National Post (National Edition)
Sexism in science not as clear-cut as professed
When Canadian physics professor Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize last week, it was bound to be a big story. She’s only the third woman out of about 200 to have ever received the honour.
When journalists gathered at the University of Waterloo where Strickland works, she was asked about her gender. Strickland told the reporters that the world has come a long way since the last time the Nobel was awarded to a woman, in 1963, and that she “has always been paid the same and treated the same” as men.
Yet the Canadian news media promptly ignored her words, choosing instead to spin her achievement into a story about persistent gender bias. CBC’S The National declared that despite Strickland’s success, “sexism appears to be alive and well” in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Their evidence was a lecture given by Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia at a conference in September, for which he has been suspended from CERN.
“Physics was invented and built by men” and “women are actually being hired over men who are more qualified,” an indignant CBC reporter quoted Strumia as saying. The reporter then turned to a disgusted female physicist, Jessica Wade, who claimed that Strumia is a “jealous” bully, and suggested that men like him are the reason only about one in 10 physics professors are women.
Wade appeared the following day on the CBC’S flagship radio program, The Current, where she expanded on her outrage, telling listeners how “terrifying” it is for women that gatekeepers like Strumia exist to keep the talented female physicists out. The host of the show, Anna Maria Tremonti, could barely contain her contempt for Strumia, demanding that Wade explain, “What does the research actually say?” Wade responded with the usual: stereotypes about women being bad at math cause young women to avoid STEM, and those who persevere face misogyny in promotions, publications and student evaluations.
Not for a second did the CBC bother to examine what Strumia actually said. If they had scrolled through his 26-slide lecture, they would have found not an attack on women in physics but an evidence-based plea to end discrimination against men in the field. Strumia, it turns out, made a far more convincing argument about gender bias than the one advanced by Wade and regurgitated by the CBC.
It’s true that Strumia, who is not a native English speaker, wrote the awkward sentence that “physics was invented and built by men,” but he immediately followed that by saying women like Marie Curie were welcomed into physics “after showing what they can do.” In other words, physics is a meritocracy; women who are up to the task are included.
Strumia proceeded to list off the ways universities now bend over backwards to try to encourage more women in STEM fields at the expense of men. Oxford University has lengthened math exam times for all students in the hopes that more women will pass; the University of Melbourne has created jobs for math professors that men cannot even apply for; and Italian universities now charge men more money.
He also pointed to data showing that women are published just as often in physics journals as men, and, rather than being passed over, are hired earlier in their careers.
Most damning, he offered a link to what may be the only recent study directly testing for gender bias in STEM faculty hiring. Cornell University psychologists Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci had 363 faculty members evaluate narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships. They found that when men and women presented with equal qualifications, women were ranked first by a two-to-one margin in biology, engineering and psychology. Only in economics were candidates of the two sexes treated roughly equally.
The study also tested whether faculty differ in how they assess women who take a one-year maternity leave. It turns out men prefer to hire mothers who took parental leaves.
Williams and Ceci concluded that their findings “do not support omnipresent societal messages regarding the current inhospitality of the STEM professoriate for women at the point of applying for assistant professorships. Efforts to combat formerly widespread sexism in hiring appear to have succeeded.”
So what then explains the disparity? Strumia asserts it’s the same reason women now make up a majority of graduates in education, law, medicine and the humanities. Women and men have different interests and abilities. When surveyed, men report strong preferences for working with things over people while women show the opposite. This doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions; it simply means gender imbalances in vocations are a part of human nature, and will persist in any society where men and women are free to pursue their interests.
If the media had only listened to what Strickland said at her press conference, they might have learned this lesson. “If we all do what we’re really good at,” she said, “it just helps the world.”