Why Aren't More Women in Science? Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams (eds) American Psychological Association, 2006 254 pp., $59.95 ISBM 159147485X Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher MIT Press, 2003 182 pp., $16.00 ISBN 0262632691
Here are two facts:
- This may be the most important book I've ever reviewed.
- Most of you will never read it. In fact, as soon as I tell you what it's about, most of you will move on to the next article, because you're tired of hearing about the topic it discusses, and you figure you're not part of the problem.
- The spread of abilities among men is greater than the spread among women, i.e., the male bell curve is flatter and wider than the female bell curve. This is why the male:female ratio in students scoring 700 or more on the SAT-M (the math portion of the Standardized Achievement Test) is 13:1. It's therefore not surprising that men outnumber women in numerate disciplines.
- But wait -- that 13:1 ratio comes from 1983. By 2005, the ratio was only 4:1; what's more, the differences in ability between American students and those in Europe and Japan are greater than those between the genders. Surely that's proof that socialization is a, if not the, major factor?
- Well, no. Women tend to outperform men on tests of verbal fluency, arithmetic calculation, perceptual speed, and memory for spatial locations. Men, on the other hand, tend to do better at verbal analogies, mathematical word problems, and mental rotation (i.e., the ability to look at several pictures of 3D objects, and figure out whether they represent the same thing from different angles or not). If you statistically subtract the influence of rotational ability from SAT-M scores, it eliminates the sex differences. Being able to see things in 3D must therefore be important to mathematical thinking, and men just happen to be better at it.
- Not so fast. Excelling in science, as in any career, requires single-minded dedication: according to E.O. Wilson, you need 40 hours a week for teaching and administration, 20 on top of that for basic research, and another 20 to do really important research. What's more, you need to put in these hours when you're in your 20s and 30s, which also happens to be the time most people start families, or start caring for elderly parents. In our society, these burdens fall disproportionately on women. The end result is about as fair as telling athletes who are just about to enter the major leagues that they have to cut their training time in half.
- Hang on -- the fact that more women than men devote themselves to family is a choice. There's lots of research showing that on average, men tend to prefer working with "things", while women prefer working with "people". What if society's expectations simply reflect people's preferences? You don't have to shift the mean of a bell curve very far to have a dramatic effect on numbers in the upper tail...
- All right, let's talk about shifting the mean. Research by Dweck and others has shown that if students -- both male and female -- believe that something is a "gift", i.e., that people are either born good at it or not, then they are less likely to do well at it, because the first time they hit a setback, they conclude that they "just don't have the gene". If, on the other hand, they are told that mastery of the ability has been proven to depend only on hard work, they will, on average, do better. Couple that with societal stereotypes, like Barbie dolls saying, "Math is hard," and it's easy to see why women are underrepresented at the upper levels of math, science, and engineering.
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