Physicists can be some of the most interesting characters you’ll ever meet, with restless curiosity about the world even beyond the confines of their subject. I admire that willingness to take the blinders off and examine the facts, rather than being hamstrung by preconceived notions. A physics education can help teach a person to question assumptions, and the analytical mindset that I gained from the years I spent in physics has helped me to see the world in a far different way from how I might have seen it if I hadn’t had that education. I do treasure having this extra way of seeing the world, even if I left physics behind.

But the problem is, the qualities of open-mindedness and questioning of assumptions in the laboratory can coexist with a huge blind spot: the belief that physics is a meritocracy. (You may substitute any science, or really just about any endeavor really, for “physics” here.) Astronomer Rob Knop posted about this myth on his blog Galactic Interactions after getting copies of these marked-up pages which are from the letters section of the December 2006 issue of the physics trade magazine Physics Today.

The letters were in response to an article published earlier in the year about that topic that always is guaranteed a heated debate, why are there so few women in physics. I don’t know what the article said—I haven’t been a member of the American Physical Society in a decade—but reading the letters is free, and the images of the marked-up pages are even better (though the handwriting is a little hard to read). I transcribe below some excerpts interleaved with the corresponding handwritten comments by graduate student Rebecca Stanek:

After observing that the number of female full professorships in physics had doubled from 3% to 5% in four years (“5%! Slow down!” went the handwritten comment), the letter writers Jerry Smith and Wei Smith went on to say:

The second question we have is this: Must technical communities be cross-sectional representations of their greater societies? Gates suggests that they should be. Unfortunately, the question immediately leaves the realm of facts and statistics and lands squarely in a domain where physicists have little experience or qualification—the emotional and political arena of social engineering. Will the social engineering of physics stop once that “parity” is achieved? Probably not. Will the next step be to lower physics graduation requirements simply to attract students from other career fields in the hope of meeting some artificial parity requirement? [emphasis added] That outcome is not as far-fetched as some may think.

Handwritten comment: “Women who drop out tend to have above-average grades and/or qualifications”

How are women faring in other career fields? It is well observed that female engineering students tend to favor such specialties as biomedical or materials engineering over the traditional mechanical, civil, and electrical domains. This phenomenon is dominated by sociological and psychological factors. The nerdy reputation that attaches to traditional engineering does not help cultivate the social connections and relationships that our society stresses for young women. [emphasis added] Alternatively, the newer engineering fields, particularly biomedical, can be viewed as exciting, and as more people-oriented and compassionate—qualities that our society emphasizes in young women.

Handwritten comments: “1) Removing the “macho nerd” reputation helps men AND women. 2) Maybe society shouldn’t stress that women be little social butterflies. 3) Maybe someone should tell Drs. Smith that physics is no longer about one dude working alone in a lab.”

Is the lack of male nurses viewed as a crisis in medicine? Considering that females currently dominate the nursing and medical aid communities, and the doctor community approaches parity, is society concerned at the prospect of a female-dominated medical community? Of course not. [emphasis added] So why should we be concerned that males may be more socially inclined to physics?

Handwritten comment: “No, because it helps them justify low pay to teachers and nurses.”

To achieve social similitude, the physics community must either change society or abandon the meritocracy that yielded the great founders of our field. Let’s allow students to choose their own careers in line with their interests and dreams. We risk losing professional integrity if we cast aside the meritocracy of physics for cross-sectional similitude with society merely for the sake of political correctness. And rather than acting as sociologists, we should remain focused on our expertise and true to our goal: good physics that is good for society. Once society has fixed its problems, the optimal solution will percolate throughout the physics community so long as we maintain our unbiased meritocracy. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “Ha ha ha!”

And then there’s this letter from a Robert Adair, who writes the following:

Certainly men and women are different. Our forebears who dealt with cows and bulls, roosters and hens, and rams and ewes never questioned such differences. Although gender differences in the intrinsic intellectual abilities important in physics are surely small, if not nonexistent, men and women differ in certain personality traits such as aggression (murderous or otherwise), which unfortunately has some effect on status, even in physics. More important is that in judging their best roles in society, women tend to make different choices from men. The influx of women into medicine and biology rather than physics and engineering likely follows from such differences in interests rather than gender biases. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “SOCIALIZATION”

It is important to reduce illegitimate gender biases in all elements of society. I suggest, though, that the most important bias is found in the structures of the paths to leadership roles. These paths mesh poorly with women’s biological rhythms. When I review the wedding announcements in the New York Times, I find that attractive and accomplished brides are marrying at an average age of about 30—halfway between menarche and menopause. Thus, among advanced societies, women are properly playing a larger role in leadership, but the birth rate lags behind replacement levels. We are becoming extinct. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “‘Don’t read, just breed!’”

There’s more good stuff if you’re interested, just click on this link and scroll down to find the photographic images of the printed letters—er, “Men defending the status quo”—pages.

I don’t know how representative these attitudes are of the field as a whole. I believe my graduate school advisor was a good guy and supportive of women in physics, but at the same time there was a gulf between the way he’d been socialized and the way I’d been socialized that led to explicit misunderstandings on several occasions.* But I heard about how another professor (about the same age as my advisor) would comment to his female chemistry grad student that she should become a medical doctor instead—not exactly encouragement.** And I would hear the occasional comment, fortunately not from anyone I worked with or chose to hang out with, but enough to make you aware that sexist attitudes still very much exist. And it makes you wonder about how much you’re not picking up on, too.

The thing is, you just don’t know what other people are really thinking, until some of them write letters like the above. You think everyone’s cool, everyone’s enlightened, because of how freethinking scientists can be in other respects, but then you run the experiment and get data showing that no, there still are people who really don’t think women are up to snuff in physics. That moves to make the field more hospitable for women—or really, hospitable for people—will dilute the quality of research being done. (And it’s easy to start asking yourself why you should care about impressing these people or why you would want to be in a field where you see that you’re not going to be given the benefit of the doubt if you’re not already head and shoulders above the competition.***)

The pity is that these people, who are so astute in other ways, can’t even see their blind spot about this. Everything else in the universe is up for questioning and being probed, but perish the thought of criticizing the culture of the field, which is clearly already perfect as it is.

—-

*—For example, I don’t think he fully got it when the first project I was on ran into serious managerial and technical problems and I took it really hard. (In retrospect, it was the wrong project for me, or really for just about any beginning graduate student who wasn’t already a master tinkerer. I did make mistakes, no question. But it really hurt that all of my eggs had been in that one basket, while he had other projects that were getting results.)

**—I do wonder if this guy might have had some issues with women at the time, though, since his ex-wife had run off to marry a rival of his working in the same field, and he was engaged in litigation over custody of their daughter. I am sure there are two sides to this story, neither of which I know.

***—I was certainly not a standout—with the way graduate school had gone, I would have had to perform a miracle during my postdoc(s) to have had a crack at an academic position. And I didn’t have the fire in the belly for that any more.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Career advice, They actually said that?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.