‘Bias squeezes women out of the sciences’

MUMBAI: The session, ‘Science is from

Mars

, Arts is from

Venus

Time to Tweak the Gender Orbits’ began with a question by moderator Pallavi Aiyar: “What is it about the culture surrounding science that makes it so hostile to

women

?”

Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan replied that it was widely believed that to succeed in the sciences one has to be “aggressive and competitive”, and so women and some men who don’t naturally adapt to that culture don’t want to engage with it. “Sexism today is very subtle and goes under the moniker of implicit

bias

,” she said.

Columbia English Literature professor Sharon Marcus cited a statistic from the US’s top research universities: 70% professors are male. “So, I have to ask the hard question: Are the men better?” she said. “But from my experience, I don’t really see numerical disparities between brilliant men and women students,” she said.

So, how does the pipeline narrow and squeeze out women students? There are several factors, including something as simple as reference letters, said Marcus. “Those written for women have words like disciplined, hard-working, pleasant. For men, it’s brilliant, imaginative, competitive. You can see how implicit bias works. Men appear so much more brilliant, while women look so much more ordinary,” she said.

On the subtlety of bias, political theorist Uday Singh Mehta cited an incident from his graduate school years as a philosophy student. “There was only one woman among the six of us, and she once said something at a seminar, to which the professor replied, “What’s the argument you are making?” She was so flummoxed, she didn’t open her mouth for the rest of the semester. Perhaps, if the professor had used a word like ‘insight’, rather than ‘argument’ which carries a greater burden she might have reacted differently,” he said.

Aiyar asked science writer Mukul Sharma if he agreed with the postulation that science fiction is a “pubescent boy thing written by men for boys”. Sharma said, “No, I don’t think so... It may be gendered, but most of my science-fiction protagonists are female.”

He added, “I have been an arts and science editor, so I’m neither from Venus nor Mars. I’m from Earth. My father, who was in the army, taught me to fire a rifle when I was four, and my mother taught me sewing and knitting. So I know both.”

Nurture matters but are there evolutionary differences between male and female

brains

, asked Aiyar.

Is there any science for the lack of women in science? “Not really,” said science writer Stefan Klein. “There is no such thing as a male or female brain.” He cited a study conducted in northeast India to assess the brains of men and women. In matrilineal villages there was almost no significant difference in the abilities between genders, as compared to patrilineal villages. “There is a very tiny difference in male and female brains due to the exposure to testosterone but the difference gets boosted by factors in society,” Klein said.