New York Times essay examines science’s scarcity of women
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8010
Writer Eileen Pollack teaches creative writing in a University of Michigan master of fine arts (MFA) program. She holds not only an MFA from the prestigious writing program at the University of Iowa, but a Yale University bachelor of science in physics. Media attention has begun to develop for her long New York Times Sunday magazine essay “Why are there still so few women in science? ”
For Pollack, that headlined question is personal. She describes her own short stint in science: In 1978, as one of Yale’s first two women to earn a BS in physics, she graduated “summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching [herself] to program Yale’s mainframe computer.” Then she adds, “But I didn’t go into physics as a career.”
Why not? In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, inspired outrage by conjecturing publicly about possible innate differences between women and men concerning science and mathematics. Pollack writes, “As I read the heated responses to his comments, I realized that even I wasn’t sure why so many women were still giving up on physics and math before completing advanced degrees.” She continues:
I decided to look up my former classmates and professors, review the research on women’s performance in STEM fields and return to Yale to see what, if anything, had changed since I studied there. I wanted to understand why I had walked away from my dream, and why so many other women still walk away from theirs.
Pollack mixes anecdotes from her own and others’ experience with her research review. She focuses extensively on the 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students ” and on the views of one of its authors, Jo Handelsman. That paper famously reported on a sociology experiment that hinged on responses to job-application materials from a pair of fictional scientists with identical qualifications, but with the names Jennifer and John. “Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant,” the PNAS paper said. “These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female.”
Pollack also cites international student-testing results and MIT’s study on the status of women faculty in science. She devotes a paragraph to the February 2012 American Institute of Physics study “Women in physics: A tale of limits ,” by Rachel Ivie and Casey Langer Tesfaye:
But broader studies show that the perception of discrimination is often accompanied by a very real difference in the allotment of resources. In February 2012, the American Institute of Physics published a survey of 15,000 male and female physicists across 130 countries. In almost all cultures, the female scientists received less financing, lab space, office support and grants for equipment and travel, even after the researchers controlled for differences other than sex. “In fact,” the researchers concluded, “women physicists could be the majority in some hypothetical future yet still find their careers experience problems that stem from often unconscious bias.”
Pollack expresses dismay at finding “that the cultural and psychological factors that [she] experienced in the ‘70s not only persist but also seem all the more pernicious in a society in which women are told that nothing is preventing them from succeeding in any field. If anything, the pressures to be conventionally feminine seem even more intense now.” As evidence of stereotyping, she cites the two prominent female-scientist characters on the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” which has drawn substantial viewing audiences since it first came on the air in 2007. Pollack declares it “beyond dispute” that “the disparity between men and women’s representation in science and math arises from culture rather than genetics.”
She emphasizes the importance of encouragement by professors, and she sees “real change” taking place. Near the end, she narrates a conversation with Yale graduate students:
Four young women—one black, two white, one Asian by way of Australia—explained to me how they had made it so far when so many other women had given up.
“Oh, that’s easy,” one of them said. “We’re the women who don’t give a crap.”
Don’t give a crap about?
“What people expect us to do.”
“Or not do.”
“Or about men not taking you seriously because you dress like a girl. I figure if you’re not going to take my science seriously because of how I look, that’s your problem.”
Pollack’s final two paragraphs, referring back to those women, require quoting:
As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture—a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources.
And yet, as I listened to these four young women laugh at the stereotypes and fears that had discouraged so many others, I was heartened that even these few had made it this far, that theirs will be the faces the next generation grows up imagining when they think of a female scientist.
The essay has been discussed briefly in at least five places online at the Wall Street Journal. Write-ups have appeared at The Scientist , The Verge , Time and Politico . NPR’s brief interview with Pollack can be heard online .
---
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.