Column: x + y + RBG

When I started grad school in the fall of 1999, my entering class of 23 physics students contained 7 women. That number shocked everyone—because it was so high. Only 20% of the physics bachelor’s degrees conferred that spring had gone to women, and there were just 2 women among the 55 faculty in the department.

By January, our number was already down to six. One of the women was so viciously bullied by her male research colleagues that she dropped out.

A few years later, a woman from another class was having inexplicable trouble with her research. After months of frustration, her adviser agreed to put a hidden camera in the lab, and they solved the mystery: Her experiment was being sabotaged by a labmate—who also happened to be a vengeful ex-boyfriend.

For as long as I’ve been part of the STEM community, I’ve been acutely aware of my status as one of a scarce number of women and girls. I’ve noticed that even well-meaning initiatives to counter that imbalance—like the award I got at a math competition when I was 12, not for making the overall leaderboard but for being the girl who had beaten all the other girls—nevertheless reinforce that there’s something a little bit odd about someone like me being somewhere like that. And I’ve wondered how we as a community can do better.

Miller’s Diary

Physics Today editor Johanna Miller reflects on the latest Search & Discovery section of the magazine, the editorial process, and life in general.

So it was with great interest that I picked up Eugenia Cheng’s book x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender . Cheng brings mathematical reasoning—in the form of abstraction and logic, not necessarily numbers and equations—to bear on a topic that’s typically treated by statistics, psychology, and feminist theory. I like mathematical reasoning, and I like cross-disciplinary thinking, so I dug in.

Cheng’s thesis is that rather than talking about “masculine” and “feminine” character traits, which leads to questions like whether women should “learn to act more like men,” we should consider the traits themselves, which she describes with the repurposed words ingressive and congressive. Ingressive behaviors, in Cheng’s theory, focus on the self over society: putting oneself forward, taking risks in pursuit of personal glory, racing to be the first or the best, measuring success in terms of money and prestige. And congressive behaviors focus on society (or at least the work to be done) over self: cooperating, collaborating, pursuing work that helps people, bringing together knowledge and skills without keeping constant track of who deserves how much credit.

Cheng observes that, while successful men tend to be ingressive, many notable women—including Michelle Obama, Emmy Noether, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Cheng herself, who gave up a traditional academic career to teach math to art students—prefer to work congressively. The association isn’t perfect; there are also ingressive women and congressive men. And Cheng doesn’t worry about figuring out how strong the correlation is or whether it’s the result of nature, nurture, or something else.

That’s because none of those things matter to her central point, which I think is ingenious: Although many of our institutions, in STEM and in the wider world, are structured to reward ingressive behavior, it doesn’t have to be that way. Schools in many countries encourage or require students to compete with one another—but knowledge and understanding aren’t limited resources, and there’s no reason all students can’t or shouldn’t have as much of them as they want. Researchers working on the same problem don’t have to view one another as rivals. Top honors such as the Nobel Prizes don’t have to be limited to a few individuals. Employers, when handing out raises and promotions, don’t have to prioritize the employees who ask for them most forcefully.

And so on. If we can all do our part to make our corners of the world a little bit more congressive, we can build a scientific community that’s not only more welcoming of women and congressive men, but perhaps even more productive overall. Cheng has a lot of ideas for steps you can take if you teach a class, lead a research group, give public talks, or even just converse with people.

I’m inspired by Cheng’s vision of a more congressive future, and I’m going to give some serious thought to what it means for my colleagues and me at Physics Today. But it can’t be the whole solution to inequality between the sexes. It’s not, as the Guardian‘s review of Cheng’s book suggests, an “end to the gender wars.” Nor is it, as Cheng herself claims, an “ungendered approach to feminism” (which is a contradiction in terms).

Cheng is probably right that one big reason women, more than men, are discouraged from pursuing careers in math and science is that we don’t like how ingressive we feel we’d need to be to succeed. But it’s not the only reason. Another big part is the treatment we receive just because we’re women: things like implicit bias , sexual harassment , misogynist bullying, and that constant drumbeat of “There’s something a little bit odd about someone like you being somewhere like this.”

Cheng briefly acknowledges that sexism exists and won’t be completely demolished by a push toward congressivity. But throughout the book, she worries that acknowledging women’s interests as a group is “divisive” and “exclusionary of men” and should thus be avoided.

I think her concern is misplaced. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species; male and female people can usually be distinguished by sight, irrespective of their character traits; and they’re treated differently because of it. Ceding the tools and language to address those differences is neither feminist nor a good idea.

While I was gathering my thoughts for this column a few weeks ago, I heard the sad news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. As a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg was a pioneer of feminist legal thought, and it’s due in great part to her work that the barriers to women’s entry into formerly male domains, although still extant, are much lower than they were half a century ago.

In the early 1970s, when Ginsburg began chipping away at sex discrimination in the law, she found some of her most noteworthy successes in arguing cases on behalf of men. (One of those cases forms the main plot of the 2018 film On the Basis of Sex , which also includes some great portrayals of ingressive and congressive law school classrooms.) In a world so steeped in rigid gender roles that they pervaded even the tax code, Ginsburg convinced male judges of the need for change by showing them that the discriminatory laws occasionally harmed people who looked like them.

I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for Ginsburg to take that approach, given her firsthand experience of how women, not men, bore the brunt of sexism. But acting on that frustration would have been counterproductive, because it was male judges who needed to be convinced.

I briefly wondered whether, in bristling against Cheng’s preoccupation with “divisiveness,” I was revealing my own counterproductive frustration. Maybe Cheng’s manifesto was even wiser than I’d first realized.

But it’s not the early 1970s anymore, and I think men these days deserve more credit than Cheng gives them. Some men, to be sure, are still just sexist, and they’ll continue to be sexist whether or not they’re appeased by efforts not to be divisive. Other men—based on personal experience, I’d say most men—would agree that all people, male and female alike, deserve an equal chance to succeed in physics, math, or whatever discipline they choose, and that if a field is less welcoming of one group than another, then that’s wrong. Those men want to do right by their female colleagues, but they might be unsure of what they can do to help.

If this describes you, I encourage you to take a page from Cheng’s book and look for ways to encourage congressivity, not just women per se, in your professional surroundings. But continue also to look out for sexist behavior, challenge it when you see it, and listen when women tell you how their experiences differ from yours. Because that’s important too.