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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Are women discriminated against in the lab? Or are gender imbalances due to intellectual differences?
Apr 12, 2001 | These days, it's not unusual to see women's names attached to major scientific discoveries. The team of physicists who succeeded in stopping a light beam earlier this year was headed by Harvard professor Lene Hau; astronomer Wendy Freedman was one of the three leaders of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, which measured the expansion rate of the universe.
Nevertheless, science remains an overwhelmingly male field: At some leading research institutions, the percentage of women faculty in science departments is still in the single digits.
Now, as the New York Times reports in its quarterly Education Life supplement, a movement that seeks to remedy bias against women in science is sweeping universities.
But is this effort, which the Times says could "change the face of science education," based on facts or myth? And is it championing gender justice or gender politics?
A major victory for proponents of women in science occurred in late January when top administrators and professors from nine major universities -- including Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford -- met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a symposium on gender equity in science and engineering. They issued a terse though vague statement recognizing that "barriers still exist" and pledging to work for change.
The location for the gathering was not chosen randomly. It was at MIT that the gender equity initiative was born a few years ago, from a study that has been both hailed as groundbreaking and assailed as "junk science."
The Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT, publicized in the MIT faculty newsletter in March 1999, brought the issue of sexism in science into the spotlight. It became a big story for two reasons: MIT's extraordinary admission that it had practiced unintentional but pervasive discrimination against women faculty, and the claim that the study had uncovered tangible proof of discrimination in pay and work space.
"It was data-driven, and that's a very MIT thing," MIT School of Science dean Robert Birgeneau, a champion of the women's cause, told the New York Times.
Other schools scrambled to follow MIT's lead; the Ford Foundation shelled out $1 million for similar studies. Columnist Ellen Goodman and others touted the MIT study as a rebuke to anyone who believed the battles for equal opportunity were over. The MIT women who had goaded the school into doing the study were hailed as heroines -- particularly biologist Nancy Hopkins, whose complaint started it all.
In April 1999, Hopkins was invited to a White House panel on equal pay, where President Clinton lauded the "courage [of] the administrators and women scientists" who "sought to make things right and ... told the whole public the truth."
But did they?
Anyone looking at the study should have spotted red flags. For one, the two committees that investigated gender bias at MIT were made up primarily of interested parties: aggrieved women professors. More important, the 150-page, single-spaced report that documented the committee's findings was kept under wraps. What MIT released was a data-free summary that broadly discussed disparities in allocation of resources (with a passing acknowledgment that these disparities did not exist in all departments) and the women's feelings of "marginalization" and misery. The published report also made no mention of rebuttals offered to specific charges of discrimination by several male professors and officials, which, according to Science magazine, were included in the full study.
In December 1999, the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative group based in Arlington, Va., published a sharp critique of the MIT report by University of Alaska at Fairbanks psychologist Judith Kleinfeld, who meticulously analyzed the study's methodological flaws and accused MIT of producing a "political manifesto masquerading as science."
MIT officials continue to defend their decision not to divulge information about differences in salaries, lab space and perks because of confidentiality. But that makes it impossible to evaluate the study's conclusions -- for instance, one cannot judge whether differences in rewards were partly due to differences in seniority or achievement. The MIT report angrily brushed aside the merit issue, declaring that "the last refuge of the bigot is to say that those who are discriminated against ... are less good."
However, a new IWF report, "Confession Without Guilt?" released days after the nine-university initiative was unveiled, bluntly states that MIT's senior women -- at least in the biology department, ground zero of the women's revolt -- were indeed less good.
