Naama Barkai wins 2008 FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) announced that Israeli systems biologist Naama Barkai is the first-ever winner of the FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award. From the press release:

Winners of the award are role models who inspire future generations of women in science. Naama Barkai's deep understanding of the relevant biology and physics allows her to combine experiments and theory to develop novel solutions to fundamental biological problems such as chemotaxis, embryonic development and the organisation of the cellular transcription programmes.

Professor Uri Alon, a colleague of Barkai for the past eight years at the Weizmann Institute of Science commented: "Naama's work is consistently inspiring. She has, in my opinion, identified some of the most fundamental problems in systems biology and proposed elegant and powerful answers."

The selection committee credits Barkai's originality and creative research as not only revolutionising the field of systems biology but also significantly changing the way scientists think about complex biological processes.

Barkai is an associate professor in the departments of Molecular Genetics and Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Her research is at the interface between mathematics and biology. As her web site explains:

The adaptation of cells to the changing environment requires sophisticated information processing, which is mediated by networks of interacting genes and proteins. Identifying the principles that govern the design and function of those networks is a central goal of modern research. Our lab is using theoretical and computational tools to investigate system-level properties of biological networks. Wet-lab experiments validate and extend theoretical results. One approach is to study small and well-characterized networks. Our goal here is to understand the biological constraints that are imposed on a particular system, and the impact of those constraints on the structural design of the network. Currently we are focusing on networks that mediate patterning during the development of the fruit-fly Drosophila. In particular, we are interested in the robustness property of those systems, namely their ability to buffer alteration in gene dosage and changes in environmental conditions such as temperature or availability of nutrients. Those requirements imposed strict constraints on the structure of the underlying patterning network.

Her group also analyzes networks of gene expression in yeast using microarrays.

Additional information:

• Barkai's recent publications
  

FEBS and EMBO are looking for nominees for the 2009 Women in Science Award.

The nominee must be a woman who have made significant contributions to her field of science in the last 5 years. The award is generally not meant to be for lifetime achievements. The nominee’s research must be based in one of the FEBS or EMBO member countries and in a scientific field covered by FEBS and EMBO, i.e. the life sciences, including medical and agricultural research.

You can get more information on the FEBS or EMBO web sites. The deadline is August 15, 2008.

Tags: Naama Barkai, 2008 Women in Science Award, FEBS, EMBO

Added to the Blogroll

Women blogging about science who have been recently added to the blog roll:

• The Afro Scientress is a science student in Australia. I especially like this post.
• Kate Seip, PhD student in neuroscience and former blogger at the Anterior Commissure ("The science of sex and mating, gender and attraction, pregnancy and parental behavior.") now blogs at Pure Pedantry
• Julia Heathcote's blog is the The Ethical Paleontologist, which focuses on earth sciences and paleontology.
• Talia Page blogs at Talking Science Abroad ("we're a new non-profit that's dedicated to bringing the latest discoveries, innovations, controversies and cures out of the lab and to the public. Our first stop: India.")
• Anne Marie Helmenstine, PhD, writes about chemistry for About.com at Anne Marie's Chemistry Blog, written for a non-technical audience.
• Kim Hannula is a "forty-something tenure geology professor at a public college in the Rockies" who blogs at "All of My Faults Are Stress Related"

Tags: women in science, blogs

Women in Science: The view from 1957

One of the things I love about this internet age of ours is that venerable periodicals are opening their archives to the public. The latest is the Atlantic Monthly, which includes articles from 1995 to the present, plus a sampling of other articles from earlier years. In one of those early articles, published in October 1957, economist Helen Hill Miller looked at Science: Careers For Women. She found that the opportunities for women were opening up in the traditional male fields of science:

Only yesterday, women who entered such fields as science, engineering, medicine, were looked on as square pegs trying to force themselves into round holes where they weren't wanted and didn't fit. Not many married women worked outside their homes in any occupation, and teaching and nursing were regarded as the suitable means of self-support by spinsters.
[. . .]
Now about 5 per cent of the doctors of the country are women; about 10 per cent of the chemists; out a quarter of the biologists. Some of these are the knowledgeable, careful assistants – the Marthas of the laboratory – who free top men for work on the frontiers of science, but by no means all.

I find the phrase "Martha of the laboratory" a bit cringe-worthy – it makes me think of a mousy glasses-wearing woman who works long hours to keep the lab running while pining for the love of the eccentric and clueless Scientist who is too busy making Discoveries to notice her efficient work or hidden beauty (or maybe I've seen too many bad movies). Anyway, Miller goes on to point to Nobel-prize winning biochemist Dr. Gerty Cori, as well as Helen Sawyer Hogg, president of the Astronomical Society of Canada, professor Harriet Creighton, president of the Botanical Society of America, and Dr. Hoylande Young, head of the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society. At the time the article was written, six women had been admitted to the National Academy of Sciences.

While women in 1957 were still overtly discriminated against, they still had it easier than the women who had come before them:

Much of the time and energy of women who entered the scientific professions in the nineteenth century was spent in either contriving to take barriers gracefully or crashing into them with results demolishing sometimes the woman, sometimes the barrier. Eminent women now in retirement well remember where fences were located and where they were coming down when they entered training. [. . .] To many a pioneer who came up the hard way, the lot of the science majors of the class of 1957 who are entering advanced study or employment this autumn seems a very easy one.

"Easy" being a relative term. While women in science today, half a century later, have it easier than the graduating class of 1957, some things haven't changed much at all.

Other types of restriction remain. One is the counsel that many young girls get when making up their minds about entering a profession. Interviewed in his private machine shop among boulders and birches at Belmont, Massachusetts, Dr. Vannevar Bush credited folklore with much of the reluctance of women to attempt disciplines based on logic, such as mathematics and physics. Promising youngsters, he remarked, are frequently scared off by the declaration: "Girls aren't good at math." Some girls, he believes, can be very good at it. Dean Gordon B. Carson of Ohio State's College of Engineering concurs: "There is still some social stigma and question in the high schools of the nation when girls major in the scientific-mathematics portion of the high school curriculum."

That paragraph could almost fit into an article published today. It just shows how entrenched the idea that "girls can't do math" is in our culture.

But the greatest barrier was a social one – the assumption that women will focus more time on her home life than on her career.

But the two-way stretch of a home and a job, during at least part of a married woman's life, is undeniable. To solve this highly personal problem without quitting requires finding an employing institution that can accommodate itself to maternity leave, part-time employment, sudden emergencies. It requires a family in accord with the effort. It requires finding, for at least part of the time when the children are young, another woman who can relieve the scientist of the necessity of being in two places at the same time. And it requires a certain philosophy, about scientific attainment: in today's competitive conditions, continuity of work is almost indispensable if one is to get as far as one might be able to go – as Vannevar Bush puts it, "Getting to the top on part time is doggone tough."

Note that Miller assumes a woman is needed for child care, and there is no mention of a husband that shares the responsibilities. And in this was in the midst of the post-war baby boom, with women marrying younger and planning more children than women had before the war. Miller goes on to describe how women balanced career and family life – by choosing more "flexible" specialties, by being part of a husband-wife team, or being a "lone wolf" like the brilliant, but unmarried, Barbara McClintock.

A lot has changed in the past fifty years. Certainly medical schools no longer limit women to 5% of the student body, and female astronomers can now use the telescopes at Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar. But the difficulties for women pursuing a career in science that Miller describes are mostly different in degree, not kind. Hopefully change will be faster over the next fifty years.

Related: io9 has tasty quotes about women scientists from 1950s issues of Seventeen, American Girl, and Woman's Home Companion, that praise their homemaking skills as highly as their scientific ones.

Tags:women in science, history, Atlantic Monthly

Active Cultures Present: Photograph 51

Active Cultures - "the vernacular theatre of Maryland"- will be presenting a new play titled "Photograph 51", a play about Rosalind Franklin:

What does a woman have to do to succeed in the world of science? It's 1953 and Dr. Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant and passionate scientist, pours herself into her studies of DNA. But when fellow scientists Watson and Crick find out about her groundbreaking discoveries, her work is suddenly not her own -- and shortly thereafter they claim credit for a major breakthrough. A compelling drama about a woman's life in a man's world, Photograph 51 asks how we become who we become, and whether we have the power to change.

The show runs February 8 - March 2, 2008 at Joe's Movement Emporium in Mount Ranier, Maryland. See the Active Cultures web site for details.

(discovered via Twisted Bacteria's post on Petri Dish Circus)

Tags: Rosalind Franklin, Active Cultures, Photograph 51

Peer Review and Gender Bias

One of the differences between male and female scientists is that female scientists publish less than their male colleagues. GrrlScientist asks why:

Some people have told me that women do not produce scientific results that are of the same high quality as those produced by men (nor do they write life science blogs as well as men, apparently) and that male reviewers can readily recognize when a woman is the lead (or sole) author of a scientific paper because "women do science differently from men" (whatever that means). Basically, science is still a very sexist community where its female practitioners publish less frequently than men at least partially because of the peer-review system that is in place. I think the commonly used single-blind peer review process is biased against papers whose lead (or sole) author is female, just as the field of science is biased against women in general.

In support of her view that the commonly used single-blind peer review system is biased against women is a study by Amber Budden and colleagues (Budden et al. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 23(1):4-6 (2008)). They compared the authorship of papers in Behavior Ecology in 1997-2001 when single-blind peer review was used, to 2001-2005 when double-blind peer review was used.

The team found that after the double-blind review process was initiated in BE, papers written by women were published significantly more often than prior to this change (Figure 1). According to the data, papers written by a female first author showed a 7.9% increase in publication rate in BE while those written by male first authors showed a proportional decrease. This increase in female authorship is three times greater than the reported increase in female graduates in the field of ecology and more closely reflects the population demographics of the field itself, which is 37% female. When the team compared these data against those collected from the other journals with similar impact factors, they found there was no corresponding change in the authors' genders during the same period of time, further bolstering their argument.

Gender bias isn't unique to peer reviewed publications, of course, a similar bias has been seen in grant and job applications.

GrrlScientist argues that changing the peer review process would be a positive step in towards righting gender inequities in the sciences.

Instead of hand-wringing and asking "Why are there so few women in science? Why are they leaving?", it is time for the community to begin reflecting on the behavioral data they are being confronted with. Basically, the scientific community makes it very difficult for women to remain in the sciences, and one way in which they do this is through a demonstrable bias against women in the review process. In my opinion, it would take very little effort for the scientific publishers and granting agencies to change their review policies to incorporate the double-blind process, knowing that women (and scientific progress in general) will greatly benefit.

Using double-blind peer review isn't a perfect solution. Commentor Lorax points out that:

Knowing the authors help me as a reviewer decide if there may be a conflict of interest, the person is independent but came from my lab, the person and I have competed significantly and though this specific manuscript is not overlapping it may have the appearance of bias, etc. Something an editor may not be aware of.

While that is an important point, it seems like it could be largely solved by knowledgeable editors.

Another common argument is that in many fields the community would be familiar enough with the data or types of experiments to guess who had performed the research. I think that that the Budden article addresses that, at least in part, by looking at first authors. Research is more likely to be identified as associated with a particular laboratory rather than an individual first author, especially in fields where multiple-author papers are common.

Retired archaeologist K. Kris Hirst has also posted about the Budden article is not entirely convinced that double-blind review is the best solution:

There is a glass ceiling in science: anyone who has worked in any field of science recognizes how few women are in management positions even today. We've known that for a long time, and so the evidence brought forward by this paper is not deeply shocking. In terms of getting fair publication (not just fair to gender, but as publication on the basis of the merits of the paper itself), I've always believed the answer was to open both sides of the review process, so that reviewers are forced to sign off on their comments. But Budden and her colleagues may have something here.

Hirst's post also links to other information on the peer-review process.

Budden and colleagues are part of ecobias, "an NCEAS working group of ecologists interested in exploring factors which influence the publication of articles in ecology." I It seems unlikely to me that journals will change their editorial policies unless confronted with a large pile of data showing that their policies are harmful, so it will be interesting to see what other studies come out of their group.

Tags: peer review, gender bias, gender gap, women in science

Interviews with Australian scientists

In 1993 the Australian Academy of Science started interviewing Australian scientists about "their early life, development of interest in science, mentors, research work, and other aspects of their careers." The resulting interviews are available (as transcripts) at Iinterviews with Australian scientists. Thirty-six women scientists are included, and their careers span most of the 20th century, from marine biologist Isobel Bennett (1909-2008) to biomedical scientist Sabine Piller (1970- ). The biological sciences are heavily represented, but there are also physicists, chemists, and geologists.

What I especially like about the interviews are the glimpses of growing up in Australia along with memories of studying science and working as a scientist. The interviews are ongoing, with Professor Dorothy Hill ("a career in geology and a trailblazer for women in science") scheduled to be added soon. The current list of interviews:

• Dr Yvonne Aitken (1911-2004), Agricultural scientist
• Dr Leanne Armand (1968- ), Micropalaeontologist
• Dr Isobel Bennett (1909-2008), Marine biologist
• Professor Marcela Bilek (1968- ), Physicist
• Dr Natashia Boland (1967- ), Operations researcher
• Dr Kristen Bremmell (1970- ), Chemical engineer
• Professor Julie Campbell (1946- ), Vascular biologist
• Dr Tracy Dawes-Gromadzki (1972- ), Ecologist
• Dr Liz Dennis (1943- ), Plant biologist
• Miss Margaret Dick (1918- ), Food microbiologist
• Professor Jenny Graves (1941- ), Geneticist
• Natasha Henrick (1972- ), Geophysicist
• Professor Mollie Holman (1930- ), Physiologist
• Dr Shirley Jeffrey (1930- ), Marine biologist
• Professor Priscilla Kincaid-Smith (1926- ), Nephrologist
• Dr Jean Laby (1915- ), Physicist
• Professor Elspeth McLachlan (1942- ), Physiologist
• Professor Helene Marsh (1945- ), Environmental scientist
• Professor Nancy Millis (1922- ), Microbiologist
• Professor Beryl Nashar (1923- ), Geologist
• Dr Moira O'Bryan (1966- ), Medical scientist
• Dr June Olley (1924- ), Fish technologist
• Dr Sabine Piller (1970- ), Medical research scientist
• Professor Cheryl Praeger (1948- ), Mathematician
• Professor Marilyn Renfree (1947- ), Physiologist
• Professor Pamela Rickard (1928-2002), Biochemist
• Professor Lesley Rogers (1943- ), Neurobiologist
• Professor Maria Skyllas-Kazacos (1951- ), Chemical engineer
• Professor Fiona Stanley (1946- ), Epidemiologist
• Dr Sally Stewart-Wade (1969- ), Plant pathologist
• Dr Liz Truswell (1941- ), Geologist
• Dr Gretna Weste (1917- ), Botanist
• Professor Ann Woolcock (1937-2001), Medical scientist
• Dr Patricia Woolley (1932- ), Zoologist
• Dr Jane Wright (1954- ), Entomologist
• Dr Jean Youatt (1925- ), Chemist
  

For biographical information, click the "Teachers Notes" link that accompanies each article.

Tags: women in science, Australia

Added to the Blogroll

Added to the Women in Science blogs list:

• Science and Medical Journalist Virginia Hughes
• PhD Candidate Jennifer Jacquet, who blogs at Shifting Baselines about the ocean and fisheries
• Anne-Marie, an undergrad in Zoology and Conservation Biology, who blogs at pondering pikaia
• Vanessa Woods, a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, who blogs at Bonobo Handshake
  

Tags: women in science, blogs

Participate in the Gender and Race in Science Blogging Panel Discussion

Tomorrow is the the Gender and Race in Science Blogging panel at the NC Science Blogging conference, and you can watch and participate from the comfort of your own home.

From the conference wiki:

This session will be broadcast LIVE on Saturday January 19 at 11am on Ustream.tv. Please tune in and participate online. Please note that you DO NOT have to register on Ustream to post comments. We look forward to hearing from you and reading your questions. Use the link above or copy and paste the address (http://ustream.tv/channel/gender-and-race-in-science-blogging into your browser.

Discussion leaders are Zuska and Karen Ventii.

Note that the time is 11am Eastern, which means 8am for those of us on the west coast. I'm going to try to get my rear out of bed to watch, but I probably won't try to participate because I'm not always 100% coherent that early on Saturday morning.

Or, if you don't want to follow the link, I've embedded the live stream and chat client below:

ETA: The session is over, so I've removed the embedded video. The discussion, or what I could hear of it anyway, was very interesting.

• Christina's LIS Rant live blogged (or immediately-after-it-was-over blogged) the discussion topics.
• Pat at Fairer Science says "Bloggers are even better in person"
• ScienceWoman has photos of Minnow at the Science Blogging Conference posing with the rest of the Gender and Race in Science Blogging Panel
• Ivan Oransky at The Scientist follows up the discussing with "Do women blog about science?"
• Zuska sums up "What We Talked About at the NC Science Blogging Conference"
  
• Laura's Psychology Blog talks about Women and science blogs . . .
  
• Watch a video interview with Ann Marie and Talia Page from Science Friday Bloggers about science blogging
  
• Couternix rounds up posts relating the conference and all the sessions
  

I'll add more links as I find them.

Coturnix has posted more on how you can participate in the other conference sessions as well.

Tags: women in science, NC Science Blogging Conference

Dealing With Your Alpha-Male Boss

Dave Jensen's latest "Tooling Up" column career development section of the latest issue of Science is provocatively headlined "Dealing With Men Who Have a Problem With Women." It turns out that that is a bit misleading, since the men in question aren't necessarily consciously sexist. What the column is really about is dealing with male bosses who "engage in moderate alpha-male behavior." And his advice isn't really that heartening:

Even if you're dealing with the world's biggest jerk, he's likely to be the jerk in charge. Of course, you need to weigh the advantages of working things out with this alpha against your own dignity and self-respect. But unless his behaviors are extreme, it's you, not him, who's likely to make adjustments.

Jensen does suggest that an alpha-male boss's behavior can be modified by clearly and professionally communicating when you feel you are being overlooked.

Despite your best efforts, you may still come face to face with the fact that you are not in the club--but it's possible to solve that problem. Here's how "Ale" described it on the Science Careers Forum:

"I presented my science at the big annual meeting of my discipline and my adviser was in the audience. It went well, and when I got back to my seat the other speakers and my adviser congratulated me. Other PI's thought that I did a good job as well, but the males decided to approach my adviser during and after the session and congratulate him for my talk. They never came to me, even though I was sitting a few feet away in the next row! Those big shot male PI's didn't bother to approach the female young trainee. ... I had never felt such status and gender bias before," she says.

"Ale" approached her adviser directly shortly afterward, not with hurt feelings but with a genuine interest in why they would have avoided her with their congratulations. At that evening's social activities, her adviser introduced her to every big shot in the room. "I ended up meeting all these well-known people, men and women, which would have never happened if I hadn't had that conversation with my boss after the big-guys incident," she says.

"Ale's" story had a happy ending, but not every adviser will necessarily "see the light". The important thing is to weigh the value of the alpha-male advisor's prestige and contacts with the possible lack of personal mentoring and almost certain lack of sympathy for any personal issues* that interfere with your research. Fortunately, not every successful laboratory head is that type of boss.

* For example, wanting to spend time on the weekend with your significant other or spouse.

Tags: alpha-male, academia, women in science

Women With Power Tools

The Library of Congress has started a Flickr account with freely available images from it's collection. To date there are only two categories, "1930s-1940s in color" and "News in the 1910s". The collection includes some great photos of women working as mechanics and machinists during WWII, a la Rosie the Riveter. Women who had previously been housewives or store clerks were trained for their new job. The pay was good, and many shipyards and other facilities provided child care. When the war was over and the men returned home, many of the women who worked for the war effort went back to being housewives or found new jobs at much lower pay.

Some were inspired to further their education, like Susan Taylor King. From her reminiscences:

After 10 months of work at Eastern Aircraft, I decided to enter college. I felt strongly that there must be a way to help my community. I entered college and later received my Bachelor of Science and my Masters Degrees from Morgan state University in Baltimore , Maryland . My career continued after riveting and I worked in the Baltimore City Public School System as a science teacher and a guidance counselor.

Read more of their stories.

Tags: WWII, Rosie the Riveter, Library of Congress

From the LoC Flickr collection:

Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a "Vengeance" dive bomber, Tennessee (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

Lucile Mazurek, age 29, ex-housewife, husband going into the service, working on black-out lamps to be used on the gasoline trailers in the Air Force, Heil and Co., Milwaukee, Wisc. (LOC) Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

Assembly and Repairs Dept. mechanic Mary Josephine Farley works on a Wright Whirlwind motor, Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

War production worker at the Vilter [Manufacturing] Company making M5 and M7 guns for the U.S. Army, Milwaukee, Wis. Ex-housewife, age 49, now doing bench work on small gun parts. Son [is] Second L[ieutenan]t, Son-in-law, Capt[ain] in Army (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

The Truth About Boys and Girls

This week NBC nightly news is running a series of reports called "The Truth About Boys and Girls," which looks gender issues in education and work.

January 14: The first episode looked at "how memory functions differently for males and females." Watch the report. There is also a web-only video with more information on the work of MIT's John Gabrieli on gender and the brain.

January 15: Yesterday's episode looked at the advantages of single-sex schools for boys. The idea is that many boys can't sit still and learn, so they fail in co-ed learning environments that have that requirement. I can't help but think this works to reinforce gender stereotypes, and that active girls or quiet boys might be put at an even greater disadvantage by such segregation.

January 16: Today's episode looks at college admissions. Since there are more female college applicants, colleges actually have to admit a greater percentage of male candidates to keep an equal campus gender balance. Yep, it's affirmative action for underrepresented males, particularly at liberal arts colleges. There was no mention of the gender imbalance in different majors.

January 17: Tomorrow's episode will look at the pay gap between men and women, using the recent American Association of University Women Educational Foundation report on salaries as a starting point. The video will be posted on nightly.msnbc.com when it is available. I wonder if the episode will answer the big question that the series appears to be leading up to: if elementary schools are set up to the advantage of girls, and more young women than young men attend college, why doesn't that translate into equal or better pay for women? Will they say the "s" word?

The reports are necessarily very superficial, since they are less than three minutes long, and I don't know how representative they are of the current thought on gender differences. It seems to me that boiling down such complex topics into short sound bites doesn't fairly represent the issues.

Tags: The Truth About Boys and Girls, MSNBC, gender gap

Women in Science Link Roundup: January 14th Edition

This week's link roundup is longer than usual, since I'm cleaning up my saved links from the past couple of months:

The Gender Gap and Stereotypes

In the current issue of The Scientist Association for Women in Science president Phoebe Leboy takes a look at "Fixing the Leaky Pipeline". She documents several "leaks": between postdoc and tenure track faculty positions, from assistant to tenured professor, and grants and awards. What makes the article stand out is not only the statistics (36% of men, compared to only 8% of women, have spouses who stay at home!), but that she gives concrete recommendations for changing the status quo. The commenters add their own stories as well.

An article in the December 2007 Scientific American asks "Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement. Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?" It covers the usual topics, including the relatively small differences between girls and boys in math aptitude. And, while boys seem to have both the highest and lowest scores on the SATs (while most girls were in the middle), there is this little tidbit I found interesting:

Although it has drawn little media coverage, dramatic changes have been occurring among these junior math wizards: the relative number of girls among them has been soaring. The ratio of boys to girls, first observed at 13 to 1 in the 1980s, has been dropping steadily and is now only about 3 to 1. During the same period the number of women in a few other scientific fields has surged. .

The one thing it does show, I think, is that the differences in test results between girls and boys is likely not one of biology. What the article concludes is that the reasons for the gender gap are "complex" and the "challenges are many", which isn't much of a conclusion at all.

At Sciencebase, David Bradley reprints one of his articles from the now-defunct HMSBeagle webzine titled "Is Your Trailing Spouse a Significant Other?" It looks at the difficulties faced by dual-career couples trying to find academic science positions. This is an issue that disproportionately affects female scientists:

FACT 43% of married female physicists are married to other physicists, whereas only 6% of married male physicists have a physicist spouse

FACT Some 38% of female chemists are married to other scientists, while just 21% of male chemists are married to a scientist, according to statistics reported by the American Chemical Society.

FemaleScienceProfessor talked about hearing self-confident women scientists criticized for being "aggressive" and an articulate woman scientist called "glib".

In the November 2007 issue of DNA and Cell Biology, Jo Handelsman and Robert Birgeneau wrote an editorial, "Women Advancing Science," inspired by the National Academy of Sciences report "Beyond Bias and Barriers." It can be read online at the Technology Review blog. They pull no punches, chalking up the lack of women in male-dominated fields to unconscious, inadvertent bias, and institutional barriers.

American science needs more talent and that talent is readily available in a legion of well-trained, but greatly underutilized scientists and engineers who happen to be women. The good news is that a few significant changes in the academic system could stem the loss of these women, thereby fortifying our scientific leadership.

In November, EMBO Reports published a study showing that traditional gender roles were a significant factor in the "leaky pipeline" in Europe.

Surveys of applicants found that traditional gender roles combined with a pervasive negative work culture appeared to be at the root of the lower success rate of women researchers versus men researchers. The traditional gender roles are manifested by the facts that women take substantially more parental leave and more often adjust their careers in preference to that of their male partners. As a result women publish less and are slower to advance in their careers because on average they spend less time at work and have a greater burden to carry outside of the lab than their male counterparts at the same stage of their careers. In the workplace, women scientists had fewer opportunities for mentoring, less supervisor support once they began to have families and there was a general lack of gender policy and monitoring in institutions.

The survey data was also published in Science (pdf).

GrrlScientist discusses the findings, and concludes:

I agree with the author's conclusions, but I think that being supportive of women in science goes beyond simply providing "family-friendly solutions"; in my experience, female scientists are routinely isolated socially and their experience and skills are either denigraded or completely dismissed by their male counterparts, especially by their PIs, who should be their most ardent supporters. Worse, women often are led to believe their work is less than stellar, and so they typically isolate themselves and their feelings of inadequacy from their colleagues. I think employment in the sciences will even out between the genders after these more subtle issues are recognized and dealt with productively.

In November, Dean of the Duke University School of Medicine Nancy Andrews wrote an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine, "Climbing through Medicine's Glass Ceiling".

Earlier this year, I was named the first female dean of the Duke University School of Medicine, an event that National Public Radio summed up in the headline: "Andrews Makes History at Duke Med School." Why should the appointment of a woman dean still be big news in 2007? Perhaps because, with a few localized exceptions, there has been little change since the 1970s in the barriers to women's full participation in academic medicine.
[. . .]
If institutions are to accelerate the emergence of more female deans, then they will need to consider women who have not stepped on every rung of the traditional academic career ladder. Never having served as a division chief or a department chair, I was a somewhat atypical dean candidate. Interestingly, Duke has recently appointed a whole cadre of new deans who have had unusual careers — not only for its medical school, but also for its business school, its law school, and its Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. I think that taking a creative view of leadership will enrich academic medicine.

Part of the answer for universities aiming to pursue such benefits is to work harder to identify and recognize women who are leaders. The Rosalind Franklin Society (of which I am a founding member) was recently created to draw attention to leading female scientists, on the premise that "there still exists a prevailing perception that women do not have the same talents and abilities as their male colleagues and that the contributions of women scientists are not as important."² The goal of the group, made up of prominent scientists of both sexes, is to ensure that outstanding women are recognized in ways that its namesake, Rosalind Franklin, was not.

At Shakesville Melissa McEwan compared this year's offerings at the Discovery Channel Store in the "girls" and "boys" category. Boys offerings included radio controlled arthropods and a kit to "create your very own interactive world". While the top offerings for girls were a sewing machine and a fashion design studio. Even more egregious was the microscope offered to girls and the microscope marketed for boys - click over to the post and decide which one you'd rather play with.

Marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum "came out" at The Intersection.

Chris and I have more than a few bright, young female readers, and I really love receiving their occasional emails about science, math and yes, even boys. Yet somehow, even in the 21st century there's still this ridiculous misconception that gets popularized in middle school suggesting girls in academics are weird, unattractive, or nerdy. 'Beauty and the Geek' anyone? I can't fathom why the negative labels persist. Frankly, I'm having a blast growing up geek exploring the ivory towers and beyond. So what we collectively ought to be doing is finding the means to reinforce reality over 'reality' television! It's past the time we get the simple honest message out in a way that resonates that women can be successful, intelligent, hip, and most importantly--it's our choice how we define ourselves. I suspect that society and culture will catch up...eventually.

Cynthia Brossman, director of the Learning Resource Network at Boston University and former middle school math teacher won the 2007 Maria Mitchell Women in Science award.
Her nomination cited Brossman’s 15 years at Boston University creating and supporting educational outreach programs.

Growing up, Brossman did not have any role women scientist role models.“Since I’ve come to work at Boston University, I know just about all the women science, math, and engineering professors, and have come to admire the women I work with for their commitment to education,” said Brossman.

Natural Sciences

Biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn was named a "Scientist of the Year Notable" by Discover Magazine

In Texas, the state director of science curriculum Chris Comer was forced to resign for sending an e-mail announcing a lecture by Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. It's ridiculous that now, in the 21st century, a science educator could be forced out for simply supporting the teaching of science.

Physical Sciences

Christina at Christina's LIS Rant links to a nice summary of the leaky pipeline in science (ppt), which may have been presented at the American Association of Physics Teachers meeting.

Mathematics and Computer Science

The Chronicle of Higher Education links to a report by the National Center for Women & Information Technology .

According to the report, while women earned 60 percent of all college degrees in the United States in the 2005-6 academic year, a mere “11 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer engineering and 15 percent in computer science went to women,” the reporter, David Nagel, notes. Those statistics are particularly grim when one considers that a higher percentage (36 percent) of women earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science back in 1983, he adds. So much for progress.

She's Such a Geek noted an article in which WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee called for an end to the "stupid" male geek culture. He thinks women are part of the problem too.

According to Berners-Lee, a culture exists where women can be put off a career in technology both by “stupid” behaviour by some male “geeks”, and by the reactions of other women.

“It’s a complex problem — we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realise that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,” said Berners-Lee.

ComputerWorldUK reported on a the Female FTSE Report 2007, an annual survey of female executives.

The report found the number of women on FTSE 100 executive committees has soared by 40% over the last year. However technology companies were among the worst represented and still lag behind other industries, "even when compared to the extremely low representation of females on other sector boards".

Their conclusion: "no chance for women in 'old boy's club' tech companies".

Geeky Mom explained why she stopped reading Wikinomics:

Then, the authors were writing about a successful female computer scientist/businesswoman, explaining her accomplishments and how much she was respected. But then, they said, ". . . and her looks didn't hurt either." And I closed the book and I'm not going to finish it.

Go read her rant.

Engineering

The Wall Street Journal profiled Michelle Tortolani, president of the Society of Women Engineers and senior director, repeater engineering and operations at XM Satellite Radio.

She moved into management at XM Satellite four years ago, supervising a staff of seven men, and says some of her male underlings were reluctant to report to her at first -- in fact, she says, a few told her male supervisor they didn't want to work for her.

The work of University of California Merced engineering professor, Michelle Khine, was given a shout-out in a Wired Science post titled "Hack: Young Professor Makes Lab-on-a-Chip with Shrinky Dink and Toaster Oven". And that's what Khine did (the paper indicates a laser printer was involved as well). Khine was quoted by Wired:

"I am not a patient person, and being a new faculty member at a brand new university, I did not immediately have the cleanroom facilities I am accustomed to," says Khine, "And desperation is the mother of invention (or something like that). So as I was brainstorming solutions, I remembered my favorite childhood toy and decided to try it in my kitchen one night."

Not only men are "MacGyvers"!

Tags: women in science, women in engineering, gender gap, leaky pipeline, stereotypes, Elizabeth Blackburn, Chris Comer, Michelle Tortolani, Michelle Khine

Added to the Blogroll

Here are some of the blogs I've recently added to the blogroll:

• Karina who blogs about her experiences as an Aspiring Ecologist
• Sandra Kiume who blogs neuroscience videos at Channel N
• Rosie Redfield at UBC has two blogs, RRTeaching, about teaching the first year biology course, and RR Research, about the work going on in her microbiology lab. She links to her labs blogs including She Who Dies with the most shoes wins (Sunita Sinha), My Blog (Heather Maughan), USS-R-US (Lindsay Wilson), and 3gggggi3 (Sally Pau).

If you are a woman who blogs about science, mathematics or engineering, please let me know. You either leave a comment or send me an e-mail (peggy.kolm (at) gmail (dot) com).

Tags: women in science, blogs, neuroscience, molecular biology, ecology

Curiosity Aroused

Rebecca Watson is one of the three finalists of the Public Radio Talent Quest, and the pilot episode of her hour-long show, Curiosity Aroused, has already been picked up by half a dozen stations across the U.S. She was recently profiled in the Boston Globe, which described her show's focus as science and debunking urban legends.

With interviews and some amusing musical interludes, her pilot takes on television reports of ghosts and visits a psychic fair. Along the way, she chats with an Australian myth-buster, toxic-substance experts who question whether the lead in lipstick really is poisoning women, and a psychologist who has studied what is supposed to be the world's funniest joke.

"The show is not exactly what I had in mind at the beginning," says Watson. "But that's because my mind was everywhere. Having done it, I know that if I get to do more, episode two will be a bit different: tighter, more focused. One really good one might be on the creationism-and-evolution debate. I think it's important to do, and we'd have fun with that."

"She's a sensational writer," says Richard Paul. A public radio veteran, the D.C.-based Paul worked with Watson on her pilot as her mentor and producer. "She also's got this fun, quirky take on something that many people see as being dull, which is science."

You can listen to her competition entries, and to the pilot episode of her show, Curiosity Aroused. Watson's blog, Memoirs of a Skepchick, takes a similar irreverent look at anti-science and pseudoscience. She's not a trained scientist herself, and this bit from her blog explains a bit where she is coming from:

Here’s my problem with [the idea that science is too hard for normal people to understand]: I dropped out of high school and I have no formal science education. I graduated from Bible school instead of college and studied the five books of Moses instead of the books of Darwin. (To my credit, I never thought “math is hard” and I did eventually get a high school diploma, attend some college, and read voraciously about science on my own.) So if I can understand these scientific concepts with a bit of mental exercise, and accept that the scientific method is really the best way to understand the universe, what’s stopping others from doing the same?

It sounds like her show would make a lively addition to the lineup of my local NPR station

(via The Bad Astronomy Blog)

Tags: Rebecca Watson, Curiosity Aroused, public radio

Remember to Celebrate Women Scientists

If you take a look at the sidebar (and over on the left), you'll notice that there is a new addition: a listing of upcoming birthdays of women scientists. It was generated from a Google Calendar compiled by MissPrism from the "Let's All Have a Party!" thread at Thus Spake Zuska. (If you're wondering, that's how it got the "Zuskateer Parties" title).

There aren't any birthdays today, but get ready to celebrate the birth of Ninetta May Runnals (1908-1980), mathematician and Carrie Matilda Derick (1862-1941), geneticist on Monday!

You can add the dates to your own Google calendar by clicking the button:


Click on the iCal version to add to your Apple iCal (worked for me) or Outlook calendar (I think).

Tags: Zuskateer Parties, women in science, birthdays, calendar

Gender and Race in Science Blogging at the NC Science Blogging Conference

Next Saturday, January 19, is the NC Science Communication Conference in Research Triangle Park. Zuska (Thus Spake Zuska) and Karen Ventii (Science to Life) will be hosting a panel on "Gender and Race in Science Blogging". Also on the panel will be Pat Campbell (Fairer Science) and the anonymous ScienceWoman (On Being a Scientist and a Woman). Even those of us who won't be at the conference can virtually sit in, because there will be a live webcast of the panel. I'll post more details when they are released.

Zuska has asked for input on discussion topics. You can leave your input on the conference wiki (click the link to "Discuss" on the right sidebar).

Tags: NC Science Communication Conference, women in science, blogging

New US Postage Stamp Honoring Scientist Gerty Cori

In April the U.S. Postal Service will release a new series of stamps honoring 20th Century American scientists. One of the first four stamps to be released depicts Gerty Cori. In 1947 she became the first woman in America to receive the Nobel Prize (along with her husband Carl Ferdinand Cori and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay) for discovering how glycogen (a form of stored energy in animals) is broken down into sugar, then turned back into glycogen.

It took years for Cori to be acknowledged for her research:

The Coris decided to leave Roswell soon after publishing their work on carbohydrate metabolism, mainly because Roswell's primary focus was cancer research. But though they had developed the Cori cycle together, Carl Cori was the one to receive job offers at universities. Although faculty at the University of Rochester warned Gerty Cori that she might ruin her husband's career, the couple refused to stop working together. Both Cornell University and the University of Toronto refused to hire Gerty Cori even while they tried to persuade her husband to take up an appointment, so the couple moved to St. Louis in 1931, where Carl had been offered the chair of the pharmacology department at Washington University School of Medicine. Gerty Cori was offered a position as a research assistant, despite her partnership role in the discovery of the Cori cycle.

It was only after Carl Cori was made chair of the department, 16 years after their arrival, that Gerty Cori was promoted from research assistant to full professor. The following year they won the Nobel prize. It's yet another example of an accomplished female scientist who was only given a research position because a close relative (in this case her husband) fought for it.

This is the second set of stamps honoring US Scientists to be released. The first set included geneticist Barbara McClintock.

(via Wired Science)

Tags: stamps, Gerty Cori, biochemistry, women in science

Invisible Computers

I'm a computer user, not a programmer, and I'm rather fuzzy on the history of computers. However, I have heard of ENIAC, which, as Wikipedia puts it, was "the first purely electronic, Turing-complete, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems". It was constructed during World War II at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a behemoth compared to the laptop I'm using at the moment.

It contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m by 0.9 m by 26 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²), and consumed 150 kW of power. Input was possible from an IBM card reader, while an IBM card punch was used for output.

It's hard to imagine operating such a machine, let alone programing it. The trouble back then was that male mathematicians were scarce due the war, so they had to turn to women to get the job done. A team of six young women were the first ENIAC programmers, but their contribution has been largely forgotten. From a recent ABC News report:

At 83, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik -- a devoted bridge player and grandmother of five -- had a secret past that was invisible to many who knew her.

Her grandson Alex knew her story. He stormed out of school one day when his teacher refused to believe his gray-haired granny was a computer pioneer who had calculated firing tables and ballistic trajectories during World War II.

The boy's parents had to explain to the teacher that Bartik and five other women had, indeed, legally hacked the world's first programmable computer, converting it into a stored machine and eventually helping to usher in the digital age.

"She was dumbfounded," said Bartik.

So, too, were the historians, who for a half century never acknowledged the wartime contributions of the six women who programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and made programming easier and more accessible to those who followed.

The team included:

• Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli had a degree in math from Chestnut Hill College for Women in Philadelphia. Antonelli married ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly, resigning her post at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds Ballistics Research Laboratory. In the 1980s she wrote articles and gave talks about her experience. In 2005 Antonelli and good friend and co-programmer Bartik talked about their experiences at WITI New York, which you can watch online. She died in 2006.
• Jean Jennings Bartik had a degree in math from Northwest Missouri State Teachers College. After working on ENIAC, she went on to work on the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers. Northwest Missouri State University honored her achievements by naming their computing museum after her. In 2005 Bartik and Antonelli talked about their experiences at WITI New York, which you can watch online.
  
• Betty Snyder Holberton studied English and journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, but was apparently a natural at programming. From Wikipedia:
  

  She was the inventor of the mnemonic instruction set (called C-10) for the BINAC, which Grace Hopper described as "the basis for all subsequent programming languages." It has been said that in creating this, she started the movement away from switch assemblies and towards keyboards as the primary input device for computers. She also wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and the first statistical analysis package (for the 1950 US Census). She participated in the early standards development for the COBOL and Fortran programming languages.

  In 1997 she received the Ada Lovelace award for her achievements in programming. She died in 2001.
  
• Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer studied something(?) at Temple University. She left the ENIAC project in 1947 to get married.
• Frances Bilas Spence majored in math and minored in physics at Chestnut Hill College. In 1947 she married Homer Spence, an electrical engineer assigned to the project, and she resigned to raise a family.
• Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum had a bachelor's degree in math from Hunter College. She traveled with the ENIAC project when it moved to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and helped train the next group of ENIAC programmers. She died in 1986.
  

Shockingly, the only one of the six initially invited to the ENIAC 40th anniversary celebration at the University of Pennsylvania was Kathleen McNulty Mauchly, and then only as the wife of inventor John Mauchly. How could this group of women have been forgotten for so long? As Wired noted in 1997, when they were inducted into the Women in Techonology International Hall of Fame:

But although they were skilled mathematicians and logicians, the women were classified as "sub-professionals" presumably due to their gender and as a cost-saving device, and never got the credit due to them for their groundbreaking work.

"Somebody else stood up and took credit at the time, and no one looked back," explains Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson, a director of WITI. "It's a typical problem in a male-dominated industry. And there's still a lot of frustration with men taking credit for women's ideas - it doesn't seem to have changed much over the last 50 years."

Kathy Kleiman, a former programmer herself, is trying to rectify that. Kleiman, along with Academy Award-winning documentary maker Susan Hadary and head of the University of Maryland's Center for Women in Information Technology Claudia Morrell, is producing a documentary on these six women titled "Invisible Computers: The Story of the ENIAC Programmers".

As ABC News reported, Kleiman began her interest in the ENIAC programmers when she was a Harvard undergraduate.

While reading a biography of an Army captain who found funding for ENIAC, Kleiman discovered a 1940s photo of women at a 9-foot tall computer. A computer historian told her those were "just refrigerator ladies" who had been posed in front of the machine "to make it look good."

"They looked knowledgeable to me, and I made it my job to track them down," said Kleiman.

She has since spent years collecting oral histories and hopes that the documentary will help keep their story from being forgotten. Stories like this are important, not only so an important part of our technological history is not forgotten, but as a rebuttal to those who claim that women don't go into computer science or mathematics simply because they aren't interested. If you'd like to help, you can make a donation to help support the production ENIAC programmers documentary.

On that note, Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants is asking for stories about womens' experiences in mathematics and computer science. It's in response to a commenter who claims that the reason for the gender gap in computer science is simply that "not as many women wanted to be computer scientists as men". Her commenters have already responded with a number of interesting (and maddening) personal stories.

ETA: Did you comment at Tiny Cat Pants? Science writer Jennifer Ouellette is wondering if she can include your story in a book she's writing about women and math.

Image: "Two women operating the ENIAC's main control panel while the machine was still located at the Moore School. "U.S. Army Photo" from the archives of the ARL Technical Library. Left: Betty Jennings (Mrs. Bryant) Right: Frances Bilas (Mrs. Spence)"

Tags: ENIAC, Invisible Computers, WWII, women in science, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Betty Snyder Holberton, Frances Bilas Spence , Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum<

How a woman can help your story

Speculative fiction writer and reviewer Ben Payne sums up the benefits of including a woman in your story:

Check out this example. In sentence one we have one of the "foe pars" of writing: the "As you know Bob".

"Nice work on that device, Mark," said Karlos to his colleague.
"Thanks Karlos," said Mark. "I used physics and chemistry and made quantum variables of the connector ribbon."

Don't be bamboozled by the science!! Now you'll notice that Mark is explaining something to his colleague that his colleague should already know!! Incongruous!!

But if we introduce a *woman* to this scenario, all of a sudden the "infodumper" is less intrusive. Because the woman probably *wouldn't* understand what Mark was talking about!! Check out the new version:

"Nice work on that device, Mark," said Lauren. She raised her eyebrows and brushed her long blonde hair away from her face. "But how on earth does it work?"
Mark admired Lauren's attractive figure. He'd been working with her for some time but never thought she'd notice a science geek with glasses like him. "It's quite simple," he said. "I used physics and chemistry and made quantum variables of the connector ribbon."
Lauren raised an eyebrow above her eye suggestingly. "Nice work," she said with a pert smile."How about dinner some time?"

Wow! You just got away with explaining the science, without disrupting the realism!!

What's sad is that there are probably authors out there who are thinking to themselves, "Hey yeah, what a great idea!"

Tags: women in science, stereotypes, science fiction

January Scientiae Carnival

Jokerine has posted the January edition of Scientiae, which appropriately looks back on 2007 and looks forward to 2008. There are lots of great posts, but I especially like ScienceWoman's Top 10 Science Developments for 2007. It's great to start 2008 on a positive note.

Thanks for the hot chocolate Jokerine!

Tags: scientiae carnival, women in science

The Hidden Giants: 4000 Years of Women in Science

Science is a traditional role for women. For over 4,000 years of written history women have participated in this great human adventure. Science an technology are neither new nor difficult for women any more than they are for men. The stories of many of our scientists do not form part of our instruction in science from kindergarten through college. Missing from out textbooks and data are the fundamental contributions of scientists, both male and female, but especially female. Female creativity and genius fill our technical past. The stories of these women not only provide role models for future scientists, but also they strengthen and broaden our ability to deal with the present.
- Preface to The Hidden Giants

Dr. Sethanne Howard has let me know about her book, The Hidden Giants, which is based on her excellent web site, 4000 Years of Women in Science.

Dr. Howard knows firsthand what it's like to be a female scientist. In 1965 she became the first woman to receive a physics degree from the University of California at Davis, and went on to receive a PhD in astrophysics from Georgia State University. She recently retired as Chief of the Nautical Almanac Office at the US Naval Observatory. You can listen to a brief interview with Howard on the January 2nd, 2007 episode of The Current on CBC Radio (Part 3, starting at about 16:00).

The Hidden Giants is available through Amazon.com and Lulu.com, which also has a downloadable e-book version. A preview of the text is available on Google books.

Tags: Sethanne Howard, The Hidden Giants, women in science, women's history

Reaching for the Stars

On this first day of 2008, I'm reflecting a bit, so forgive my rambling. While there seem to be more and more programs to encourage girls who are interested in the sciences in engineering, old attitudes about the aptitude (or more accurately, inaptitude) of women in technical fields seem to be a long time in dying.

Exhibit A: Desmond Morris has written a follow-up book of sorts to his 40-year old bestseller, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal. The new book, The Naked Man: A study of the male body, is a "celebration of the human male"*. As the Guardian reviewer Michael Hanlon puts it:

Try to name history's top ten women artists, scientists, composers, dictators, heroines or explorers. You can probably trawl your mind and come up with a few examples - especially in those categories involving humane work.

I can think of Marie Curie, Rosamund "DNA" Franklin and the astronomer Jill Tarter (who runs an alien-detection institute and discovered dwarf stars). We've had Boudicca (vanquisher of the Romans) and Margaret Thatcher (who gave the Argentines an equally bloody nose). Also, arguably, our three greatest monarchs have been queens, not kings.

But, by and large, the inescapable conclusion is that the history of humanity is the history of man, not of woman.

For every great woman there have been 100 - even 1,000 - great men in the same field.

[snip]

If war and sport hunting had become the only two ways in which the male brain could respond to the emasculation brought about by the farming era, then we would truly have been in trouble. But, happily, there is another side to the male brain.

That is its creativity combined with curiosity. The ability to concentrate and cooperate towards a long-term goal, an ability forged in the primeval chase, could be put to good use.

The result was the fascinating development of human society: buildings and roads, technology and art, music and literature, the whole of science and industry.

These are all, Morris argues, great fruits of the human male brain.

He says: "The human male has had the most impact on the planet than any other life form. Women are responsible and men are more playful and it is this playfulness that is our species' greatest achievement."

It's not clear from the review whether it was the practical, incurious, and stick-in-the-mud human female who invented the "emasculating" technology of farming, which would suggest that that important development in human civilization apparently doesn't count as a significant achievement. I'll probably never find out, since I can't imagine getting through the first chapter without hurling the book across the room. (Echidne has a longer discussion of Morris' thesis)

As the review points out, Morris has missed an obvious point:

As for Morris's thesis about the superiority of the male, it is undoubtedly true that most of the great technical and artistic advances achieved by humanity have been made by men.

But this may not be because women are less creative than men. There are other reasons. Today, it is hard to understand what it must have been like in the world of even a century ago, a world where women could not vote, where they found it almost impossible to go to university, own property independently of their husbands or, even in most classes, to learn to read and write.

As a result, it is perhaps not surprising that the majority of the world's great artists, scientists and so on have been men.

Morris's thesis can only truly be tested in about 300 years' time, when a proper assessment of human history can be made based on three centuries of sexual equality.

I'd argue that Hanlon didn't go far enough, since books like The Naked Man make it clear that we're still working towards the point where men and women are considered to be intellectual equals.

What really bothers me is that information about women who were discouraged from pursuing science - or who did pursue scientific research, but seem to be little known by the general public - is readily available. It also seems clear to me that many women who have pursued scientific research had unique family circumstances that helped make them exceptions in the male world of science. For example, the November/December issue of American Scientist has a brief article about Caroline Herschel, sister of astronomer William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus).

With few career options open to women of her time, her desperate wish was to achieve sufficient education to become a governess teaching music and literature. Her father was sympathetic to the idea, but her mother dismissed it. As a result, her father's death in 1767 condemned Caroline to be little more than a teenage drudge in the family kitchen. When William invited her to join his musical world in Bath she leapt at the opportunity.

As William Herschel developed an interest in astronomy and endeavored to build his own large telescope, Caroline joined him in his studies. While William gained fame (and the position of Astronomer Royal) from his discovery of the new planet, Caroline pursued her own astronomical observations.

Caroline Herschel now faced a choice: whether to continue her career as a singer or to “serve” her brother as his scientific assistant. She chose the latter and was appointed by the court as a qualified assistant with a salary of 50 pounds per year – the first salary that a woman had ever received for scientific work.

Now Caroline began her own astronomical research, specializing in the search for comets. Between 1786 and 1797 she discovered eight of them. Whole nights through she worked with her brother observing the heavens, noting the positions of the stars as he called them to her from the other end of the giant telescope that they had built themselves. She evaluated the nocturnal notations and recalculated them, wrote treatises for Philosophical Transactions, discovered fourteen nebulae, calculated hundreds more, and began a catalogue for star clusters and nebular patches. In addition she compiled a supplemental catalogue to Flamsteeds Atlas which included 561 stars, as well as a comprehensive index to it. For this work she was paid the highest tribute by Gauss and Encke, among others.

In 1828 she received the Gold Medal from Royal Astronomical Society, the last woman to be so honored until Vera Rubin received the prize in 1996. She was made an honorary member of the society in 1835. While Herschel was recognized for her discoveries, there were likely many more women over the centuries who have had an interest in the stars, but no wealthy brother with similar interests to give them the opportunity to pursue astronomical research**.

The bright side is the growing recognition that women and men have similar ability and interest in science, math and engineering. Hopefully, more women will find the doors open to them, whether their dream is studying the stars, digging in the dirt or building machines.

Happy 2008!

* Morris has also published The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body, in which "each chapter, which correlates to body parts as subtle as the brow and as expected as the breasts, examines how each characteristic has been shaped by social authority." So apparently women = body parts, while men = playful hunters and innovators.

** If you are interested in this topic, and in the London area, mark your calendar for May 13th. On that day Dr. Mary Bruck of the University of Edinburgh will be giving a free public lecture at the Royal Astronomical Society on "The fascination of the heavens: women in astronomy in Britain in an age before equality"

Tags: Desmond Morris, The Naked Man, Caroline Herschel, women in science