A problem of perception

I‘d like to perform a small experiment. Picture a scientist in your mind. Now answer this: what gender is your scientist? What colour is their skin? I’d hazard a guess that a large number of you pictured a white male. Mine has a beard too – and he’s scrunched over a desk in a solitary room, calculating something. His clothes are scruffy, and he clearly doesn’t care over-much about his appearance. We all have mental preconceptions. Of people, of jobs, and of the way life is in general. It’s not really possible to get away from that. Nor would the lack of them be desirable – how would we begin to think about anything without somewhere to start from? We can’t remember the properties of everything individually so we have to categorise and just remember ‘if it’s in this category it has these properties’.

If you think I am wrong then I invite you to tear my arguments to pieces. At least we’ll both be thinking about it, and I’ll have achieved my goal

As scientists, we like to think of our-selves as objective and rational. It’s what we strive for. But we are humans like everyone else, and sometimes our irrationality gets the better of us. A recent study looked into the hiring of lab assistants, aiming to determine if there was any gender bias in the way that science departments viewed the relative competence of male and female applicants. They created a group of fake applications, containing the same content, but randomly assigned the names as male or female. The differences were striking: on average, men were consistently judged as being ‘more competent’, and offered higher starting salaries (by about $3500) than women.

But this wasn’t a case of ‘misogynistic old men’ putting women down. The study found that the gender, and indeed age, of the academic judging the candidates had no significant effect. In other words, women were just as likely as men to rate female candidates as ‘less competent’. Curiously, despite not offering them the job as frequently, both also consistently rated female candidates as more ‘likeable’: given that the CVs were identical, it would seem that this hints at yet another false preconception, though in this case working against men.

The study found that... women were just as likely as men to rate female candidates as ‘less competent’

Recently, within the Department of Physics, a group of students have started meeting to talk about these issues, and questions much wider than that: are there fewer people from ethnic minorities than there ought to be? What is life like for disabled people who want to pursue science? For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on women in physics in particular, though much of this extends to other sciences and engineering equally well.

There is strong evidence that far fewer women go on to do physics research than in other sciences. In 2006, only 14.78% of PhD students from the ‘Top 50’ departments (as rated by the National Science Foundation) were female. This compared with 33.42% and 45.89% for Chemistry and Biology respectively.

First of all, why should we care? Many arguments have been proposed to explain this. I will address some of them here, and hopefully convince you that this is worth thinking carefully about. One argument that is frequently encountered concerns the relative ability of males and females in physics. Intelligence is tricky to define, but if we focus on performance in areas relevant to mathematical disciplines such as physics, then some research shows that despite there being no difference in the average ability between genders, males exhibit a greater variance. If you picture a normal distribution, you can see that a consequence of this is that there are significantly more males with very high ability (and also very low) than there are females. One figure puts this at twice as many males as females in the top 1%.

Does this explain the situation? Let’s leave aside issues of whether the data is applicable and assume that it is for the moment (this is a complicated area – the difference in variability has been shown to be different, and even reversed, in different cultures, for example). A very crude comparison of ‘2:1 male:female ratio in the top 1%’ with the 14.78% female PhD students’ might hint that this isn’t sufficient. More importantly, however, it has been shown that women are less likely to want to pursue careers in science, independent of their ability. This in itself tells us that a difference in variability cannot explain the lack of women.

Which brings us to the second point. Perhaps women just aren’t as likely to want to study physics as much as men? This is an interesting one, because it is probably true, but really just re-states the question – why don’t more women want to study physics? The assumption behind this argument seems to be that women are intrinsically less interested in physics. However, there is some evidence that can be interpreted as suggesting that girls are put off physics at an early age. A recent study by the Institute of Physics found that girls educated in single-sex schools were up to twice as likely to study physics at A-Level: an effect which persisted even taking into account social background and type of school. What is it about being educated around boys that makes girls less interested in physics? I don’t have an answer to that, but this seems to me to undermine the idea that girls are ‘innately’ less interested, and suggests that something is putting them off.

... there is some evidence that can be interpreted as suggesting that girls are put off physics at an early age

Finally, I’ve also heard it suggested that the effect is a hang-over from the days when people were less conscious of gender equality, and that it will take time for more women to get into physics. It’s certainly true that we’ve made a lot of progress over the last few decades, but there are problems with this line of reasoning. The first is that recent data doesn’t support this. If it were the case, we would expect to see more women in the early stages of their academic careers, but in 2006 the National Science Foundation’s figures for the percentage of female ‘Assistant Professors’ at the ‘Top 50’ departments were 11.15% and 21.47% for physics and chemistry respectively. So even if things have improved, it would appear that physics has not improved as much as other subjects.

Now that I’ve raised some objections to these objections, I’d like to talk about why this matters so much to me. I began this article by talking about unconscious perceptions and this, I believe, is the root of the problem facing physics. I believe this because I know for a fact that I hold these perceptions as much as anyone else.

I assumed ‘Noether’ must be a man. Statistically, this was a reasonable assumption. But what bothered me was that I was surprised when I learnt that she was not

I first noticed this when one of my lecturers told us about the work of Emmy Noether. For those who aren’t familiar with her work, Emmy Noether is best known for ‘Noether’s Theorem’, a mathematical formulation of the link between conservation laws and symmetries in nature. It is a beautiful idea, and underlies much of modern physics. In her day, Noether had to fight to be accepted among academics, and at one time could only lecture unofficially under the name of her colleague David Hilbert. However, what struck me is that when I first heard about ‘Noether’s Theorem’, I assumed ‘Noether’ must be a man. Statistically, this was a reasonable assumption. But what bothered me was that I was surprised when I learnt that she was not. Why should I have been surprised? Is it because I don’t regard women as capable of being as competent as men? I wasn’t consciously aware of believing that. Counter-intuitively, however, research has shown that those who most care about believing they are objective are in fact more likely to harbour biases.

If we are capable of being biased without even realising it, then how much discrimination is going on under our noses without even being noticed? Playing a blame-game and crying ‘misogynist conspiracy’ will not help with this. Awareness will. Thinking about these issues rather than hoping they will just go away is the only way to combat our unconscious perceptions. I’ve made a lot of points here, and there is so much more to say. If you think I am wrong then I invite you to tear my arguments to pieces. At least we’ll both be thinking about it, and I’ll have achieved my goal.

The author would like to thank the Equal Opportunities Group for the many vibrant discussions which inspired this article, and in particular Sofia Qvarfort and Apostolia Tasoudi for their advice, critique, and encouragement of this particular project.