The Science on Women and Science , Edited by Christina Hoff Sommers
AEI Press, Washington, DC, 2009. $20.00 paper (330 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8447-4281-6
Scientific information often collides with ideology in the area of sex-differences research. Many people agree on a host of quantifiable differences between the sexes, but intense debate surrounds which, if any, are relevant to the scarcity, the slow academic-career progress, and the “second-classness” of women in science. If you enjoy multidisciplinary and emotive scientific debates—which are rare in physics—then The Science on Women and Science, edited by Christina Hoff Sommers, will be of interest to you.
Also rare in physics is a single-topic volume whose editor doesn’t agree with all the authors. The Science on Women and Science grew out of a conference sponsored by the politically conservative American Enterprise Institute as a reaction to findings reflected in the National Academies’ 2007 report titled Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. The report minimizes the role of biology and ventures that the root causes of gender bias in science are psychosocial and can be fully addressed by educational and workplace reforms. Those findings, as well as actions such as the efforts to enforce Title IX—the US law that prevents gender-based discrimination in educational programs—are generally inconsistent with fundamental, socioeconomic beliefs held by scholars who are for the free market and against government regulation. This book’s bent is to “attribute the gender disparity to characteristic gender preferences grounded in biological differences,” says Sommers in the introduction.
For example, David Geary (chapter 7) claims that males have an evolutionary advantage both in spatial cognition and mathematical reasoning. But wait: Elizabeth Spelke and Katherine Ellison (chapter 2) counter that core systems for math emerge in human infants and in “no case have male infants or children been found to have a general advantage over females in any of these core domains.” But in older children they do, says Richard Haier (chapter 8), for there are “more boys than girls in the extraordinary range” of the SAT math test. However, chime in Jerre Levy and Doreen Kimura (chapter 9), some crucial abilities (reasoning) in mathematics favor males, while others (computation) favor females. Depending on your views on gender and science, a given chapter will offer either an infuriating refutation or a delightful confirmation. The mixture of evidence in this book might even change your mind … but probably not, speculates Joshua Aronson (chapter 5).
And so the debate continues: Simon Baron-Cohen (chapter 1) argues that thanks to “liberal and fair-minded” professors, academic misogyny is a thing of the past, but men dominate science because they tend to be natural “systemizers,” whereas women tend to be “empathizers.” In his chapter, Aronson discusses the stereotype-threat theory, which posits that negative stereotypes contribute to a particular group’s poor performance. By not overinterpreting those findings, he goes a good way toward deflecting criticism in the following chapter, in which Amy Wax challenges his handling of stereotype-threat data and the degree to which they explain the gender gap in scientific achievement. Charles Murray’s conclusion (chapter 10) goes where angels fear to tread and violates Sommers’s dictum that comparing sexual brain dimorphism research with its racial analogue is inappropriate. If you want to read a view that compares the resignation of Lawrence Summers from Harvard University to the trial of Galileo, you will enjoy Murray’s concluding chapter.
The political becomes personal for me in chapter 4, in which Sommers attacks both my alma mater, MIT, and the NSF ADVANCE program, which supports projects to enhance the participation of women in science and engineering. The gender reforms championed by MIT dean of science Robert Birgeneau in the late 1990s clearly did not diminish the university’s scientific reputation or power. And I’ve seen firsthand the resulting scientific progress and development of human capital from just one ADVANCE award, which benefited more than four dozen senior chemists and physicists. Another gripe with the book concerns a couple of simplistic graphs that are meant to be illustrative but are instead misleading because they either improperly characterize the data that are being discussed or conflict with the author’s statements in the text.
Do these 10 chapters give a balanced representation of our current state of knowledge? It’s a tough question and requires evenhanded searching of the extensive literature. Why Aren’t More Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate the Evidence (American Psychological Association, 2006), edited by Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, may have achieved that remarkable balance. Also, mainstream views that question the significance and immutability of brain-based sex differences are not well represented in The Science on Women and Science. For those views, curious readers might want to peruse, for example, the forthcoming book on that subject by Rebecca Jordan-Young of Barnard College or works by Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin-Madison or Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University.
Though falling short of the synthetic excellence of Ceci and Williams’s work, The Science on Women and Science is rich in data, descriptions of real-world reform efforts, and essays by acknowledged experts. However, a few otherwise strong chapters are weakened by polemics. Scholars, whether on the right or the left of the political spectrum, do not serve their cause by preaching a loosely reasoned sermon to the choir. Although choir members will receive it with enthusiasm, guests in the congregation may not.
Amy Bug is a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She conducts research in computational condensed-matter physics, teaches across the physics curriculum, and has taught a course called Gender and Physical Science.
