WOMEN IN SCIENCE: Preferences and Penalties Differ

CREDIT: JUPITERIMAGES

Raegen T. Miller reviews the book The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams in Science for 20 November 2009:

Two groups of people should care about the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields: academics and everyone else. In The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams provide a valuable resource for both audiences. For academics, their book may help diffuse political tension inimical to the goals of the academy. Currently, the issue of underrepresentation is a political lightning rod, and scholars are virtually guaranteed to attract abundant criticism for posing and testing any hypothesis explaining gender disparities among scientists in different fields. Such criticism is not always confined to the scientific merits of its recipient’s work, and junior scholars, in particular, may jeopardize their careers by pursuing research agendas speaking to the relative scarcity of women in mathematically oriented fields. An intellectualclimate more conducive to self-censorship than the pursuit of knowledge seems unlikely to help explain the issue of underrepresentation, much less address it. In other words, the academy has painted itself into a corner, and it needs help getting out. In this sense, The Mathematics of Sex is a lifeline.

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