If you tell women they’re genetically worse at math and science long enough, it’ll become true. Or at least that’s the impression I get from a new paper in the journal Science. (From MadScienceMama.) Researchers divided women into four groups. Each group took an “exam” in which they answered math questions, and the math questions were broken up by an essay in the middle which the women had to study.

One group had an essay that stated that women do worse in math than men due to genetic factors. Another group read an essay which said women do worse at math than men, but blamed it on environment. A third group read an essay that had nothing to do with women or math. And a fourth group read an essay that wasn’t about math, but talked about women artists, thus “reminding” the women of their group membership.

The women who had the essay stating that women are genetically less gifted at math did much worse on the math questions than the women who read the neutral essay. The women who read the essay that blamed environment for women’s lower performance in math did as well as women who read the neutral essay. And the really surprising result: the women who read the essay about women artists did almost as badly as the women who read the essay that said women were genetically inferior at math.

As MadScienceMama says:

The study suggests that genetic theory can give powerful support to discriminatory stereotypes. It is likely due, in no small part, to the way genetics is presented to the public, with an emphasis on determinism.

She goes on to say that this study may not explain the “leaky pipeline” in science, because women who actually work in the sciences may know better than to believe in junky theories about genetics. She may well be right, but the results of this study may go some way towards explaining why fewer women enter the pipeline in the first place.

Former Health & Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala recently took part in a taskforce on the status of women in academic science and engineering. The taskforce’s findings were dismal.

Despite this optimistic piece in Newsweek, women still don’t have proportional representation in academic sciences, Shalala writes:

For more than 30 years, women have made up more than 30 percent of the doctorates in social and behavioral sciences and more than 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet at the top research institutions, only about 15 percent of the full professors in these fields are women.

The reason isn’t biology, childrearing demands, or differences in biology, as Alternet’s Caryl Rivers wrote. It’s “discrimination pure and simple.” She cites a river of crap spewed by supposed experts who claim, based on sketchy science, that women’s brains just aren’t suited for anything involving leadership or tricky number crunching. (Warning: reading Rivers’ piece will piss you off.)
Shalala puts it best:

Yes, there are some slight differences in the ways men’s and women’s brains operate. But the same researchers who stress these differences often fail to note the many more areas in which men and women share the same approaches. Study after study indicates no significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that could account for the lower representation of women in these fields.

She recommends a raft of policies, including woman-friendly hiring and tenure policies and new federal regulations.

And the problem starts early, as I See Invisible People points out:

My daughers had not a single woman teacher in science or math in high school. My son has had only one. Universities, as well as high schools, need to make a serious effort to recruit and promote women in under-represented areas if we’re to make any headway on the issue. To quote the old public service announcement, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that’s exactly what’s happening. I’m encouraged to see the Academies make a stand on it.

From Chicagoist:

Women in technology are hard to find, and we don’t mean the White Town album. According to the 2001 Current Population Survey data, one out of 10 employed engineers was a woman, while two out of 10 employed engineering technologists and technicians were women. Women made up 17 percent of all industrial engineers, 12 percent of metallurgical/metal engineers and 11.5 percent of chemical engineers. Among all other engineering specialties, women represented fewer than 11 percent.

Such statistics make us happy that organizations such as Women in Technology International exist. And on Thursday at Northwestern’s Kellogg Conference Center, the organization will honor those women who have excelled as industry and civic leaders in the Chicago IT community.

On Monday, Women In Technology honored five women who’ve made strides in scientific or technical fields, including Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who co-discovered HIV. Also inducted into their “Hall of Fame” were Maria Azua, a vice president at IBM who holds 27 patents and has another 59 pending, and Been-Jon Woo, an engineer at Intel who holds 13 patents.

Another honoree has helped HP realize that helping women engineers return to work after they give birth isn’t rocket science, according to the inspiring lede in the Mercury News story:

The pattern was depressing. For years, Nor Rae Spohn watched as women engineers at Hewlett-Packard would take time off work to have children and then disappear. “The technology moved quickly, and you couldn’t entice them to come back,'’ she said.

But Spohn, vice president of business imaging and printing at HP in Boise, and her management team worked to get women engineers to come back to work part time — anywhere from two to four days a week. The result: Her organization is 22 percent women in a male-dominated industry. “As their kids get older, they gladly come back to the workplace and we haven’t lost them,'’ she said.

The fifth honoree, Kim Jones from Sun Microsystems, was quoted as saying: “I want to pass on the message that diversity is critical in all decisions a business makes.”