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Like Flora, the statistic that surprised me the most was the one sited in Sonnert and Holton's section that cited that men published on average 2.8 publications/year whereas for women the ratio was 2.3 publications/year. This surprised me because of the weight put in the other two articles on how women publish less frequently and tend to get cited more. However, this overreaching statement seems to be pretty insignificant in the face of that statistic. Does producing .5 less publications/year really effect them so much? Furthermore, it boggles my mind that if men are that competitive as the articles make them sound, why they would focus so much on the production of the publications and not worry more about how they were being cited.

Another point of information that surprised me was the commentary in the same article about how men have a different professional style than women (pg67-68). This surprised me because the behavior described, with the men actively trying to gather a social network wheras women being more concerned with the issues discussed in "professor talk," seemed to be a role reversal. Aren't women supposed to be more concerned with and/or better adapted to creating large social networks? Isn't that what gossip is supposed to be all about? And in all three articles, it seemed to also be a foundation for the contrast between men and women that women were focusing more on "traditional methods" of forming science. Yet I believe it is also pointed out, at least in Thom and Sonnert and Holton's pieces, that one of the things that women bring to science is a unique perspective.

Which us to the worring statistic. One of the most discouraging statistics that came from the reading was the contrast between how frequently men and women think about gender. "Do men and women 'do science' differently? Yes, said many of our interviewees. Somewhat more women than men (60.8 percent vs. 49.4 percent) siad that they believed in the existence of gender differences in the work of scientists in general. In additon, substationally more women than men interviewees thought that their own gender influences the way they pursue their work." (pg67) It is interesting to contrast this statistic with the one from Ivie and Guo's article, where 25% of women said they would not discuss the situation of women in science with co-workers. (pg 9)

The reason this is troubling is that one can look at these statistics and conclude three things that could negatively effect women from just that factoid. The first is that it is all in women's heads that they are being discriminated against, that gender differences are only there because women think about them too much. The second is that, based on the fact that women adhere more to traditional methods of science, that they feel due to these gender differences they have to act more masculine in order to be a part of the science field. The last is related to that second point: that it doesn't matter anyway, because women would never talk about gender differences in the workplace for fear of standing out amonst their male peers.

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I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind -- which was also his mother's -- I learned that the mind is not sex-typed. -- Margaret Mead