Crosspost: How centuries of sexism excluded women from science — and how to redress the balance

A reveiw of Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science by Athene Donald, Oxford Univ. Press (2023)

by Karly Pitman for Nature

Despite growing numbers of women participating in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), barriers to entry and retention remain prevalent. Numerous reports outline the problem. Some 35% of the US STEM workforce are women, with fewer in the European Union (17%), Japan (16%) and India (14%). But harassment and discrimination remain common. Just over one-fifth of women in STEM are considering leaving their field, whereas two-thirds of those who have left wish they could return. However, such numbers don’t explain how the situation arose or how to repair it. British physicist Athene Donald offers answers in her latest book.

Not Just for the Boys is an enjoyable and useful primer on the challenges faced by women in STEM. Donald, an experimental physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a leading authority on gender-equity issues, draws evidence from history, neuroscience and social science to explain why gender bias is rife in STEM. With close attention to the societal factors that affect education and career choices, she successfully argues that the scientific workforce needs more women.

Read more at

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02138-y?

Read another review of this book at

https://physicsworld.com/a/attention-all-allies-why-there-are-so-few-women-in-science-and-how-you-can-help/

AASWomen Newsletter for August 19, 2022

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of August 19, 2022
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Alessandra Aloisi, and Sethanne Howard

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

Leisa Townsley, 1964-2022

1. Passing of Dr. Leisa Townsley 
2. Special Message on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
3. Seeking Co-Chairs for Cross-AG IDEA Working Group
4. Two New Books!
5. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
7. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

Good Beach Reading: The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan has been called the book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Originally published in 1963, this trailblazing book that changed women’s lives is still just as relevant 50 years later.

For the first time in my academic career, I spent Spring Break at the beach. I took not only The Feminine Mystique, but also A Room of One’s Own and The Mercury 13. I came away with a healthy dose of 20th century feminism as well as inspiration. Betty Friedan not only informed me of things I knew little about (the shift backwards in the Women’s Magazines from stories about “Career Women” in the 1930s and 40s to stories about the “Happy Housewife” in the 1950s and 60s; the Madison Avenue campaign to make women fall in love with household appliances), but also put into perspective the issues I was familiar with (the Seneca Fall Women’s Rights convention; the college “Mrs. Degree”). The book is also very well written. If you are headed to the beach this spring, or even if you’re not, The Feminine Mystique is worth a read.

Michael Gurian: Leadership and the Sexes

I recently attended a talk by Michael Gurian, who was promoting his new book, Leadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business. With a title like that, I couldn't help but be intrigued, but also skeptical.

The focus of his talk was not specifically the retention of women in STEM professions, although he did mention that as a problem he hoped to solve by pointing out gender differences. His point was that there are, indeed, biological differences between men and women, in brain activity and development in particular. While those differences don't translate to differences in intelligence, the way we communicate and learn is different. He showed us MRI scans of brains, demonstrating a distinct difference between men's and women's brains to emphasize his point.

Women's brains have more white matter, while men's have more grey matter. This means that women have more connections between different areas of the brains. Thus, men are good at being very single-mindedly focused on one task at a time, while women are very good at communicating, responding to facial cues, and making connections. When at rest, men's brains show much less activity on brain scans then women's. Science is very much a male-brain profession, Gurian argues, so some specfic ways for encouraging women in STEM include:

• Discard the Ivory Tower paradigm for STEM. The truth is that science has become a more communal effort and that collaboration and communication are vital.
  
• Increase mentoring.
  
• Deal proactively with gender differences. For instance, women tend to go into meetings looking for community and reciprocity, men go in looking to express dominance.
  

I didn't necessarily agree with everything Gurian said. Some of the behaviors he described as being male-specific are ones that I see in myself: being fidgety when bored, for instance. He put up some cartoons in an attempt to encourage us to have a "sense of humor" about these issues: for example, one depicting the amount of time and money a man versus a woman spend at the mall buying a pair of jeans. I didn't laugh. Cartoons like that only serve to reinforce stereotypes. He also cited a study showing that infant boys prefer to stare at mobiles while infant girls prefer faces, which might have been an interesting point if I hadn't recently read a thorough debunking of the study at the Sociological Images blog.

Still, I think that those of us interested in promoting women in science do need to consider that women and men are different, whether because of nature or nurture, and that those differences must be acknowledged in order to level the playing field. This is analogous to the failure of "color-blind" approaches to combating racism. Pretending that we are all the same, or rather that we are all just like white men, ignores the real problems faced in creating true diversity.

All in all, I found Michael Gurian's talk intriguing, and made me curious to read his book, but not curious enough to actually buy it. If any of you have read it, please comment below!

Outliers

First, I want to give a brief shout-out to those who attended the DPS Women's Lunch at last week's DPS Meeting in Pasadena! I found it to be a great opportunity to network and share ways to support fellow women astronomers. Susan Niebur has a nice recap of some meeting highlights at the Women in Planetary Science Blog.


I recently read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. The premise of the book is basically that those we consider geniuses didn't really get there strictly on talent alone. Rather, luck, opportunity, and hard work play as much, if not a larger role than any innate ability.

An example of luck might be being born just after the cutoff date for youth sports teams: Gladwell demonstrates that NHL players' birthdays are heavily biased toward the beginning of the year for precisely this reason. Opportunity is like Bill Gates' middle school PTA buying a computer. Hard work is summed up in Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, which says that it takes that many hours of practice to become and expert at something.

It isn't too far a stretch to apply the same ideas to the question of women and minorities in science. If factors such as luck, opportunity, and hard work play such a large role in creating geniuses, then unluckiness, misguidance, and discouragement clearly play a role in preventing people from achieving as well.

Let us consider the case of a hypothetical Jane, who is quite bright, but whose parents never even consider that she might use a computer, who is encouraged to follow her proclivities in writing rather than science, who pays a high social cost for devoting herself to her studies, and who experiences hostility from her male peers for beating them at what they consider their own game. Her brother John, who is equally bright, might be presented with different opportunities and encouragement. Would it then be any wonder that Jane might be directed toward becoming an English major while John studies math and science?

All this supports arguments that expanding opportunities for minorities and women and encouraging them to pursue math and science are effective ways to increase their representation. The question, really, is how to put that into practice.

Thoughts on the Job Market and a Book Recommendation

I have been incredibly busy these last few days, especially with the Women in Astronomy and Space Sciences coming up real soon. As the youngest member of the organizing committee, I find myself being turned to quite frequently regarding issues for early career scientists. So here's one issue that I've been mulling over a lot lately.

My own personal issue of the moment is job hunting. This year is particularly rough, especially if you're looking for faculty positions. (To all my fellow job hunters out there: let's all give a big cathartic scream right now: AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!! There, doesn't that feel better?) What with the economic downturn, there are fewer jobs available than in years past, but just as many people on the market. And yes, this strikes real close to home for me. But what also bugs me is that if you look at the demographics, the diversity is all at the bottom. As you look higher and higher in seniority, astronomers get whiter and maler. Now, who stands to lose their jobs right now? Who are the ones who will leave astronomy because no one has a job for them? Not those senior white males with tenure. It's us folks at the bottom of the career ladder, where a lot of effort has gone into making a diverse population. While the numbers are still quite small for minorities, there are quite a few women in astronomy now. If us young 'uns get squeezed out of the job market now, it means that the percentage of women in astronomy as a whole will go down. Now, add to that the fact that women tend to leave at a higher rate than men overall, well, it's bad news for the status of women in astronomy.

Now, I'd like to end on a positive note since this big Women in Astronomy conference is coming up, and there is much to celebrate in spite of hard times, so I'd like to recommend a book I read recently. It's She's Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff. It's a collection of essays by women who are self-identified geeks of various stripes. You'll find computer science geeks, video game geeks, and yes, science geeks. The stories are about what it's like being a minority within a minority group (i.e. women in science). You'll find that we women geeks are a heterogeneous group, and some stories will resonate more with you than others. But the stories all celebrate being a geek and being a woman and demonstrating that those two identities are not incompatible. So I guess the moral of the story is that no matter how this job season goes for me, I will always be a woman geek, and that's something to take pride in.

Peer Mentoring

It's pretty well established that success as an academic scientist depends very much on good mentoring. Whether this comes informally (e.g. old boy's network) or formally (e.g. MentorNet) is irrelevant: the key is getting sound advice and the social and scientific connections that will help you succeed.

A few weeks ago, the topic of mentoring came up in conversation, and MentorNet was mentioned. One person interjected, "MentorNet is useless. They don't have nearly enough women scientists available as mentors."

Part of this is probably that there simply aren't that many women in science, especially at the higher levels. The higher up I get in my field, the fewer women I see above me. Also, senior women in science already get asked to do a lot of mentoring and outreach precisely because there are so few of them. It almost seems unfair to ask them to do more.

One might argue that men can be mentors just as well as women, but quite frankly, there are some things that women go through that men simply can't relate to. This is part of the motivation behind Dr. Isis' Letters to Our Daughter's Project, which she started because:

It's not a secret that the largest attrition among female scientists happens in the transition between trainee and faculty. I also think that, for better or worse, there are things that are unique to being a female scientist that affect the ability/willingness of women to pursue careers in science. I know from my time at ScienceBlogs that there is a large group of women who are eager for the perspectives of successful women scientists as they consider their own careers in science.

Mentoring from senior scientists is undeniably valuable. But personally, I've been starting to rely a lot more on what I think of as Peer Mentoring, but might also be called B!+ch Sessions. I often feel like I get more out of discussions with fellow postdocs who are facing the same situations I am, rather than relying on the advice of more senior people who were postdocs during a different era. Part of it is, as I said before, that there are fewer women ahead of me the higher up I go. This might simply be the fact that I myself am aging. Many of my cohorts from graduate school have transitioned to professorships or otherwise permanent positions. The people I might turn to for mentoring are getting closer in age to me anyway, so why not simply brainstorm with my peers.

Lately, I've been reading Every Other Thursday by Ellen Daniell, which is about her support group for women scientists. The women in her group met together regularly, and helped each other through their careers. I'm amused at this editorial review on Amazon:

But the book's real failing is that instead of addressing Group members' journeys through science as women, it focuses on the same career roadblocks, personal disasters and need for self-empowerment that one finds in any self-help book ("I am entitled to be myself. I'm entitled to be successful"). Rather than hard-nosed help for aspiring young women scientists, this book, while it includes interesting passages on the machinations of university politics, essentially offers material that should best have remained within the Group.

Just because self-empowerment is addressed in any number of self-help books doesn't mean it's any less relevant to women scientists. I get the feeling that this author has never faced debilitating Imposter Syndrome before.

While I think the idea of support groups for women in science is great, it only works if you live in a region with high PhD density. Daniell worked at Berkeley, where there are more universities per square foot than perhaps anywhere else in the country. What if you live in a big rectangular state and work in a department with only one woman? I don't have a good answer for that.

Well, at least there's always blogging...