"Nihilism is best done by professionals." - Iggy Pop

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Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?
Christina Hoff Sommers

"Women earn most of America’s advanced degrees but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the "problem."

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.”...

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks... The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”...

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences... Elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports...

If a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of fund­ing, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of cal­ibration could devastate academic science...

As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biol­ogy, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Why this is so is an interesting question—and the subject of a sub­stantial empirical literature. The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer.

There were, however, no disagreements at the congressional hearing. All five expert wit­nesses, and all five congressmen, Democrat and Republican, were in complete accord. They attributed the dearth of women in university science to a single cause: sexism. And there was no dispute about the solution. All agreed on the need for a revolutionary transformation of American science itself...

During the past 30 years, the humanities have been politicized and transformed beyond recognition. The sci­ences, however, have been spared. There seems to have been a tacit agreement, especially at the large research universities; radical activ­ists and deconstructionists were left relatively free to experiment with fields like comparative literature, cultural anthropology, communica­tions, and, of course, women’s studies, while the hard sciences—vital to our economy, health, and security, and to university funding from the federal government, corporations, and the wealthy entrepreneurs among their alumni—were to be left alone.

Departments of physics, math, chemis­try, engineering, and computer science have remained traditional, rigorous, competitive, relatively meritocratic, and under the control of no-nonsense professors dedicated to objec­tive standards. All that may be about to change. Following years of meticulous planning by the activists gathered for the hearing, the era of academic détente is coming to an end...

“The list of cultural norms that appear to disadvantage women... includes the favoring of disciplinary over interdisciplinary research and publications, and the only token attention given to teaching and other service during the tenure review process. Thus it seems that it is not necessarily conscious bias against women but an ingrained idea of how the academic enterprise ‘should be’ that presents the greatest challenge to women seeking academic S&E [science and engineering] careers.”

When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its suc­cess would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with compet­ing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women—but it gives the STEM-equity movement extraordinary scope, commensu­rate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal...

What is the basis for... attempts to balance the sta­tistics? If numerical inferiority were sufficient grounds for charges of discrimination or cul­tural insensitivity, Congress would be holding hearings on the crisis of underrepresentation of men in higher education. After all, women earn most of the degrees—practically across the board. What about male proportionality in the humanities, social sciences, and biol­ogy? The physical sciences are the exception, not the rule.

So why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty atti­tudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female pro­fessors in math, science, and engineering. Just 1 percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24 percent to sexist discrimination, and 74 percent to differences in what characteristically interests men and women.

Many experts who study male/female dif­ferences provide strong support for that 74 percent majority. Readers can go to books like David Geary’s Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (1998); Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), and Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (2003), for arguments suggest­ing that biology plays a distinctive—but not exclusive—role in career choices...

Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm—the “extreme male brain,” all systematizing and no empathizing. He believes that men are, “on average,” wired to be better systematizers and women to be bet­ter empathizers. It’s a daring claim—but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testoster­one and behaviors in both girls and boys from infancy into grade school...

After two major waves of feminism, women still predominate—some­times overwhelmingly—in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education, social work, veterinary medicine, and psychology, while men are overrepresented in the “system­atizing” vocations such as car repair, oil drilling, and electrical engineering.

Rachel Maines, a visiting scholar in science and technology studies at Cornell University, recently wrote an essay expressing amazement with women’s progress in veterinary medicine compared with engineering. Nationally, women now comprise fully 77 percent of students in veterinary schools, compared with 8 percent in the 1960s. Maines writes, “To be sure, pup­pies are cuter than microchips, but most of what veterinarians do isn’t about cute. Veterinary medicine…remains irreducibly bloody, messy, and often hazardous…. It certainly requires a rigorous scientific education that is at least as difficult and daunting as what engineering demands.”...

I located two female survivors—Sherry Gong, currently enrolled, and Kelley Harris, who com­pleted Math 55 with an A last year. “Did you encounter a hostile environment in that class?” I asked Miss Harris. She laughed. “I loved my classmates!” When she once thought of dropping out, it was her male friends in the course who persuaded her to stay. Sherry Gong was taken aback when inquired whether she felt that women in math were unwelcome or margin­alized. It was as if I had asked whether women had the vote. “It is 2007!” she reminded me...

[There is] a body of feminist research that purports to prove that women suf­fer from “hidden bias.” This research, artfully presented with no critics or skeptics present, can be persuasive. A brief look at it helps explain the mind-set of the critics and their support­ers. But it is a highly ironic story. For the three recognized canons of the literature are, in key respects, travesties of scientific method, and they have been publicized and promoted in ways that have ignored elementary standards of transparency and objectivity...

Steiger wrote to Wenneras and Wold request­ing copies of the data so he could review them himself. Wold wrote back that she would gladly send the data, except that they had gone miss­ing: “They were in a computer of a guy at the Statistics department and I got them on a dis­kette many years ago and I am afraid I will not be able to find it anymore.” Wenneras did not reply at all...

“We don’t accept biol­ogy as destiny…. We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate.... I propose we adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences.” In other words, the ubiquitous female propensity to nurture should be treated as a kind of disor­der or disease.

Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, sin­gle-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalize women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasize and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”

Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-sci­ence movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocial­ized men) earn Nobel Prizes on flextime has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s lead­ing scientific institutions...

The power and glory of science and engineer­ing is that they are, adamantly, evidence-based. But the evidence of gender bias in math and science is flimsy at best, and the evidence that women are relatively disinclined to pursue these fields at the highest levels is serious. When the bastions of science pay obsequious attention to the flimsy and turn a blind eye to the serious, it is hard to maintain the view that the science enterprise is somehow immune to the enthu­siasms that have corrupted other, supposedly “softer” academic fields."