Are women innately ill suited to scientific inquiry? Harvard's last President thinks so. What do others say?
Where are all the women? This is a question that researchers and feminists have been asking for the last few decades. The fact is women make up more than half of all graduate students but only 10 percent of tenured faculty in North American university science programs. And researchers explain this disparity with unsubstantiated views innate gender differences are the cause - that women are naturally unsuited to scientific inquiry. While this perspective seems almost too antiquated to be taken seriously, readers are reminded that just last year Lawrence Summers stepped down as President of Harvard University after commenting that innate gender differences accounted for the small number of female academics.
Ben Barres, Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford Medical School has a different perspective. Dr. Barres is uniquely experienced in this area. Prior to his transgendering process in1997, Dr. Barres worked as a female scientist. Today, he maintains that gender bias within the scientific community privileges male funding applications, and diminishes women's career opportunities. His article published last year in the academic journal Nature recounts the various ways in which his scientific work as a man has been treated differently than his scientific work as a women. This view is substantiated by scientists like Candace Pert, a leading psychoneuroimmunologist whose account of her own challenges are well-documented in Molecules of Emotion.
Structural inequalities hinge on traditional views that women are less mathematically inclined than men, and therefore less capable of scientific inquiry. Centuries old views link women with emotion and men with rationality, and fuel the argument that human brains are gendered. Brain gendering makes women less suited to careers in science, and coincidently, more suited to careers that involve caretaking like nursing, and primary level teaching.
Barres suggests gender sensitive selection processes that place more women on selection panels, and evaluate work according to quality rather than quantity. Women still bare the lion's share of childcare responsibilities which impacts on the quantity of papers published. He encourages women to speak out against discrimination when and where it is experienced, and challenges universities and research institutes to stress diversity in faculty composition. Dr. Barres also acknowledges the importance of mentoring in guiding younger, less experienced female scientists through the murky waters of the old boys' network.
