Merton's passion and interest towards the study of the Sociology of Science, especially through the interactions of social and cultural structures with Science. In this regard, he formulated the Norms of Science, namely: Universalism, Communism, Organized Scepticism and Disinterestedness.
This post deals with the norm of Universalism ('claims to truth' ought to be evaluated fairly and not determined by characteristics such as race, nationality, gender, religion, etc.) especially in the context of Gender.
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams of Cornell University, in a paper titled 'Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science' try to explore the prevalence and causes for gender bias in the academia. The primary causes for under-representation, reports suggested were discriminations in the fields of granting funds, hiring and the journal reviews.
With respect to Journal Reviewing, the authors examine manuscript acceptance rates between males and females while keeping the quality of work as a constant. Analysing works ranging from Budden's study of blind reviews faring better gender-wise in Behavioural Psychology to longitudinal studies spanning two and a half decades, the authors dismiss the argument of gender bias in Journal Reviwing, primarily citing weak justifications and proof of discrimination with respcet to manuscript acceptance rates.In the case of Grant Funding, Ceci and Williams (2010) primarily compare the works of Wennerås and Wold with the Cochrane Methodology Review Group that concluded that apart from the former's study conducted a decade ago, none of the other studies indicate a strong case of discrimination.Hiring, witnessed rather interesting results- one study that looked at positions in R1 universities concluded that women has a better chance of getting interviewed and receiving offers than their male counterparts.
In conclusion, Ceci and Williams are rather sceptical about these conventional claims of discrimination against women. So how do they answer the puzzle of under-representation? The authors attribute it to fertility (life style choices), career preferences (teching over research, for example) and 'work-home' balance issues. While they acknowledge gender differences, they define the differences as 'secondary' and conclude that the real problem lies in the resources attributable to the abovementioned choices and it is those that have to be the focus of the remedy.
Thus, placing it in the context of Merton's Universalism, we see that Ceci and Williams bear a tinge of optimism and infact indicate a move towards Universalism. However, some points to note about the article are that the argument is centered around American contexts and hence cannot be extrapolated to other contexts; the authors primarily look at data for explicit indicators of discrimination, which is rarely the case.
Reference- Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science. PNAS vol. 108 no. 8 3157-3162 (2010)
-Uttara
This is an interesting article about women in science in India:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_gender-bias-keeps-women-away-from-science-study_1340544
What I found interesting was that the task force formed to study the issue said that science textbooks are sexist - "Women and girls were shown as passive figures doing stereotypical low-paid jobs in illustrations. There are hardly any instances where women are shown as leaders or initiators in the field of science." Sort of shows that there are a lot of societal prejudices and that the issue of women in the field isn't one based on (lack of) ability.
The number of women academics in hard sciences is lacking universally today. The article discussed in the post above deals with the same.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting concept here about women's abilities being determined by their Gender is that of Biological Determinism, which is quite sexist and not based on any concrete proofs. Please check out this article in Dissent: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=216
Lawrence Summers himself is infamous for having made an Biological determinism based argument in trying to justify the gender gap.
I found an interesting piece which claims that Gender Discrimination in Academia is just a myth. It cites research from Cornell University which claims that women themselves choose not to be pursue the so called hard sciences, which is similar to the personal preference argument posed by Ceci and Williams. The piece is available at : http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/256816/gender-discrimination-science-myth-alex-b-berezow
Claims that women being left-brained are not equipped to excel in quantitative subjects or become leaders are not to be taken as face value as the differences in brain structures are not understood well at all by anyone yet, and such claims cannot be said to be true.
An interesting article here: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/09/07/sexism_neuroscience_interview
Then again, the norm dealt with in this article is of Universalism in Science, and I do not intend to restrict the discussions to a feminist critique of the norm.
If we shift the focus to race, for example, we find that Watson of the Watson-Crick duo which cracked the double helix structure of the DNA
(which itself is not devoid of sexism, check out: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-crick-and-watsons-dna-lab-was-a-hive-of-genius-ndash-and-sexism-2093498.html)
is guilty of racist remarks where he said that he was gloomy about the condition of Africa, since the social policies aimed at them assume same intelligence level as Westerners, whereas scientific testing in fact shows the "contrary". More information on:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2677098.ece
Such social prejudices creep into the objective world of scientists too.