“Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science” is an essay written by Peter A. Lawrence, and published in the January 2006 issue of PLoS Biology. Below is an excerpt taken from a section near the end subtitled: “Job Searches in Academia.” Essay via Rox Populi.
….”About 100 years ago, Ibsen shed light on the secrets of contemporary life, and in doing so, championed women’s rights. But since then, the feminist campaign for equality has helped build the belief that men and women, on average, have exactly the same aptitudes. It is time we exorcised this particular ghost, and if we do, it will help put more of the less aggressive members of society, most of whom are women, into positions of power. For example, in job searches and in considering people for promotions, we have been asking women to take tests, largely devised by men, that tend to overvalue masculine characteristics. If men and women on average were identical, no one would see fault in this, but if it is agreed that they are not, these tests become discriminatory:for they favour those many men and those few women with masculine behaviour.
“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 most important of all, could we try to select for the one characteristic we need most, scientific originality? Originality and creativity are all too rare, and I know of no evidence that these traits are more frequent in one sex [13]. As we busily compare candidates, adding up their papers and calculating impact factors, do we remember to look for these qualities? Instead of reading the papers, we count them. Counting rewards those who have had many papers accepted, and those who have worked their names into the author list. But is the editorial process of selecting papers an objective one? Certainly not; in the jungle where we fight to publish, salesmanship and pushiness pay off [14], and these tend to be masculine characteristics. Thus, if we were to read the papers of candidates and search for originality and insight, I believe we would select more women, as well as more men with feminine qualities. So I am not advocating overt positive discrimination; instead, I suggest we consciously try to see through showmanship and select the qualities we actually need.
“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.” ….
