In her essay Evalyn Gates argues that women are underrepresented in physics because of gender biases and that our physics community has an obligation to rectify this perceived inequity. She says, “Institutions that award fewer than about 40% of bachelor’s degrees to women should be actively investigating to find out why.”
A much wider male-to-female discrepancy was reported in the New York Times recently. It seems that women commit only 7% of the murders in New York City. There is one bright spot, however: In the spouse-offing category, women lead men two to one.
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.
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.
I have long been interested in the status of women in science. When I was young, Maria Skłodowska Curie was my hero. At the time of my retirement, I could claim that more women received their PhD working with me than with anyone in the history of Yale physics. And my wife, Eleanor Adair, is a significant figure in her area of environmental physiology. Ellie’s career path was significantly modified—mainly delayed—by her raising of our three children.
Rather than work toward quotas that incorrectly assume men and women are equivalent, we had better work toward a more radical end, a reconstruction of our corner of a society currently fitted to male biology so that it better fits that of females.
