Last summer I was at a conference where a colleague referred to herself (only half-seriously) as a “person of gender”. Of course I ended up thinking to myself “well, I’m a person of gender too. Everyone is a person of gender.” And I think that was rather her point.
Today I was at a committee meeting of science professors, gathered around to give an award that was to go to one science professor – who could be in any science discipline. Of course it’s impossible to choose a “best” science professor across disciplines. How would you choose between, say, cell biology and astrophysics? So inevitably such an award becomes a kind of message: Because all the candidates at this level are excellent, ultimately the committee is really deciding what statement it is trying to make through its choice.
Now it happens that a lot more men become science professors in the U.S. than women. And I mean a lot more. The ratio seems to be hovering at around five to one from figures I’ve seen. Yet I know from personal experience in teaching that I get just as many brilliant female students as brilliant male students – there is no gender-based difference that I’ve ever been able to tell. And I can tell you straight out, these days in the sciences all the academic departments I know are actively looking for women faculty. So clearly there is self-selection going on here: Men are choosing to stay in the sciences at this level a lot more than women are.
While I am indeed a “person of gender” (as is everyone) I am also a “person of science”. And speaking as a person of science, the available evidence from that five to one faculty gender ratio tells me that four out of five qualified young women are choosing not to go into the sciences in academia. This constitutes a phenomenally huge portion of our nation’s best talent not finding its way into the sciences!
So when it comes time to confer awards, it’s my identity as a “person of science”, not as a “person of gender”, that encourages me to confer awards upon women, because I want to find ways to help reach that huge portion of our nation’s young people who would benefit from role models.
In short, speaking as a scientist, I find myself more inclined to give awards to a woman in science than to a man, for the benefit of the future of science itself.
I draw your attention to an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science.” The author, Peter Wood, is the Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars. His stance is patently evident in this passage:
“The science “problems” we now ask students to think about aren’t really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences. President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for speculating (in league with a great deal of neurological evidence) that innate difference might have something to do with the disparity in numbers of men and women at the highest levels of those fields. In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.” Officials of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education are looking to use Title IX to force science graduate programs to admit more women. The big problem? As of 2001, 80 percent of engineering degrees and 72 percent of computer-science degrees have gone to men.
A society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn’t a society that takes science education seriously. In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert famously drew up a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics; 18 have now been solved. Hilbert has also bequeathed us a way of thinking about mathematics and the sciences as a to-do list of intellectual challenges. Notably, Hilbert didn’t write down problem No. 24: “Make sure half the preceding 23 problems are solved by female mathematicians.”
Obsession with the sex and race of scientists is just one more indication of how American higher education has swung into orbit around the neutron star of identity politics. ”
I’m glad you were one of the ones helping decide the recipient of award, Ken. Perhaps if Wood were contributing to the decision, this generation’s Madame Curie or Grace Hopper might be passed over…