Women in Science
Author: Dr. Siegfried Othmer
When Larry Summers casually
interjected his by-now famous comments into a discussion of women
in science, he found out that the President of Harvard University
cannot just shed his label and make off-the-cuff remarks without
it gaining notice. Summers suggested that a shortage of native
ability might be one of the reasons that women did not populate
the upper reaches of the fields of mathematics and the hard sciences.
The flood of commentary that
rippled forth from this discussion exposed an issue that was still
festering in our society. It also brought back memories on the
milestones of progress out of our own lives. Exemplar #1 was the
fact that Sue was the only female physics student in her class
at Cornell back in 1962. When Sue then turned out to be consistently
the first or second in her class, behind only the son of a Cornell
physics professor who had gotten physics along with his mother’s
milk, her classmates had a choice of regarding her as competent
in physics, or as a girl, but not both. In the classrooms and
the laboratory courses, Sue had in their eyes become “one of the
boys.”
And when Sue applied to the
Department of Neurobiology for Graduate School, she was massively
discouraged:
“Oh, you’re probably just going to get married along
the way, and never complete your degree.”
“But I am married already.”
“Well, then, you’re probably just going to end up having
a child and abandon your career.”
At the Annual Conference of
Danforth Fellows in 1970 that I attended, a number of liberal
arts graduates with fresh Ph.D.’s in English Literature, American
History, etc., lamented that Ivy League schools such as Harvard
would categorically not interview women at all for positions in
those departments. And in the late eighties Sue’s sister Ruth
Cserr, a professor of neurobiology at Brown University, had to
fight a lengthy (and ultimately successful) legal battle for tenure.
By fortuitous accident, the tapes of her tenure hearing were preserved,
so the outrages were still available to be heard in their full
sexist expression. “Professor Cserr does not need tenure. She
is married to a psychiatrist, so hers is a second income….”
It is also helpful to remember
that at the time of the Brown versus Topeka Board of Education
desegregation decision in 1954, women were applauding the progress
in racial equity while they themselves were still confined to
the gallery at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. If
they were aware of the contradiction at the time, then they certainly
kept it to themselves.
I have wondered for many years
just how it is that certain kinds of prejudice can stir one’s
conscience while others remain utterly invisible—invisible perhaps
even to the affected class. And why was there so long a time when
racial discrimination was thought to be ok, and did not strike
people as being in conflict with the governing ethical principles,
namely the universality of status as “children of God.” People
felt ok about making such distinctions even in the face of certainty
that God was not making them.
One way to approach this question
is to ask: what are the prejudices that are still ok today, and
perhaps still invisible? The obvious answer is that we are still
ok with distinctions of class. There are others as well. We have
an obvious height prejudice. CEOs average 3” greater height than
the rest of us. We elect the taller of the Presidential candidates,
unless they are named Al Gore or John Kerry. We tend to defer
to the bigger and taller people in meetings, and to those graced
with deeper, more resonant voices. We elect the more mature-looking
face by a 70-30 margin. We obviously favor the more good-looking
among us. Even mothers selectively neglect their more homely children.
The pretty ones get strapped into their car seats with far more
regularity. Even blacks favor the lighter-skinned among them,
as do Mexicans. Much of this is rooted deeply in our biology,
or in biology as modulated by culture, and we tend to accept the
reality.
But when it comes to class
distinctions that we make, one does not even feel the need to
make apologies. If there is any doubt in that regard, then males
reading this may simply want to ask themselves about how they
form judgments on their daughter’s boyfriends or fiancé… Inevitably
we form such opinions, and these opinions are very likely to wrap
around issues of class membership. A lot of what traditionally
has been seen as “culture” and “refinement” really means a finely
honed skill at making subtle class distinctions. This ability
is a virtue, not a liability, and certainly not an ethical flaw.
This is not a matter about which one wishes to have blind spots.
Racial prejudice can then
be understood, among other things, as an index to class membership,
and that could always make it ok as long as class distinctions
were ok. Thus Hitler’s early fulminations against Jews could be
dismissed as being directed against the jobless and poor ones
that were pouring in from the East, recognizable by their Hasidic
beards and their black greatcoats. Surely he was not referring
to the pillars of Berlin society that were then the dominant class
residing in Berlin-Grunewald? How could German society even function
without them? It was unthinkable. By linking race and class, Hitler
anesthetized such ethical impulses as existed in that society
for as long as such anesthesia was needed. Paradoxically, the
propaganda that juxtaposed poor Jews and rats scurrying in gutters
and eating the seed corn mobilized fear on the one hand, and on
the other allowed distinctions to be made by those for whom the
analogy just did not fit. And in our own time, the “ok-ness” of
class distinctions means that the class warfare by the elites
can continue unabated, almost unnoticed, and certainly unchallenged.
By virtue of the association
of class distinctions with culture and refinement, it should be
no surprise that class distinctions should have their fullest
expression among the highest arts of a given culture. And in our
current Western culture, that is the sciences and the creative
arts. For present purposes, I am only interested in the science
side of this issue. Is not the whole post-graduate educational
process oriented toward the acculturation of new initiates into
membership of a particularly exclusive class?
Cornell University once experimented
with a “six-year Ph.D.” program, one in which they hoped to capture
the best and brightest out of High School and spirit them quickly
into productive professional life. The program did not even last
six years. Ignominiously, the special housing unit in which the
students were segregated had been set alight by one disgruntled
student whose emotional development had not kept pace with his
intellectual growth. Many of the students died, along with one
of their professors who succumbed in a futile last rescue attempt.
The program died with them, but it had already been dying. There
was no opportunity in such a hothouse environment to transmit
the “culture” of a particular discipline to the new candidate.
What we are seeing in the
sciences is the most refined expression of cultural distinctions,
i.e. of class membership, in a manner that not only meets social
approval but is abetted in all possible ways, both from within
and from without. Here is where prejudice is one of the highest
virtues, and certainly not a liability. Only it is not called
prejudice because it is so strongly based on the “facts” of science,
or more correctly, on the currently operative “model” for a particular
discipline. Every study committee member at the NIH and every
journal editor and reviewer considers it his obligation to discern
group membership among the authors, contributors, and grant writers.
This is why it is has become
so difficult to do anything paradigm-breaking. At every turn the
culture of science literally bristles with rejection of the foreign
intruder. Every insider has already incorporated the necessity
of maintaining the integrity of the particular scientific culture.
So we have prejudice run rampant, and it is all the worse for
being supported by a hard body of knowledge because it just makes
these people insufferably sanctimonious. At any moment there are
uncountable scientists who are “self-censoring” with respect to
ideas they may have, or results they may have obtained along the
way, because they fear the rejection by the arbiters of their
own scientific culture. It is simply impossible to contemplate
in this day and age a patent clerk getting published in the Zeitschrift
fuer Physik. The paradigm-breaking stuff must be left to the socially
maladjusted, to the tone-deaf, to those goaded onward by personal
tragedy on the one hand or by personal demons on the other, and
to the bumblebees that do not know they cannot fly.
Yet another crisis of the
culture sharpens the issues: It is the rise of the hypothesis
of Intelligent Design. One could just rejoice in the fact that
proponents of Intelligent Design have obviously accepted the historical
fact of evolution. When it comes to Intelligent Design we are
just arguing about mechanisms, not the fact of evolution. Is it
not remarkable how huge a cultural shift has just occurred within
the creationist movement, one in which the entire argument against
evolution has suddenly become dated and irrelevant? The advocates
of intelligent design have just swept the field within their own
movement. We can all just declare the war won, sheathe our weapons,
and retire from the field of battle.
Alas, no; scientists feel
burdened to make war on the hypothesis of Intelligent Design.
In this discussion, I actually appreciate what Michael Shermer
has said. He is the editor of Skeptic Magazine, and certainly
not my favorite person. He wears the superiority of the perpetual
skeptic, and one just wants to wipe that “one-up-manship” smile
off his face. Correctly he indicates that the question of God’s
existence is simply not one for science to resolve because science
by definition operates on a naturalistic hypothesis. We are looking
for laws of nature, not instances of miraculous intervention.
The latter stand outside the framework of our hypotheses, and
hence can never be either confirmed or disconfirmed.
Whereas it is correct to point
out that proof of Intelligent Design can never be the outcome
of a scientific investigation, Intelligent Design can also never
be ruled out as a fact of our historical existence. The methods
of science will simply remain oblique to the issue. That being
the case, it is certainly appropriate to discuss in a high school
classroom just what constitutes the boundary between scientific
knowledge and everything else. Otherwise, the hegemony of the
scientific worldview stands implicitly supported. The “conjecture”
of Intelligent Design illuminates that boundary, but it cannot
ever resolve it. Of course it can be discussed, but only as a
cultural phenomenon, not as a scientific hypothesis. Intelligent
Design is a narrative that goes along with the hypothesis of God.
If God made the universe, why could He not tinker with it along
the way?
So science and religion remain
independent magisteria, despite the earthquake in the creationist
community. It is therefore ok to campaign against the inclusion
of Intelligent Design as a verifiable scientific hypothesis within
a scientific curriculum, but one should raise no objection to
the hypothesis per se from the standpoint of science itself. It
is on this latter issue that a certain hegemonic impulse manifests
within the scientific enterprise, one that should be resisted.
And one gets the impression that science as a sociological entity
or subculture seeks a comparable level of intellectual hegemony
to what was accorded religion in an earlier age. The hypothesis
of God seems to bother some scientists, and they are not as neutral
on the issue as scientific rigor would insist upon when they are
speaking as scientists.
If truth be told, a number
of scientists were upset when the Big Bang hypothesis took over
from the steady-state universe simply because it would give implicit
support to the idea of an act of creation. The very name “Big
Bang” was intended as a pejorative by one such critic, Fred Hoyle.
The Journal Nature even ran an editorial in the late eighties
titled “Down with the Big Bang,” by John Maddox, then editor of
Nature. He called the theory “philosophically unacceptable” because
it gave implicit aid and comfort to the creationists. And in the
early days of Darwinism there were certainly scientists who saw
the theory as a way of ridding the society of its religious superstitions.
This had the effect of sharpening the adversarial relationship
between religion and science, to the detriment of both. In an
effort to show a united front, scientists neglected some of the
very real issues posed by Darwin’s theory for many years. One
of these was the emergence of complexity out of a concatenation
of developmental steps, each of which had to contribute positively
to the survival probability and adaptation of the species. Another
was speciation, the issue of why there has been such a proliferation
of species.
The only reason for bringing
this matter up here is that in this cultural divide the hegemonic
impulses of science as a worldview are exposed. Science has marginalized
its critics both within and without. In this regard it parallels
our current politics and our economics. We should remember that
biology (in general) and evolution (in particular) are not kind
to monolithic cultures.
Curiously, in its aggrandizement
the enterprise of science has assumed many of the trappings of
the paradigm of religion that it seeks to replace. “Is it published?”
is the functional equivalent of, “Is it supported by Scripture?”
We have our scientific priesthood, and the increasingly unchallengeable
codification of our body of knowledge. Finally, there is the emotional
attachment that people exhibit to particular worldviews. Laws
of nature do not get people to mount the ramparts in their defense.
Something else must be at work. So whenever heat enters the discussion
around neurofeedback, which it does often enough, it cannot be
about science as science.
We must understand these conflicts
as part of the culture wars within the health disciplines, each
recruiting science on its behalf as the objective arbiter. Alas,
when science starts to be used as a weapon then it suffers in
its role as a pathway to knowledge. And in support of the culture
wars, science acquires even more of the trappings of religious
icons. Particular research methods become mandated as steps on
the pathway to truth. They are enshrined as inviolate. This is
no longer science per se, but science as a particular kind of
religious doctrine.
With Galileo’s house arrest
very much in mind, we still carry with us the image of a science
beleaguered by a narrow religious authoritarianism. But that is
hardly the case any more. Science has become the dominant paradigm
and the victim role no longer suits. The larger enterprise of
science, harnessed as it is to a predatory cultural elite, has
become hegemonic and over-bearing. The excesses were neither the
essence of religion then, nor are they the essence of science
now. They are instead the features of a dominant paradigm recruited
in the service of the levers of power within the society. Science
is not more benign now for having suffered its own prior traumas.
We may be seeing here another kind of cycle of the abused ultimately
becoming the abuser.
So we return, finally, to
the issue of women in science that started us off. Here we have
another instance of the scientific enterprise being unaware of
its own biases. There are no more institutional mechanisms for
effective self-criticism within science than there were in the
Church. Issues such as animal rights, conflict of interest, and
the investigation of scientific fraud have to be raised from the
outside. In some sense, the enterprise of science has been just
as deluded by a sense of inherent incorruptibility as the edifice
of religious institutions has been. And most injurious to its
own self-image, science has become just as hostile to alien and
novel ideas as any religion. To be an outsider to such an enterprise
of self-adulation and self-preservation for a brief time is not
a deficiency.
Dr. Siegfried Othmer |
