The freedom to choose physics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010081
Thor, the six-year-old son of my friends Anne and Vince, likes to wear orange. Emma, the (nearly) six-year-old daughter of my friends Laura and Neil, likes to wear pink.
Thor and Emma popped into my mind yesterday when I came across a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper’s authors, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University, scrutinized studies from the past 20 years to answer the question: Why are women underrepresented in physics and other math-intensive fields of science?
Perhaps to some readers’ surprise, Ceci and Williams concluded that
despite frequent assertions that women’s current underrepresentation in math-intensive fields is caused by sex discrimination by grant agencies, journal reviewers, and search committees, the evidence shows women fare as well as men in hiring, funding, and publishing (given comparable resources). That women tend to occupy positions offering fewer resources is not due to women being bypassed in interviewing and hiring or being denied grants and journal publications because of their sex. It is due primarily to factors surrounding family formation and childrearing, gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences—s ome originating before or during adolescence—and secondarily to sex differences at the extreme right tail of mathematics performance on tests used as gateways to graduate school admission underrepresentation.
As Ceci and Williams point out, the impact of raising a family affects the prospects of all women scientists, not just those in math-intensive fields. Improving the support available to scientists with young families, adjusting tenure process would help to remedy that source of underrepresentation.
But what to do about “gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences”? The question is tricky because, as Ceci and Williams state,
to the extent that women’s choices are freely made and women are satisfied with the outcomes, then we have no problem.
Indeed, studies cited by the two authors show that adolescent girls prefer careers that focus on people rather than things. That preference, according to the studies, accounts for women’s large presence in biology and medicine and their small presence in math-intensive fields.
But to what extent is that preference the outcome of free choice? I don’t doubt that young Thor made his unusual and distinctive wardrobe choice by himself and not under the influence of either society or his parents. Only Dutch sports fans favor orange garments.
Young Emma’s preference for pink, on display in this photo, seems more rooted in contemporary American society than in her free choice. All five of my young nieces favor or used to favor pink or its close relative purple.
Paradoxically, pink preference could be grounds for optimism. If physics were marketed to girls as skillfully and vigorously as pink clothing is, maybe the underrepresentation in our ranks would begin to diminish.
Don’t get me wrong. By talking about orange, pink, and purple clothing, I don’t mean to be flippant. I agree with Ceci and Williams:
To the extent that [career] choices are constrained by biology and/or society, and women are dissatisfied with the outcomes, or women’s talent is not actualized, then we most emphatically have a problem.
PS Knowing how punctilious young children are about their ages, I should point out that Emma was four years old when the photo was taken.
