pulling in (based on previous accomplishments), and maybe even not really justifying the modest salary I'm pulling down. I just didn't have the time, energy and attention to devote to my work as I did pre-kid, and for this reason I won't likely have another. THis is not true for all women scientists with small kids, but it is true for many of us. And it does get better as the kids get older, but the timing of this may not work out well with the tenure clock.
Women scientists with more than one child are out there, but I don't see a lot of them around me. However, I do know a lot of women ex-scientists that have more than one kid.
ada, I realize you're not being flippant, and as somebody neither in academia nor in the sciences I appreciate your perspective on this.
revenant is right that C is going to come out on top. But isn't that supervisor who values A more going to become disenchanted when A refuses to turn into C? And if B is a drudge yet still manages to bring in the same grant money and publications, why is B more valued than work-shunning A?
On the statistics--setting children aside, it amazes me that anybody steps on that career path at all. Grad-student poverty for so many years, and busting your butt merely to prove yourself for the first time at forty? You're ALL nuts. :D
Yeah, well, you're right about the nuts. Sometimes I wonder why I'm doing this. Like when my husband and I trade off weekend days with our kid so we can each get a full sixth day of work in, or when I look at how little money is in my 401K when I feel like I've been busting my a** since I was 22. But we make choices in life, and most of the time, there's nothing like being intellectually independent and doing stuff you love.
And you're right that any productive scientist will be valued, no matter the route to productivity. So A will never be undervalued compared to B, but C will be most highly valued. That being said, there are a lot of thriving A's and B's, and we happen to think the C's are nuts, that is when we were not busy being insanely envious of their success and productivity.
most employers will promote your 15-hour drudge over your 8-hour genius because the drudge puts in more hours. This is especially true in fields where time is billed and is therefore literally money.
Companies that do not bill by the hour generally measure achievements and results, not hours worked. A person who needs to work twice as long to achieve the same things as the guy next to him is NOT looked upon favorably by his employers.
As for industries that bill by the hour, I would have to say that any intelligent person who enters an industry where time is money and then proceeds to put in only the minimum effort is signalling loud and clear that he lacks both ambition and any concern for his employer's success and profitability. Why SHOULD you promote a person who quite clearly doesn't care?
A person who needs to work twice as long to achieve the same things as the guy next to him is NOT looked upon favorably by his employers.
See below.
any intelligent person who enters an industry where time is money and then proceeds to put in only the minimum effort
In an industry where time is money, there is no 'minimum effort'. There is only a race to put in more time. So while employers in those industries may not think B is as smart as A, they will reward B more than A because B is more profitable. The fact that A got it done in half the time means only that A produces half the income.
See below.
Well, I looked, and you never got around to addressing that point. Why would a person whose time isn't billable by the hour be looked upon favorably by his employer for taking twice as long to complete a task?
The fact that A got it done in half the time means only that A produces half the income
Only if A's time is billed at the same rate as B's, which isn't the case in real life unless both A and his boss are stupid -- every hour of A's time generates twice the work of B, which means roughly that A should charge twice what B does.
But even assuming the unlikely scenario of A and B's time being worth the same, it isn't the fact that A works faster that causes his company to make less money, but the fact that A stops working when he completes a task instead of starting on a new one.
Why would a person whose time isn't billable by the hour be looked upon favorably by his employer for taking twice as long to complete a task?
Because an awful lot of employers can't seem to shake the focus on pure-and-simple time rather than productivity. (Why, yes, A does a lot of work, but she never wants to stay late, like good old team player B...) Smart employers don't, but I think we all know that smart isn't necessarily the rule in every workplace.
Anecdotally, I see this all the time in law, and not because of billables. People who arrive super-early and leave after X hours are not regarded as highly as people who put in X hours, but leave later (because they started later). There's just something about an employee staying late that warms a boss's heart.
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