What You Don’t Know Can Hurt
You: Illogical dimensions to
being a woman scientist.
By Kristy Dyer
Kristy Dyer is in her last year of Ph.D. research at North Carolina State University and will be starting
an NSF Fellowship in Fall 2001 at National Radio Astronomy Observatory. She is an alumna of Mt.
Holyoke. She studies thermal and non-thermal X-ray emission in supernova remnants. This article
originated in a talk given to the 2001 Invitational Conference on K-12 Outreach from University
Science Departments sponsored by the NCSU Science House and the Burroughs Welcome Fund.
June 2001
FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES I want
to you regard me as an escapee from the
hard-science zoo. I’ll report on the
conditions, hopefully finishing before the zookeepers
note my absence and come after me with
nets. The following is my
own experience and it
should not be assumed that
I speak for all zoo animals.
Certain people (men
and women) are drawn to
the hard sciences (by which
I mean math, physics,
chemistry and engineering).
The scientific ideals we
picked up as we struggled
through our classes were worthy and principled.
We are detached, we are skeptical, we offer our
results up for peer review, our truths can
be replicated.
There is a long and noble history of science —
we trace our roots back to Aristotle (the use of
logical deduction) and Galileo (experiments
under controlled conditions). Newton decreed
nature could be described by mathematics
(although he had to invent the mathematics to do
it). Descartes gave us Cartesian reductionism,
which among other things specifies that causes
can be unambiguously separated from effects.
Bacon laid the ground rules for the scientific
method, recording observations in an impartial
and totally objective way without prior prejudice.
I want to point out that none of the above
actually prohibits women or minorities from
succeeding in science. This is a noble and highminded
set of rules for making sense of the
universe. This is why I fell in love with science.
This is unfortunately not the way science is done.
It turns out that science has a culture. Karl
Popper, a philosopher of science, found that in
fact it is not possible to be totally objective:
decisions about what is a relevant observation are
influence by background assumptions — in fact,
context matters!
“Paradigms Lost” by John Casti gives the
following simple example. A series of numbers is
given {1, 2, 4, 8} where the “correct” continuation
of the series depends on the context: 16, 32,
128 (doubling), or 9, 11, 15 (differences in
original sequence), or “Who Do We Appreciate!”
which is certainly correct if the context is high
school sports.
A second example comes from a former
professor of mine. In an effort to bring everyday
science examples to a “physics for poets” class,
he gave the following test question: “Why are
stop signs red?” To which a liberal art student
answered, “So they can be easily seen.” He felt
that this showed up the impossibility of trying to
teach non-science majors. (What he wanted was
an answer that discussed wavelength and
reflected and absorbed light). It seemed to me
that the student had answered the question
perfectly correctly in a different context.
Thomas Kuhn unearthed further evidence of
this unexamined scientific
culture. Most scientists have
heard of (and some have
actually read) “The Structure
of Scientific Revolution,”
which delineates the ways in
which scientific progress is
made, not according to or
within the accepted scientific
method, but in a wider
scientific culture where
scientific paradigms are
broken, and then reformed.
In order to understand
where these majestic rules
break down, I’ve plotted the
perceived “Progress of
women in science” (Figure
1). This figure has several
interesting characteristics. It
begins in the 1800’s (ancient history) with zero
women in science. It then shows the situation
improving as rapidly as possible (sounds like
exponential growth to me) with equity either
having been obtained in the last decade (independent
of whatever decade we are in) or equity
about to be obtained (before I reached graduate
school at the very latest).
One thing becomes immediately clear — if you
think the progress has been an exponential
growth curve, clearly an overshoot (indicated by
the dotted line) is likely — which explains why so
many men in science think we have overshot
equity and women are now clearly being
preferred for jobs. A second possible curve (the
lower dotted line) is the “S” curve beloved of
population studies — we are asymptotically
approaching equity. If you believe this curve, any
complaints about current problems are picking
nits, since the problems are so much smaller than
in the past and clearly progress is being made as
fast as (scientifically) possible.
Unfortunately the real progress of women in
science is much more like Figure 2 and there are
consequences for mistaking it for Figure 1. To
start, the figures disagree
over whether inequities have
been fixed. Figure 1 also
shows monotonic progress,
implying that women in
science never lose ground
once gained. It’s a daunting
reality, not only that we at
times have lost ground, but
that the number of women
working in science is less
affected by education and
public policy than by an
outbreak of war (Sputnik was
mentioned as major motivating
factors in the careers of
the first three speakers:
Marye Ann Fox, Jane Butler
Kahle and Jack Rhoton!). I don’t know where to
put the equity line in Figure 2. If you taught at
the university during WWII, and were laid off
when the men returned from the front, had you
(momentarily) achieved equity?
The perceived graph has no historical women
scientists, where as the actual graph shows that
there have always been a few women in science.
This leads to what I’ll call the “Marie Curie
Effect.” Often we are called upon to list
famous scientists:
Einstein
Newton
Feynman
Marie Curie
Stephen Hawking
(Odd isn’t it how some scientists have two
names and some only one?). We put Marie Curie
on the list because we want to include role
models for women and we don’t want women’s
contributions to be forgotten. However, from
glancing at this list I would deduce that 20% of
the great historical achieving scientists were
women. We are over-representing women, and
therefore minimizing their absence and the issues
that lead to that absence. When we make these
lists we never mention all the women of Marie
Curie’s cohort who were unable to become
scientists. This also leads to another fallacy —
we like to emphasize that our hero-scientists have
overcome enormous obstacles to succeed —
Einstein being a Jew in Nazi Germany, Newton
banished from the University due to the plague,
etc. However when we over-represent women in
science we suggest the following: “If women
succeeded historically in producing important
scientific work despite enormous obstacles (such
as not being allowed access to higher education!)
then if women today are not succeeding it must
be because their work is not of sufficient scientific
importance.”
In fact Marie Curie is not statically
significant in her time. These obstacles (as well as
more subtle ones) were effective in reducing the
number of women scientists from N to basically
zero. [Ed. Note: c.f. See “Science Has No
Gender” by Sethanne Howard, STATUS
January 2000.]
Here I am going to take an unpopular stance. I
am going to sing the praises of mediocrity. We
will not have achieved equity in science until
mediocre women achieve tenure — women who
have solid but uninteresting research programs,
have brought money into the university and are
(just) adequate. Most people in favor of the
inclusion of women in science argue that women
make great scientists. I want to point out that
most men in science don’t qualify for the list of
greats I’ve listed above. If anything, the scientific
record has shown that progress is made on the
back of lots of mundane, dull labor, as well as
new ideas from unexpected sources.
The scientists who are concerned about women
in physics and astronomy talk a lot about the
“leaky pipeline” (Table 1). Each part of the
pipeline should be flowing into the next, but
instead is leaking girls/women. You could set the“necks” at different levels but I’ve chosen a few
common ones. Where I could find data I’ve
placed the ratio of women/men for Physical
Sciences + Engineering on the left and the
percentage of women/men in Astronomy (my
field) to the right. The early stages, marked with“?” are guesses on my part.
The problem with this pipeline concept is that
there is, in fact, no “flowing” going on. Rather, it
is a “snapshot” of populations at any given moment, the easiest data to gather. The girls
interested in science are not the same population
that becomes tenured faculty — no one has ever
done this longitudinal study.
There are consequences for mistaking a“snapshot” pipeline for a longitudinal study. It
places the largest responsibility for the leaks at
the “soft” end — home life, kindergarten, grade
school, high school. These are areas not in the
responsibility realm of hard scientists. It lets
hiring committees, tenure committees and
conference organizing committees off the hook.
Effectively they say, “If we were given anything
to work with we could include women but until
there are women to include, we are just doing
our job.”
At some level we do recognize this is a“snapshot”. Often we think it fully explains the
number of tenured women professors — there
were simply fewer girls interested in science in
the 1960’s when they were young. There is
however no scientific evidence to support that
thesis — I suspect that the 1960’s pipeline was
narrower at the beginning but also less efficient
than the present pipeline at “leaking” women at
later stages. I encourage someone to refute this!
We are encouraging girls in science — where
do we expect them to go? The problem is
complex — the closer a woman comes to being a
model scientist, accepting without question the
scientific culture I enumerated above, the less
prepared she will be to cope with the inequities
she will encounter. The culture as it stands simply
does not allow the following questions to be
posed, let alone answered: Is peer review biased?
Are men and women in science evaluated by
different standards? Is there a culture to science
that works to exclude women?
There are probably more questions I should be
asking but as a model scientist I can’t even
formulate them. I do know that when I talk to
girls interested in science, undergraduates and
potential graduate students, I have to admit I lie
to them — I tell them how wonderful science is
and I point to the one or two (statistically
insignificant) women at the top to prove it can
be done. I don’t tell them how many women
drop out of graduate school or how dismal the
employment statistics are for women who
do graduate.
There are many desires and plans to include
women and minorities in the sciences — these
admirable solutions don’t exist in a vacuum —
it’s worth examining the paradigms they assume
as context. There are several standard paradigms:
- The deficit model. Girls are like boys but they
lack certain things. Programs that try to give
girls hands-on experience in labs, because they
often get less experience than boys are
operating within a deficit model.
- The difference model. Sarah Berenson’s Girl
Math program operates within a difference
model. She believes that girls are different than
boys, no less talented, and that by changing the
context of math problems we can involve girls
in math relevant to their values.
I believe we need to move to a climate model if
we are going to understand and address these
problems. Both the deficit model and the
difference model take as a standard the way boys/
male scientists do things. Both put girls/women
scientists under the microscope to examine why
they are different. This is like finding a threelegged
frog in a polluted pond and taking the
frog back to the lab for an interview, demanding“Why did you grow an extra leg?” without ever
examining the pond, the environment.
There have been quite a few studies of women
in science — I think it is time to study men in
science — the default culture, and to make that
culture the responsibility of the scientists.
Women, who make up less than 5% of tenured
physics faculty, are not in a position of power. It
is a fact that we are not the ones granting tenure,
directing research funds or guiding hiring
committees — we cannot solve the problem of
the lack of women in science by studying women in science because women in science don’t
actually have control over the problem.
I think until we do this — examine the
underlying culture of the hard sciences we
will not be able to place effective patches on
the leaky pipeline. I worry that it’s dishonest of
us to work so hard to patch the beginning, when
even students who clear many hurdles, will
simply be cannon fodder in graduate school.
And I think we need to teach the culture of
science to students at all levels — knowing the
unspoken culture as well as that noble facade can
provide them with the tools they will need to
overcome barriers, barriers the statistics make
all too clear.
Further material on the culture of science
and its effect on women:
“Women Science and Technology: A Reader in Feminist
Studies” by Wyer et al. 2001, published by Routledge.
Statistics on women in science and engineering came
from the NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf00327/
pdfstart.htm (2000).
Statistics on women in astronomy came from STATUS
June 2000 http://www.aas.org/~cswa/, and from a
1999 AAS survey which was reported in Bulletin of the
American Astronomical Society 31, 1552 #121.01.
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