DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN, WOMEN STILL TOO HOT TO TOUCH

Date: Saturday, February 18, 2006

The political fallout from Harvard President Larry Summers' comments on the relative scarcity of women in science is evidently still radioactive.

Peter Lawrence, a biologist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, submitted a paper to the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on that subject. It is, on my reading, exceedingly mild-mannered, though it does take as its starting point the observation that men and women are "born different" on average, which is something you're not supposed to say in polite academic circles.

But it goes on to suggest that the way science and other social activities including business are organized continue to reflect the fact that they were organized by men at a time when women were very rare in science or business, and therefore the procedures for choosing the "best" candidates for jobs and promotions tend to favor predominantly male characteristics "such as self-confidence and aggression."

Science would be better served, Lawrence writes, "if we gave more opportunity and power to the gentle, the reflective, and the creative individuals of both sexes."

That's hardly an anti-female diatribe, and Lawrence goes out of his way to emphasize that he is writing about a difference in the statistical distribution of personality characteristics, not an unbridgeable gulf. Obviously, saying men are taller than women on average does not mean that the tallest woman is shorter than the shortest man, but what's obvious in the case of a nonpolitical and easily measurable characteristic like height becomes nearly unmentionable (or willfully misunderstood) if the trait is competitiveness or empathy.

Well, Lawrence submitted his paper to Science, and as the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reports, the editors held it for consideration for seven months and finally gave the author "a publication date, proofs and a chance to order reprints."

And then they got cold feet. In a last-minute e-mail to Lawrence, the journal's editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy, said they wouldn't publish it after all. According to the Telegraph, "the piece 'did not, at least for us, lead to a clear strategy about how to deal with the gender issue,' said Kennedy. 'So much has been written on all sides of this problem that it sets a very high bar for novelty and persuasiveness, and although we liked your essay we have had to decide to reject it.' "

Lawrence calls that "a lame excuse."

His paper was finally published online in PLoS Biology, one of the peer-reviewed journals of the Public Library of Science. (Both the Telegraph article and Lawrence's paper are linked from the Web site aldaily.com, which asks why the "leaky pipeline"?)

Among biomedical students, Lawrence observes, there are similar numbers of male and female students, yet at higher ranks women drop out disproportionately, so that among full professors only about 10 percent are women.

Overt discrimination accounts for very little of that, he believes, since he has seen very little of that during his career and that "has been both for and against women." (That's another thing you're not supposed to say.) But the fact that men and women on average make different choices is significant. Who bears children is not a matter of choice, but who cares for them could be, at least after the first few months. "Yet partly because of the different priorities that on average men and women have," Lawrence says, "a much higher proportion of women put the needs of their children first and climbing the career ladder second."

But he believes a different sort of discrimination, in job searches for example, not deliberately directed against women, tends to reward people who are aggressive, competitive, good at self-promotion, and even ruthless. Men are more likely than women to be like that.

Well, maybe. Men and women have different competitive strategies, because women are more likely to think they have to pretend not to be competitive. But in a job interview, that distinction may not matter.

Anyway, Lawrence notes that there doesn't seem to be evidence that creativity and originality are more frequent in one sex than the other, and suggests that in science, particularly, those are the traits that should be valued.

As I said, pretty mild-mannered and surely worth discussion. But the same harpy who savaged Summers and Harvard into submission has gone after Lawrence too.

The Telegraph says Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accused him of "mashing together true genetic differences between men and women with old-fashioned stereotypes. In so doing, he perpetuates the very problem he is trying to address about why so few women get to the top in science."

Look, stereotypes don't get to be stereotypes because they are self-evidently absurd. Maybe we'd get further trying to make them work for us, as Lawrence is doing, instead of howling that they're too evil to talk about.