by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

There’s been a bit of an online kerfuffle this week over a recent John Tierney column in the New York Times.

Tierney looks at studies of gifted students who take the SAT at a young age (in this case, seventh grade); these statistics show that boys in this group substantially outnumber girls in getting the very highest math scores (and girls outnumber boys in getting the very highest verbal scores). From this, he concludes that women may be outnumbered by men in the sciences because of… innate lesser ability! How “daring”! No one has ever suggested this before!

Of course, his conclusions aren’t very scientific. Here are a few of the unfounded assumptions he has to make to draw the conclusions he draws:

• Most obviously, the assumption that test scores at age 13 precisely reflect innate ability, rather than also reflecting the effects of thirteen years of possibly-biased education and socialization
• The assumption that the SAT (a test known to feature many cultural biases) accurately tracks mathematical intelligence
• The assumption that mathematical intelligence is “what it takes” to get tenure at a top university (and not, say, luck, personal factors, institutional support…)
• The assumption that science is so hard that it’s really only suited for people with extremely high scores (in the top fraction of a percent among a group of students who are already in the top fraction of a percent among their peers)
• The assumption that this finding would explain the low numbers of women in science, ignoring the fact that the size of the imbalance among high-scoring seventh graders is still smaller than the size of the imbalances in many professional STEM fields

Why are people still trying to bend over backwards to “show” an innate difference in ability, that, if it exists at all, is by any evidence available still much smaller than the difference in representation? Why are they trying so hard to deny the existence of biases and unequal treatment, despite the heaps of evidence available that this occurs at every level and the common-sense conclusion that cultural factors play a much bigger role than biological factors in keeping women out of science?

(More responses to Tierney at Shakesville and Jezebel.)

As women in technical fields, we’re probably more likely than most to run into the phenomenon of “mansplaining” — when a man presumes he has more expertise in a particular field than the woman he’s talking to, either ignoring the facts of her qualifications or not bothering to find them out, and holds forth confidently, while unbeknownst to him the woman already understands the concept perfectly — perhaps better than him!

Rebecca Solnit called this “men who explain things” in this classic Los Angeles Times article, where she describes a man condescendingly explaining to her the existence of a book she wrote.

It’s particularly prevalent in technical fields because men are socialized to assume that their gender automatically grants them greater knowledge of technical things. Since in reality there are fewer women in these fields, it becomes a vicious circle, because if you meet a man you know nothing about and a woman you know nothing about, just statistically, the man is more likely to know how to fix your computer — even though that’s often not true in the specific case. So men act confident when talking to women about technology, and then women, “caught up [in their] assigned role of ingenue” as Solnit says, assume there’s a reason for this confidence and don’t assert their knowledge, thus perpetuating the cycle in which they’re assumed to have less knowledge.

It’s also part of the culture at least of computer nerds (I don’t have personal experience with other technical fields — those who do, is it similar there?) to puff up your knowledge as much as possible, which, as I discovered when I first entered the field, gives men an advantage since they’ve already been socialized to do this. This comes up in things like job postings, too: postings for programmers often exaggerate the qualifications needed (e.g. “5 years of Java experience” when 3 will do). Since men are used to rounding up their accomplishments, the man with 3 years of Java experience applies for this posting — and gets the job, since he’s the most qualified person who applied. On the other hand, since women are used to rounding down their accomplishments (or placing more emphasis on accuracy), the woman with 4 years of Java experience doesn’t apply for the job, since she takes the posting at face value — and then she’s frustrated when she realizes she’s actually more qualified than the man who got the position and that she probably would have gotten it had she applied.

Zuska at ScienceBlogs, Shapely Prose, and Shakesville all have recent threads about mansplaining — complete with several hilarious examples and some intersectional analysis of the issue (you can also have things like whitesplaining or ablesplaining — anytime when someone’s privilege artificially inflates their perceived credibility on an issue).

I’m lucky that most of the men in my life aren’t usually guilty of mansplaining to me — they tend to be aware of, and respect, my strengths. But I do sometimes see a related issue — when people don’t acknowledge a comment made by a woman, but respond strongly to the same comment made by a man. Occasionally I’ll notice that I make a point or a joke in a group setting, and my boyfriend will repeat it and get a bigger response/laugh (even though he’s not consciously trying to upstage me).

This cartoon perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon (“I can’t take it seriously until a man says it”). (This happens a lot in discussions about general feminist issues, too — women will insist that there’s a problem in a particular area, but not get taken seriously until a feminist man steps up and says the same thing.)

Even worse, this has happened on a grander scale many times in history: men have often directly taken work that women have done and presented it as their own. (Kate Beaton has a great cartoon about how this happened to Rosalind Franklin.)

Do you find that you get “mansplained” to a lot? What are some of the most egregious examples of mansplaining you’ve encountered? Do men (consciously or unconsciously) try to take credit for your work? Do they get better responses than you do to the same ideas? Weigh in in the comments!