Yesterday J. drew our attention to an article by Peter Wood in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which Wood posits that the drive to increase enrollment by women in the sciences is based on a destructive feminist political agenda. This is one of those situations (familiar to anyone observing recent campaigns for the U.S. Presidency) in which a viewpoint is simply dismissed outright as being driven by preconceived doctrine, and therefore devoid of rational merit.
But in this case, it seems to me that cold hard rational science is against Peter Wood. I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth spelling it out in more detail, because our nation’s economic well-being is at stake. Let us begin with the myth that women cannot do science. Current secondary level test scores in science show male and female students scoring at an essentially equal level. If there is any bias at all in these numbers due to the long history of girls being told that “girls can’t do science”, these numbers suggest that female students actually have an innately greater facility in these areas than do their male counterparts. But let’s put that aside, and take the current numbers at face value in their message that ability in science has no gender bias.
What then are we to make of the current situation, in which only one out of every six science professors is female? Since the evidence rules out innate ability as the deciding factor, we must conclude that this disparity is due to environmental factors. And that leads us to the following diagram:
If we simply look at the numbers, we see that all of the social, political and economic factors that discourage women from pursuing science careers in higher education are having an enormous – and quantifiable – negative effect on our nation’s productivity. We are only able to utilize 60% of our nation’s top level talent for cutting edge scientific research. This is staggeringly wasteful – like throwing away $40 out of every $100 you earn.
Considering how much of our nation’s wealth depends upon its achievements in the sciences, I would argue, in marked contrast to Peter Wood’s sanguine view, that more resources should go into addressing this problem. Wood makes the following statement:
“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.”
The assertion that 18 of Hilbert’s problems have been resolved is rather simplistic. But setting this point aside, it is quite reasonable to assert that, had we been able to utilize that 40% of potential top mathematicians who have gone into other fields, we might also by now have a solution to problem 8 (the Reimann Hypothesis) and problem 12, as well as full solutions to problems 9, 11 and 15.
Often those who point fingers and cry “politics” are themselves unwittingly following a doctrinaire agenda. Politics aside, a nation operating at only 60% efficiency in scientific research in a competitive global economy is in a state of crisis. All of us, no matter our gender, need to recognize this state of crisis and address it.