Women and Science - Again!
I have been reading the comments in a blog entry on women in science. The post questions the potential bias of the Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering produced by the National Academy of Science (NAS) in the US. The comments do not discuss the content of the report, the findings, nor the data but the meritoriousness of the study as the committee who submitted the study comprised only women.
The arguments are typical, stupid, mean and some clever!
There were a couple of gem articles in the comments section which taught me some useful socio psychological concepts:
Stereotype Threat (Claude Steele)
premise is that a person’s “social identity”—defined as group membership in categories such as age, gender, religion, and ethnicity—has significance when “rooted in concrete situations.”
the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype (ref)these situations are
identity contingencies
settings in which a person is treated according to a specific social identity.
Steele suggests that stereotype threat is a far more pervasive barrier to a truly integrated society than is overt racism or sexism.
when a person’s social identity is attached to a negative stereotype, that person will tend to underperform in a manner consistent with the stereotype. He attributes the underperformance to a person’s anxiety that he or she will conform to the negative stereotype.
Individuals will begin to believe they have to outperform because they are from that stereotypical group. Several studies have shown
that stereotype threat influences women’s performance on math tests, and thus is likely responsible for at least part of the observed gender differences in math ability (ref).
This concept explains alot about how some groups in society rank higher on so many variables but underperform in other areas. Personal and collective beliefs and all their feedback and mirroring can be so damaging. I have been thinking about culturalism, racism, caste, ethnic nationalism, identity politics and chauvinism and what happens in and to a society when the power imbalance and stereotypes have been reinforced and enacted for centuries. What does it take to overcome these.
The following article, takes a different turn and provides a unique perspective on the topic of women in science.
Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist
Biologist Who Underwent Sex Change Describes Biases Against Women
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 13, 2006; Page A10
Neurobiologist Ben Barres has a unique perspective on former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’s assertion that innate differences between the sexes might explain why many fewer women than men reach the highest echelons of science.
Barres said he has realized from personal experience that many men are unconscious of the privileges that come with being male, which leaves them unable to countenance talk of glass ceilings and discrimination.
Below are some great lines!
"Does anyone doubt if you study harder you will do better on a test?" Barres asked. "The mere existence of an IQ difference does not say it is innate. . . . Why do Asian girls do better on math tests than American boys? No one thinks they are innately better."
innate differences as explanations for disparities become absurd if applied to previous eras. "You won’t see a Chinese face or an Indian face in 19th-century science," she said. "It would have been tempting to apply this same pattern of statistical reasoning and say, there must be something about European genes that give rise to greater mathematical talent than Asian genes."
"I think we want to step back and ask, why is it that almost all Nobel Prize winners are men today?" she concluded. "The answer to that question may be the same reason why all the great scientists in Florence were Christian."
