Jun 3, 2016 05:54 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 3, 2016 06:58 PM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-scientific...-to-reform
EXCERPT: [...] In the final months of my physics degree, one of my professors asked me into his office – an exciting prospect, given that I assumed we’d be discussing subjects for my potential honours theses. He closed the door, invited me to sit, and declared he’d fallen in love. He wanted to have an affair, he said, and if I couldn’t share in that plan he couldn’t continue as my advisor – he’d find my presence ‘too distracting’. He was a senior academic, and married; but this was Australia in the late 1970s and the subject of sexual harassment wasn’t on any university radar. It seemed this was just one of life’s inequities, another hurdle facing being a woman in science. So I made the decision to leave physics – a subject I loved – and in the following academic year switched to computer science at a different university.
At the University of Queensland, I’d been the only woman in the physics department, aside from the secretaries. There were no women lecturers or professors, and for two years no other female students. Students and professors in science departments didn’t fraternise then; we were there to learn, they were there to impart wisdom, and the only interaction between us outside class were rare meetings with an advisor – short, sharp and strictly about science. Any type of sexual behaviour seemed at odds with the near-monastic atmosphere that prevailed in our faux-gothic physics building and, until I was propositioned, I’d felt as if I was participating in something akin to Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. I was involved, I’d thought, in a ‘higher’, ‘purer’ activity, a cosmic game of chess in which Truth and Beauty were the aims.
Part of the reason I’d gone into physics was to escape the messy world of human emotions. Like many men in this field, I loved the crystalline order that physics revealed, and the mathematical harmonies it uncovered in nature seemed a refuge from the chaos of my fellow human beings with their inscrutable urges and desires. The last thing I wanted was to blur the boundary between scholarship and sex.
In recent months, the world of academic science has been rocked by a number of high-profile scandals in which senior scientists at leading universities in the United States, including Caltech, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, have been called out for sexually harassing female students and junior colleagues. The litany of cases involves graduate students who have been victims of groping, explicit emails, invitations to private dinners, and demanding, childish love letters. In one case, a professor of astronomy with a known track record of harassment moved universities. No one in administration passed on the information, and so the behaviour began afresh.
With every new report, a wave of weariness washes over me: ‘Really?’ ‘Still?’ my mind cries. When will we get over this? Anger used to be my pre-eminent response, but I’ve seen so much sexism in science over the past 30 years that nothing much surprises me any more. How retrograde and boring all this is. Then a little cheer arises: at least the guy is being sanctioned. At least in some cases. At last there are inklings of justice. While my professor got off scot-free, some professors are now being found guilty of sexual harassment and forced to attend training courses, or they’re suspended from teaching.
[...] Part of what women are up against in science is a continuing widespread attitude that, deep down, we’re not really up to it, which by extension implies that a high rate of attrition is no big loss. That view was startlingly articulated in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, when in a conference he mused that if there weren’t more women in top science positions at elite universities it might be in part because women’s mental abilities are different. The ensuing furore led Summers to resign and precipitated a great deal of hand-wringing about academic sexism. Yet here we are, a decade later, with yet more academic sexism.
What surprised me about Summers was not what he thought – in my experience, it’s not an uncommon view among elite academic men – but that he thought he could say it out loud. He didn’t seem to understand the absurdity of stating, in an intellectual forum, that half the Harvard student body might be inherently unsuited for intellectual success. As one male physicist has reputedly put it, ‘only blunt bright bastards make it in the field’. Though that has never been wholly true (think of the gentle genius Michael Faraday), it sums up sentiments that run deep through the physical sciences community, creating psychological and sociological barriers not only for women but also for many men. Recently, the magazine Physics World devoted a special report to obstacles confronted by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and minority physicists in institutions such as the European particle accelerator CERN. Machismo stereotyping creates an environment that disenfranchises many potential scientists.
One is reminded here of that founding document of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1624), which presents one of the first visions of what a science institution might be: in Bacon’s hugely influential book, scientific research is carried out by a priesthood, a group of 36 ‘fathers’ – pointedly, all men. Bacon was also the first to propose a scientific method, which was to be transacted on the body of a female Nature: ‘I am come in very truth to leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.’ As Jahren notes: ‘the scientific method may be impartial, scientific culture is not’....
EXCERPT: [...] In the final months of my physics degree, one of my professors asked me into his office – an exciting prospect, given that I assumed we’d be discussing subjects for my potential honours theses. He closed the door, invited me to sit, and declared he’d fallen in love. He wanted to have an affair, he said, and if I couldn’t share in that plan he couldn’t continue as my advisor – he’d find my presence ‘too distracting’. He was a senior academic, and married; but this was Australia in the late 1970s and the subject of sexual harassment wasn’t on any university radar. It seemed this was just one of life’s inequities, another hurdle facing being a woman in science. So I made the decision to leave physics – a subject I loved – and in the following academic year switched to computer science at a different university.
At the University of Queensland, I’d been the only woman in the physics department, aside from the secretaries. There were no women lecturers or professors, and for two years no other female students. Students and professors in science departments didn’t fraternise then; we were there to learn, they were there to impart wisdom, and the only interaction between us outside class were rare meetings with an advisor – short, sharp and strictly about science. Any type of sexual behaviour seemed at odds with the near-monastic atmosphere that prevailed in our faux-gothic physics building and, until I was propositioned, I’d felt as if I was participating in something akin to Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. I was involved, I’d thought, in a ‘higher’, ‘purer’ activity, a cosmic game of chess in which Truth and Beauty were the aims.
Part of the reason I’d gone into physics was to escape the messy world of human emotions. Like many men in this field, I loved the crystalline order that physics revealed, and the mathematical harmonies it uncovered in nature seemed a refuge from the chaos of my fellow human beings with their inscrutable urges and desires. The last thing I wanted was to blur the boundary between scholarship and sex.
In recent months, the world of academic science has been rocked by a number of high-profile scandals in which senior scientists at leading universities in the United States, including Caltech, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, have been called out for sexually harassing female students and junior colleagues. The litany of cases involves graduate students who have been victims of groping, explicit emails, invitations to private dinners, and demanding, childish love letters. In one case, a professor of astronomy with a known track record of harassment moved universities. No one in administration passed on the information, and so the behaviour began afresh.
With every new report, a wave of weariness washes over me: ‘Really?’ ‘Still?’ my mind cries. When will we get over this? Anger used to be my pre-eminent response, but I’ve seen so much sexism in science over the past 30 years that nothing much surprises me any more. How retrograde and boring all this is. Then a little cheer arises: at least the guy is being sanctioned. At least in some cases. At last there are inklings of justice. While my professor got off scot-free, some professors are now being found guilty of sexual harassment and forced to attend training courses, or they’re suspended from teaching.
[...] Part of what women are up against in science is a continuing widespread attitude that, deep down, we’re not really up to it, which by extension implies that a high rate of attrition is no big loss. That view was startlingly articulated in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, when in a conference he mused that if there weren’t more women in top science positions at elite universities it might be in part because women’s mental abilities are different. The ensuing furore led Summers to resign and precipitated a great deal of hand-wringing about academic sexism. Yet here we are, a decade later, with yet more academic sexism.
What surprised me about Summers was not what he thought – in my experience, it’s not an uncommon view among elite academic men – but that he thought he could say it out loud. He didn’t seem to understand the absurdity of stating, in an intellectual forum, that half the Harvard student body might be inherently unsuited for intellectual success. As one male physicist has reputedly put it, ‘only blunt bright bastards make it in the field’. Though that has never been wholly true (think of the gentle genius Michael Faraday), it sums up sentiments that run deep through the physical sciences community, creating psychological and sociological barriers not only for women but also for many men. Recently, the magazine Physics World devoted a special report to obstacles confronted by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and minority physicists in institutions such as the European particle accelerator CERN. Machismo stereotyping creates an environment that disenfranchises many potential scientists.
One is reminded here of that founding document of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1624), which presents one of the first visions of what a science institution might be: in Bacon’s hugely influential book, scientific research is carried out by a priesthood, a group of 36 ‘fathers’ – pointedly, all men. Bacon was also the first to propose a scientific method, which was to be transacted on the body of a female Nature: ‘I am come in very truth to leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.’ As Jahren notes: ‘the scientific method may be impartial, scientific culture is not’....