In January 2005, the then president of Harvard College, Larry Summers, publicly questioned the intrinsic ability of women in the physical sciences in front of an audience of intellectuals. This incident became infamous and endlessly discussed. In January 2005, I was beginning my first semester back at Bryn Mawr College as a physics major after a one year leave of absence. At the time, I remember Summers' comments exploding across campus. The president of our college distributed a statement denouncing Summers' words. I remember thinking how lucky I was to go to an institution where my abilities would not be underestimated due to my gender. Although I remember reading several op-eds and discussing his remarks with friends, I never read the transcript of his talk or encountered a supporter of his views. The conversations I recall were very one-sided.

When pioneering feminists fought for women’s rights, they knew that they had a long battle ahead of them. Today, when most of us would like to think that women are equal, we still can’t quite put our finger on just why women are still underrepresented in the hard sciences. Women actually make up the majority in the so-called soft science fields like anthropology, and they have a large representation in many other high-powered and male dominated fields, but they are lagging behind in others.

The question as to why women are so sorely outnumbered in various scientific fields has been raging for years now, and almost every expert to ever glance at the issue has some pet theory that is sure to raise someone’s hackles.

 A Reaction to the “High-Powered Job Hypothesis” All my life I have thought of myself as a kind of scientist – from my childhood curiosity about the world to my matriculation at a “School of Science and Mathematics” to my physics degree from Bryn Mawr College, I have identified myself as being interested in and, to some degree, talented in the natural sciences and math.  I have not, however, ever identified myself as the high-powered kind of scientist pulling down six figures working and perhaps teaching at a major research institution.  I would infinitely rather do a job that al

Reconsidering The Boys Club

By E. Newbury

You've got it wrong. It isn't socialization that we should blame for gender roles, it's just pure logic and biology. Oh, and it’s these factors, combined with shoddy job market, that cause the lack of women in scientific fields not discrimination. It’s because our brains are different that women are bad at science and math.

R.Malfi
2/2/06

Thanks Larry, but No Thanks

Some say that gender equality is no longer an issue in the workplace. I've heard it myself, from the mouths of friends. Feeling, myself, that this statement is incorrect, I struggle to understand the source of this sentiment. Perhaps this belief is partly derived from the fact that an increasing number of women seek higher education. Perhaps it comes from seeing women like Hilary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Condoleezza Rice in leadership positions. There is no doubt that women have come a long way, that they've overcome many obstacles to enter positions formerly closed to the female sex. What remains to be seen, however, is a State of the Union Address where the room is 30 to 50 percent women. In this article, I wish to focus specifically on women in the sciences, but it is important to keep in mind that the ongoing dialogue presented here should be taken beyond this field into discussions about other professional areas and the workplace as a whole.

• Serendip's Exchange, a place (this place!) for conversations, blogs, forums and papers in progress. Please join in!

 

• Courses for Spring 2007:
  • Biology 202: Neurobiology and Behavior
  • Emergence 362
  • The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories
  • Gender and Science: Re-envisioning & Revising the Relation

   

Hey everyone! Marquise de Merteuil here, starting her evil letters. Just have one book keeping question. It's OK for me to post a blog entry as my forum writing for the week, right? My thoughts don't correspond to any existing thread, and I was thinking of creating a forum topic but just instinctively felt that "the blog" would be a more appropriate outlet. So people can comment on blogs, right? Because, as always, I would love to chat.

Since our course, "Evolution of Stories" is about the relationship between science and literature, we apply Prof. Grobstein's idea that science is a process "of getting it progressively less wrong" to Zadie Smith's idea that literature is the same thing, that classics are the best failures we have, since the author can never express "his true self." Or "soul" but somehow she feels in our society that word can't be said... But even in a course like this it is essential to keep in mind that literature is not just a discipline that can be connected to science, but its own rich field, and so I'd like to see if Smith's argument holds up from a literary point of view, or in other words if it describes literature in a compelling way.

I like the idea that Eden expresses in an earlier thread, How much of “me” is my choice?” It reminded me of something I read about child development. There are many theories on child mental development. Of these theories there is one theory by a man named Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. His theory illustrates development as being largely influenced and shaped by the culture and society that a child is living within or exposed to. Vygotsky views development as a process of inevitable acculturation.

The first few years in child development are precultural, but at 2 years of age, a child will begin to learn semiotic tools it will need to develop. At 2 years a child will begin to grasp language and symbolic thinking. With these tools a child will develop higher consciousness and take in the world through the onslaught that is verbal society. This means that a child’s exposure to language will cause acculturation and the child will assign meaning to words and concepts as they are used and viewed within the society he is living in. These concepts become concrete ideas and allow the child to build upon that foundation with other things that he experiences. No matter what the activity, when children observe the world about them, they will learn and develop values that will later determine his thoughts and actions. Such values are learned unconsciously and can be as little as the usage of the word “cup” and the actions associated with the word cup: “we share cups, we clean up after ourselves when we spill, we must be careful not to break cups.” This type of development allows younger minds to be guided by more knowledgeable individuals.

I found Chapters 1-4 to be very interesting. I'm going to be completely honest: Before I read the material, the thought of reading 80-some pages about evolution made me sick, as I am a Spanish major taking this class for a Div. II requirement & by spark of interest. I'm glad I read now because I learned some new things that 1) I have always wondered about but never cared or remembered to research & 2) just never occurred to me. For example, I never knew that the young Earth initially consisted of methane, molecular hydrogen, ammonia, and water vapor, and finally, oxygen came in increasing quantities with the rise of cyanobacteria.

I also agree with the theory that brain equals behavior. Data from fMRIs and PET scans is pretty convincing for me, but at the same time I think it is important to realize that these machines do not yet show “real time”. “Such images can be acquired with moderately good spatial and temporal resolution; images are usually taken every 1–4 seconds...(Wikipedia)”. Thinking about how quickly one can feel pain or think or react to any stimulus tells me that taking images every 1-4 seconds doesn’t give a very clear picture. So much more is most likely going on within the brain during those 1-4 seconds than the final image shows. Although the parts of the brain that were activated are still shown, they are not precise pictures.