Last year, when Tongue, but No Door was lost for a while, most of our old posts had not yet made it into the Internet Archive. However, they seem to be creeping in, which is nice, because I have some updates for you.

First, you may remember my post about the unique sexual relationships of Bitch PhD. Nothing new to add to that discussion, but in case you missed it, I wanted to point out that Adrianne and Nick interviewed Dr. B for the third episode of Love & Radio.

Secondly, you almost certainly remember Monica's post about institutional sexism. Now (via Neurodudes) I bring you an interesting paper by Peter Lawrence on gender and academia.

The paper is the kind of thing that Lawrence Summers might have meant to say, if he weren't in all likelihood a douche. Discussion and extensive quoting from the paper follow, below the fold.

Tasty morsels include:

For example, among current student members of the British Psychological Society, there are 5,806 women to 945 men; and among graduate psychologists, 23,324 women to 8,592 men. Of those who practice as chartered psychologists, the ratio has fallen further (7,369 women to 4,402 men). Yet among Fellows of the Society, honoured largely for their research, there are 428 men to only 106 women!

The point being, there are jobs that women seem to choose more than men. However, they still don't have the positions of power within those fields. Lawrence argues that this not because of discrimination, but because the selection process for those positions favors the wrong traits.

There is good psychological evidence that aggression and lack of empathy are on average male characteristics, and we may agree with Baron-Cohen that for both sexes, “nastiness…. gets you higher socially, and gets you more control or power” [2,10,11]. Science should not be a military or a business operation, but nowadays it increasingly resembles one—for most, it is a vicious struggle to survive. In this struggle, men climb higher because they are on average more ruthless, and many women, as well as a gentle minority of men, shy away from competing with them [12]. And I think that our selection methods exacerbate this tendency.

He continues:

At present, in the competition for academic posts, we expect our candidates to go through a gruelling process of interview that demands self-confidence. We are impressed by bombast and self-advertising, especially if we don't know the field, and we may not notice annexation of credit from others, all of which on average are the preferred province of men. But we should also seek out able scientists who would care well for their groups, those who would mentor a distressed student and help her or him back into productive research. And if we did, we would choose more feminine women as well as more feminine men.

And, his conclusion:

I have argued that reducing the premium we give to aggression would, in several different ways, lead to more women in science and also to better science. Even so, in this Utopia, I think that far less than 50% of top physicists would be women (and far less than 50% of top professors of literature would be men). But I don't think that would matter—we would be making better use of the diverse qualities of people. Both women and men might accept that although there is much overlap in the two populations, we are constitutionally different—a diversity we should be able to celebrate and discuss openly. Both women and men should be leading such discussions with pride.

One thing that bothered me was the terse dismissal of discrimination as a factor in the discrepancy: "Regarding overt discrimination, in a lifetime in science, I have seen only little, and it has been both for and against women. Surely, gender discrimination cannot explain more than a tiny part of this trend." Well, gee, Pete, I wonder why you've seen so little discrimination? While we're at it, let's ask a bunch of middle class white people whether or not racism is a problem in America.

Nonetheless, this strikes me as a relatively constructive contribution to the discussion. Thoughts?

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