Chemists who happen to be X
Mar 17th 2005Wallabynerd alert
Went to the CSIE seminar today on “building a diverse faculty”. This began, of course, with the assumption that we want a “diverse” faculty, because Diversity Is Good. Period.
What struck me as interesting was the combination of two points: First, that men and women don’t have any innate difference in capacity to do science, or how they do science (and therefore Larry Summers is a Big Fat Idiot — general applause). At the same time, we want a “diverse” faculty in science because a “diverse” faculty will reach a “better” solution because they think differently.
Diversity Is Good, because a “diverse” team is likely to arrive at a “better” solution to a given problem. The example given was that of the team of engineers who developed airbags not safe for short thin people, because (apparently) none of the engineers themselves were short and thin. (Engineers only test things on themselves, you see. Just like chemists only test new antibiotics on themselves.) We took a running leap and arrived at the conclusion that a “diverse” group of people is therefore better suited to investigating and teaching chemistry. Diversity Is Good also because it’s a better example for students who might be less likely to pursue chemistry as a career if their teachers are all white males. And Diversity Is Good because it’s Fair, and we all want to be fair, don’t we?
And so the real topic of the talk (given by the new chair of the department, who happens to be a woman) was how to attract and retain women faculty. And what works for women should certainly work for other “minorities”, because clearly all non-majorities are alike. The two obstacles are first, that people (both men and women) don’t particularly associate science and “womanly” characteristics — men are objective and task-oriented, women are nurturing and people-oriented. And therefore women candidates for faculty positions (or postdocs, or whatever) are evaluated on slightly different standards; women candidates must have better CVs to be considered. The second obstacle is that the traditional career at a research university isn’t particularly favorable to women who also want marriage and a family; it’s not clear whether it’s a deliberate choice to “opt out” of the pressure of getting tenured, or if women faculty who are married with children are seen as having their attention too divided and therefore unsuitable for tenure. So we (meaning universities in general) should work to make sure that we hire lots of women professors so that all these assumptions will fade away with increased evidence that they’re incorrect.
No data given on the question of whether men and women actually *do* think about chemistry in different ways; can’t remember if I’ve seen such from CSIE stuff before. No examples given either of how adding a Chemist Who Happens To Be A Woman to the faculty has allowed a department to do exciting new research. No suggestion given on why this should even be so; it’s hard to see how it’s not implicit bias from the expectations of “normal” behavior for men and women. (“This will create a more nurturing, caring atmosphere, because Dr. Judy is a CWHTBAW and we all know that CWHTBAWs are more nurturing and caring.” Or even, “Dr. Judy is a CWHTBAW, and therefore she has a much better relationship with her synthetic methods than her colleagues do”?) I’m not, of course, saying that only men should be chemists, or can be chemists; I’ve known many chemists and chemistry students who happened to be female, and they were certainly as capable as anyone else.
So…. either gender matters in how one thinks about chemistry, despite the standard academic assumption that it doesn’t, and therefore we should recruit CWHTBAWs for their unique womanly points of view. Not that this is intrinsically a bad thing. Certainly departments already recruit faculty to have a “complete” department with respect to specific fields of research. Of course, every CWHTBAW I’ve ever known, at three different schools, has had a real — and understandable — desire to be judged as a chemist, not just someone who provides a “unique womanly point of view”. And this also means that one of the main ideas that Science prides itself on, the idea that it’s experimental results that matter, rather than the experimenter, gets tossed out the window. (Of course, I was sitting across from a certain semi-famous lecturer in the department, author of a very successful organic textbook, who happily remarked to the professor next to her before the talk began that of course there’s no such thing as objective reality. So perhaps there’s all sorts of things that Science is ready to discard.)
Or, it doesn’t matter, and therefore the “problem” of having only 20% of tenure track faculty be CWHTBAWs is really one of “how do professors teach and mentor students regardless of gender and skin color?”. But I really don’t see how it can be both. Not that I dared ask at the seminar; there are some things one just can’t say in a university.
