Controversial article re: women in science

[Guest rareza]

This article was approved, then rejected for publication. The ideas expressed are not popular, but I didn't find them far-fetched or offensive, but apparently it is already the subject of controversy. I'd like to hear what others in the science community think of it.

 

Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science

 

Peter A. Lawrence

 

Peter A. Lawrence is at Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom. E-mail: pal@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk

 

Published: January 17, 2006

 

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040019

 

Copyright: © 2006 Peter A. Lawrence. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

 

Citation: Lawrence PA (2006) Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science. PLoS Biol 4(1): e19

 

At the current pace, European women are not expected to reach parity with men in academic science positions until 2050. —Gerlind Wallon [1]

 

Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research. But I think this dream is Utopian; it assumes that if all doors were opened and all discrimination ended, the different sexes would be professionally indistinguishable. The dream is sustained by a cult of political correctness that ignores the facts of life—and thrives only because the human mind likes to bury experience as it builds beliefs. Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women are born different. Yet even we scientists deny this, allowing us to identify the “best” candidates for jobs and promotions by subjecting men and women to the same tests. But since these tests favour predominantly male characteristics, such as self-confidence and aggression, we choose more men and we discourage women. Science would be better served if we gave more opportunity and power to the gentle, the reflective, and the creative individuals of both sexes. And if we did, more women would be selected, more would choose to stay in science, and more would get to the top.

 

A Taboo

It is not easy to write or talk about this subject. If you say, for example, that women are on average more understanding of others, this can be interpreted as misogyny in disguise. If you state that boys on average are much more likely than girls to become computer nerds, people may react as if you plan to ban all women from the trading rooms of merchant banks. The Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen published research on the “male brain” in a specialist journal in 1997, but did not dare to talk about his ideas in public for several years [2]. One reason for this absurd taboo is that we cannot think objectively because our minds are full of wayward beliefs and delusions—“ghosts” (Box 1). And one of these ghosts is the dogma that all groups of people, such as men and women, are on average the same, and any genetic distinctions must not be countenanced. Such ghosts bias our perceptions and censor our thoughts.

 

Boys and Girls Are Born Different and Remain So

The chance that a woman will mug you tonight on the way home is somewhere around nil. That is a quirk specific to my gender. —Michael Moore [4]

 

Baron-Cohen makes one point crystal clear: you cannot deduce the psychological characteristics of any person by knowing their sex. Arguing from the scientific literature that men and women typically have different types of brains, he nevertheless points out that “some women have the male brain, and some men have the female brain” [2]. Stereotyping is unscientific—“individuals are just that: individuals” [2]. Yet Baron-Cohen presents evidence that males on average are biologically predisposed to systemise, to analyse, and to b

 

The rest of the article is at:

 

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040019

[silkworm]

This is equivocation at its whiniest.

 

Do they count working in the medical professions as work in science?

 

The lack of women in science is like the lack of black athletes in the NHL. The NHL never kept blacks out, like baseball did, it's just all the great black athletes focused on other sports.

[zyncod]

One good thing about this debate- at least it got rid of that idiot Larry Summers.

[insane_alien]

hmm... in the chemistry labs there is a 55:52 ratio of girls to boys. from this we could say that women are pretty well represented in some areas.

[cosine]

In Mathematics here its about 60:40 Females to males. Maybe a little more even, but thats the gist of it.