Turns out She’s Such A Geek isn’t the only new book delving into the topic of women in science and technology. A more academic work, Why Aren’t More Women in Science: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence, aims to examine the possible reasons for women’s under-representation in the sciences. It’s very much a response to the whole Larry Summers fiasco.

The book’s editors seem to have gone out of their way to give space to biological explanations of women’s under-representation in the sciences. In this interview, they worry that the anti-Larry backlash dampened the spirit of free inquiry: “Defenders of Summers’s remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science — it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other.”

But it sounds, from the interview, as though they had a balance of arguments for, as well as against, the idea that women are naturally less clever with numbers:

Our biggest surprise was not found in any one essay but in the class of essays about biological differences between men and women. We had anticipated greater agreement among these essayists, but what we found was quite divergent, with some arguing strongly in favor of sex differences in brain organization, hormones, etc., as causative factors in women’s underrepresentation among those who score the highest on standardized mathematics tests, and others arguing against such views.

So that’s something. And they also note the well-known fact that the “science gender gap” is really a white American thing, not a global thing.

They also discuss social factors behind the disparity, including the well-known “leaky pipeline,” where women give up at every stage of the academic process. They also talk about the challenge of balancing a career and family. This gives rise to the following comment from a guy reading the post:

Most of the references to “women” in the article (and perhaps the book it describes) are about women who desire male sexual partners, i.e. heterosexuals. From childhood to adulthood this orientation may well be a liability for women with interests and aptitudes in science…

Studies of lesbian women faculty in the sciences are sorely needed, as is research on adolescent lesbian attitudes towards the sciences. … The question that needs to be asked is this: How much is this problem is caused by female biology and how much is a result of the culture of heterosexuality?

Darn good point, actually… although the lesbian scientists I know are as stressed out by the whole balancing-careeer-and-family thing as everyone else.