There is currently a bit of a storm in scientific circles about sexism in science.  Again. An article in New Scientist recently highlighted yet another male scientist who thinks that women can’t or shouldn’t do science – in this case physics. It happens regularly – the last male scientist to do this was James Damore, who was fired from Google last year for holding similar views. This time it happened at a scientific workshop on gender and high-energy physics being held at the CERN particle physics laboratory, in Geneva that aimed to look at gender issues in science. A professor, Alessandro Strumia from the University of Pisa, Italy, who is a long-standing member of the CERN collaboration, gave a presentation purporting to be on “a historical look at women’s representation in academic publishing”. Instead of giving an evidence-based account of gender issues in physics, he used poor evidence to claim that women weren’t as good at physics, were promoted too early and received disproportionate funding given their ability. He got a lot of stick for this and CERN has suspended him from any activities, pending an investigation.

It resonated with me because there are lots of men who think like this. Last week I was talking with a good friend, a retired scientist, about the problems women had in politics, and he said exactly the same thing – that the reason why there aren’t many women in high positions in politics or science is that they really aren’t as good as men in either discipline. He inferred that women are good at empathy, and communication and have no real interest in science.

There are two parts to arguments like this; firstly whether women’s brains are configured differently so that they really aren’t as good in thinking scientifically, on average, as men. That is a question for science itself to answer, and I will go into this a bit later. But the other question is – are women put off by the scientific culture and is there still gross sexism in science today?

So I told him about something that happened to me when I was in the sixth form in a co-ed valleys grammar school in 1962. There were 7 girls and 22 boys in the A level physics class, and for the first term we had an excellent experienced teacher who we all liked. Then in the second term he took promotion at another school and left, and we got a young teacher, who had been teaching for about 3 years. The difference was astounding, and the girls soon began to feel very undervalued. He would never ask girls to answer his questions; he would make snide comments to them and he picked on them. I say “them” because I didn’t feel that so much. As it happened I was the daughter of the deputy head in the same school, so I got treated a lot better. But after several terms of this, and after trying to talk to the teacher about it, the other girls wrote a petition and asked me to take it to the headmaster. I was a little unwilling to do this at first as it didn’t really seem to be my problem, although I could see what was going on, but I realised that I was the only one who would be able to do this. So I went to see the Head taking the letter. He was very fair and understanding and assured me that he would try to deal with it. Indeed he did, and the teacher was obviously made aware of the problem and did try to be fairer towards the girls. Of course he wasn’t at all happy with me and ignored me as much as possible for the rest of the course.

Physics wasn’t my subject as I was intending to study medicine, but I found it very interesting and not difficult. I have no idea whether any other girls went on to do Physics in university but I doubt it.
I went on to read medicine at Cambridge, and at that time there were 9 lads to each girl. It was very disconcerting to be completely overwhelmed with boys. It is not a comfortable situation to have such an unequal gender mix, and I am sure boys would feel just as uncomfortable if they were in a situation of being always in an extreme minority.
I found that throughout my career as a GP. At the beginning of my career in the seventies, female doctors were very scarce and while the patients were very happy with us, our colleagues often weren’t. When I joined the practice I was eventually to stay in for 37 years, one of the male partners said he didn’t think I should have been appointed because women wouldn’t stay and would leave to have babies. He left general practice 10 years later, and became a farmer instead! I knew I had to be very disciplined to survive and when I did have to have occasional flexibility to deal with childcare emergencies I would always say I had to take the car to the garage. That was always so much more acceptable. Sometimes there was outright prejudice, not so much in the practice but in medical management, which I did a lot of. All the usual gripes – I would make a point in a meeting, which was ignored, then a man would make the same point 10 minutes later and it was immediately taken up as an important contribution. The successful projects for improving quality in health care that I started were ignored by my male colleagues even though they were picked up by think tanks (such as the King’s Fund) and by the Welsh Assembly. They managed to ignore my work even when there was a trail of health service managers coming to our Health Board for information on how to copy it.

So if men in science or medicine think that women are only suited to “female” jobs is not surprising that for so long women thought these jobs were just too uncomfortable? And that is without the sexualizing and indecent behaviour that so many women seemed to suffer from. And the undoubted fact that in high-pressure jobs where women want to give their best but also have a family, childcare and housework  will fall on them in most cases. It will weed out all but the most energetic, disciplined and brave young girls.

So, back to the question of whether there are differences between male and female brains that might account for differing ability aptitude and attitude towards science.
It has been said that from a very young age baby boys and girls are different, boys being more interested in objects and mechanics and girls are interested in people and emotions. But this has been disproved by evidence from scientific papers
over the last 30 years. It appears that male and female infants are equally interested in objects; make the same inferences about object motion at the same time in development. The small differences that are found are just as likely to show girls learning skills earlier as learning them later.
It has then been claimed that formal maths and sciences don’t bear any relationships to these early learning skills, and males are better at these skill subsets. From the evidence there is a biological foundation to mathematical and scientific reasoning. We have core knowledge systems that emerge prior to any formal instruction and that serve as a basis for mathematical thinking. But these systems develop equally in males and females.

However, it seems there are differences in cognition between older children, starting at puberty. They manifest themselves more in the ways that children solve problems using different strategies. Girls perform better at some verbal, mathematical and spatial tasks, and boys perform better at other verbal, mathematical, and spatial tasks. But it is very subtle; manifesting itself in the choices children make that will speed up or slow down solving the puzzle. It does not mean women are “verbal” and men are “spatial.” In formal testing, it is possible to construct tests that can give an inherent advantage to boys or girls depending on which tests are used, so you have to be very careful in interpreting IQ scores, for instance.

So why have boys done better on maths tests than girls? They certainly used to but the gap has been getting smaller over the years with more girls studying the sciences. And now in many cases girls are doing better than the boys. The age at which girls have improved has been gradually rising and now both sexes tend to perform similarly right up to University. So while there are sex differences, they don’t add up to an overall advantage for one sex over the other.

Why do so many more boys than girls become “high flyers” in maths and science? The usual explanation is that men show a greater variability so that there are more men at the top of the ability scales (as well as more in the bottom sets). This is certainly possible, but given the different expectations of boys and girls and the amount of encouragement and opportunities they have had in the past, this can’t be proved at the moment and it may well be that in future this gap will narrow as well.

So we have now had 3 Nobel prizes for women in Physics. Attitudes towards women in science may have changed, but only slowly. Jocelyn Bell didn’t get a Nobel Prize for the discovery of Pulsars because her supervisor took it, despite the fact that not only did she do all the work but also he even disbelieved her results in the beginning. He may have been within his rights, and it may have happened to young men as well, but it still seemed unfair. Rosalind Franklin didn’t get a Nobel Prize for her part in the elucidation of DNA despite the fact that the solving of the structure was based on her crystallography pictures, which had been stolen from her without her knowledge. It is true that she died tragically young, and Nobel prizes are only given during one’s lifetime, but even in the early years her work wasn’t acknowledged. That there always was gross discrimination and discouragement of women in Science is indisputable, but the tragedy is that some men cannot see that this will have an effect on the numbers of young women making a career in science and think that it is because women are not up to it. There are however plenty of men especially those who have daughters and granddaughters of their own, who do support young women, and who want to change things for them. And it is reassuring that when men with such dated and sexist opinions do speak out there are consequences for them, often leading to them losing their jobs. Perhaps they will get the message sometime soon.

References
New Scientist Daily news 1 October 2018
1. Physicist sparks gender row after claiming women are worse at physics
2. It is 2018, so why are we still debating whether women can do physics?
3. THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE
PINKER VS. SPELKE A DEBATE 5.16.2005]