There was a really interesting article in the New York Times earlier this week which has been giving me a lot of thought. It deals with that thorny question of why there are so few women in science and engineering faculties. It's a big question for me, as I am tempted to dive through the BP sized hole in my career and leave the scientific pipeline myself.
The pipeline refers to the years of university, graduate school, post doctoral training, and slavish years as early faculty that are required to obtain that holy grail of the scientific endeavour, the tenured position. The leaks are women leaving the pipeline at every stage. For example, in the field of geology in 2003, women made up 42% of BA/BSc recipients, 45% of MSc recipients, 39% of PhDs, 26% of assistant professors, 14% of tenured associate professors and a paltry 8% of full professors (Leaks in the pipeline, Holmes and O'Connel, 2007, Nature 446:346).
I don't think there's any doubt as to the major reason that women leave the profession in droves: the road to a professorial job is long, arduous, pays poorly, involves a great deal of travel, upheaval, and little support. For example, in my field, a postdoc on support from his/her supervisor can expect to make between 30-45k; if you have a fellowship that can improve the situation, but even then most fellowships are two years in length. Add to the difficulty that this is usually after 5-6 years of graduate school, and you are expected to postdoc in another institution, and have roughly 5 years to prove yourself capable of building your own research program, and you can see how the prospect starts to lose its appeal.
In 2005, Larry Summers, the then President of Harvard, gave a speech at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce where he famously expounded on the lack of women in upper levels of science. He was widely excoriated for having said that women aren't as good at math and science and men, but in fact that isn't what he said. As well as acknowledging the lifestyle reasons that women leave science, he spoke on research that suggests that while the average intelligence of men and women is equivalent, the distribution of mathematical/scientific intelligence amongst males may be higher. This means that the extremes of the distribution, or the best at science and mathematical reasoning, will be more likely to be male (by the same token, if intelligence is normally distributed, the dumbest will also be male).
Clearly this is a provocative argument. Luckily, it's testable. The authors of the study "Sex differences in the cognitive abilities: a 30 year examination" (Wai et al. Intelligence, article in press) looked at the SAT and ACT scores of seventh graders over 30 years. The use of two separate types of standardized testing helps balance the inherent biases in standardize tests, and the long time scale allows for inferences of cultural influences on test-taking ability. The results showed that while mean intelligence was equivalent between the sexes, males were overrepresented in the highest math and science reasoning scores, and women were overrepresented in the highest verbal reasoning scores.
I haven't ranted about this yet, but I want to emphasize that one study is never enough to firmly determine whether something is true. Standardized tests are notoriously culturally biased, and even by grade seven children are inundated with gender stereotypes that may discourage either gender from performing their best. However, the demonstration of this trend across 30 years is compelling. In fact, in the 80's, the bias towards males in math and science reasoning was much more pronounced; the ratio has dropped, but has leveled at its current value of roughly 3:1 for the last twenty years. The distribution of ability between men and women requires far more study: is this a trend also seen in other countries? At different ages? Does performance on one of these tests correlate with future ability?
More importantly, what does this mean in terms of how few women there are in science? This is where Larry Summers' address and the New York Times article become more nuanced. Both suggest that as well as social factors, inherent ability may play a role. Theoretically, the high powered institutions such as Harvard hire the brightest scientists, probably those individuals who are in the top 0.1% of the distribution. If the distribution of mathematical intelligence is skewed, then these positions can't help but be filled by men.
Well, I don't think that anyone thinks that the situation is that simple, and in Larry Summers' defense, he never said that it was. (Did he deserve to lose his job over what he said? I don't think so. If you read the text of his speech, he clearly says that there are social reasons that contribute to the lack of women in science, and also admitted to being deliberately provocative. Is provocative so bad in a representative of higher learning?) Still, in my experience, the women who leave science were just as bright as those men who stayed in the game. And I also don't think that every scientist, male or female, was necessarily drawn from the brightest of the population.
The truth, from my perspective, is that the pipeline just gets to be too long, and largely runs steeply uphill. Perhaps it's true, as Larry Summers said, that jobs that require complete devotion and ruthless competitiveness tend to be filled by men because they are more willing to give it all. To spend nights and weekends away from young families, and be constantly, mentally devoted to their subject. And maybe because men find it easier to be competitive, driven, aggressive and demanding (isn't that right, Hillary?)
How science got to be such a high powered career I'll never know. It seems ridiculous to be classed as such, especially once you've met a few scientists. Regardless, increased support for women in science can't help but improve their representation. Some input from the verbally talented gender can't but help those Big Bang Theory types.
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