Bias in Science

This month The American has a great article about gender bias in science. It's pretty much exactly what I thought: there might be some bias, but if there is it's small. The lack of women in science, math, and engineering isn't due to biased behavior but the same kind of things that result in a lack of men in social sciences and education (etc). For some reason people have a hard time accepting that men and women prefer different things (according to distributions, of course), and that would seem to be the utterly logical and predictable cause of this oft-decried disparity. The article also discusses attempts to "title-nine" the sciences, which would be disastrous. I know for a fact that title nine results in odd (and arguably discriminatory) situations like women's teams in obscure sports (like crew) getting much more money than men's teams to offset things like football programs, at least at Stanford (unless my friend who used to be on Stanford women's crew was lying/wrong).

The article is quite long and goes into great depth. Here's the punchline in case you're pressed for time:

The power and glory of science and engineer­ing is that they are, adamantly, evidence-based. But the evidence of gender bias in math and science is flimsy at best, and the evidence that women are relatively disinclined to pursue these fields at the highest levels is serious. When the bastions of science pay obsequious attention to the flimsy and turn a blind eye to the serious, it is hard to maintain the view that the science enterprise is somehow immune to the enthu­siasms that have corrupted other, supposedly “softer” academic fields.

Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade. Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats that they may soon be facing. The business commu­nity and citizens at large are completely in the dark. This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically con­sequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers.

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone—its faculty, alumni, and staff—started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years. Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results? So far, no one in Congress has even thought to ask.