Women vs. Men In Science

It’s not very often that words like women, science, and leadership are combined together. Since the dawns of time, science and leadership roles have been reserved for their male counterparts. Boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls. To like math and science is considered a masculine feature, while the love of art and music is considered feminine.

Among 770 Nobel laureates, only 34 are women, 12 in the categories of Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine. That makes less than 6 percent of all Nobel Prize winners.

Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard University, made a variety of controversial remarks in an attempt to explain these gender differences. While addressing an academic conference Dr. Summers said, as Boston Globe quotes, “innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers”. Lawrence Summers also questioned what role – if any – discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing their careers.

There is no question that there are huge biological differences between males and females in any species, including our own, at the genetic, hormonal, physiological, and psychological levels. There exist differences in the structure of the average male and female brains and in some measurable parameters of brain activity. Yet despite the desire for a definitive answers to complex questions of difference in intellectual capacities, researchers warn us that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows.

A leading researcher in the field of Human Genetics and professor at McGill University, Dr. Benoit St-Jacques opines, “any discussion of the role of nature (innate abilities) versus nurture (environment) is mostly meaningless and usually a result of intellectual oversimplification”. Today scientists strongly believe that everything regarding our biology is a result of the interplay between our genetic make-up and our environment. Dr. St-Jacques refutes any evidence that these two "causes" contribute to a certain outcome in a proportion of 10%:90% or 50%:50% etc. Thus, even if it was true that males make up a higher percentage of high achievers on math and science tests, there is no way to determine whether it is because of their genetic make up or their environment.

The importance of discrimination and oppression that women and other minorities have faced for centuries in many areas of life cannot be overstated. The history of women’s participation in science and math is a history of struggle for access. For many years, women’s social roles have mainly been limited to child-bearing and less to professional roles. Even in our modern societies, there are still "pressures" that discourage women from a career in basic science.

Irrespective of gender, a positive environment and a social support system free of discrimination make a world of difference. Consider for a second, the studies that were meant to show that African Americans have low I.Q. – the greatest antithesis to Dr. Summers’ hypothesis on innate gender differences. In 1969, Arthur Jensen, a Harvard psychologist concluded in the Harvard Educational Review that genetic differences between African Americans and whites accounted for the lower average I.Q. scores of African Americans. The research failed to take into account the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression of the population in question. Jensen’s research was also challenged on scientific and methodological grounds.

A 19th Century myth stated that women have smaller brain than men, contributing to their "fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason". The late 19th century also saw a number of discoveries made in physics that paved the way for the breakthrough of modern physics. Marie Curie’s research with Pierre Curie and Antoine Henri Becquerel on radiation was among the most important and revolutionary contribution to the development of physics and received a Nobel Prize in 1903. In 1908 Marie Curie received another Nobel Prize, thus become the first woman to be accorded this mark of honor on her own merit. Eleven other women, including Linda B. Buck in 2004, followed the suit and received Nobel Prize in the category of Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine.

There is no doubt that women have come a long way. The present outlook of the society, the one with male dominance, is not likely to reverse in the blink of an eye. It will take several years of development of systematic effort to increase the number of women choosing science and math as a career choice. Any debate over innate genetic differences may prove counter-productive and take us several hundred years back when women were discriminated against on the basis of gender. Marie Curie once said, “I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done”.