Biocurious

/ a biophysics blog

Science of Gender and Science

Posted 11 May 2005 by Andre under

A lot of people have been talking (and blogging) about comments made by Lawrence Summers regarding differences in representation in the sciences between men and women. Summers suggested that the disparity was due more to innate differences between genders than the effects of socialization. Needless to say, debate ensued and a lot of people said a lot of things without knowing much and without learning much.

I’ve tried to keep BioCurious free of political rants, although at times I’ve been tempted by people being really stupid or really inspiring. It might not seem that way, but this post is not giving into that temptation: the question of gender differences in cognitive ability is an empirical one and definitely has a biological component so it’s perfect material for this blog. The reason I’m writing it now instead of a couple of months ago when the issue was more current is that I’ve just read a great exchange between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Check out the latest issue of Edge for transcripts (with slides), video, and audio of their presentations and subsequent discussion.

Here is a brief summary of my opinion on the subject.* There are clearly innate gender differences and there is also the possibility that these gender differences manifest themselves in such a way that there are more men who are capable of performing at the leading edge in fields such as physics and math than there are women. But I think it is premature to think that we are currently at equilibrium levels of men and women in academic positions. One only has to look at the first figure in this report from the American Institute of Physics to see why. The number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees and PhDs in physics has been steadily increasing since the 70s. Given that innate gender differences are biological and are therefore a product of evolution, they are not expected to change greatly on the scale of decades, so this increased representation of women in graduating PhD classes has some other cause. To me, it seems likely that it shows the gradual reduction in barriers presented to women over time. I would be more likely to accept the innate differences argument if the percentage of women receiving PhDs had increased and then plateaued at some value significantly below 50%. Maybe it will. The figure suggests that if it happens, it will be within my lifetime. An important open question is why this is taking much longer in physics than in other fields.

*not really based on the talks I linked to, so feel free to skip this section and go straight there to read their better informed and more interesting opinions.

UPDATE: The Reality Club at edge.org has responded to the debate I linked to above. Steven Pinker also took the opportunity to counter. You can see all their comments here.

  

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