Science is a meritocracy
American academic Heather Mac Donald triggers protests and outrage whenever she speaks on US campuses. She challenges programmes that promote more women and minorities in the sciences. Mac Donald argues that science is under attack in the US for being dominated by white males who shut women and racial minorities out of their ranks. Attackers say science is ‘‘insufficiently diverse’’.
As a result, most American universities and federal agencies go to great lengths to increase the number of women, blacks, and Hispanics in their science courses.
They do this by admitting quotas of underrepresented minorities (URMs), by watering down exam requirements for them, by de-emphasising maths in favour of ‘‘culturally sensitive pedagogies that pay close attention to social identities’’.
Mac Donald argues that democratising science lowers its standards. She points to research examining more than two million academically talented US and Indian students over 35 years showing that, on average, males outperform females at maths from kindergarten to postgraduate levels.
The same research shows that most females outperform men in verbal and people-centred skills.
This advantage might justify diversity in politics, commerce, law, communication, health, and entertainment, but not in science, where maths is the lingua franca.
Surely, gender and race-pandering couldn’t happen in New Zealand? Well, yes it could.
The Royal Society insists that all its councils, committees, speakers and its workforce comprise at least 30 per cent women and Ma¯ ori.
Some of our medical schools allow preferential admissions to Ma¯ ori and Pacific students. Only last week, Minister of Science, Dr Megan Woods, proclaimed that New Zealand must increase diversity in science and give everybody a fair go.
Sexism and racism are phantom problems in New Zealand science. Scientific directors and professors I have known appoint or promote anybody whose skills they think will increase their chances of scientific breakthroughs.
Science welcomes people of any shape or colour into its ranks but, as Mac Donald implies, science is not a democracy. It’s a meritocracy.
Sexism and racism are phantom problems in New Zealand science.