Is science a man's game?

Marie Curie

Yesterday I promised a more thorough rebuttal of Larry Summer's blithe assertion that women were inherently inferior at science, and that this had been convincingly established by behavioral genetics.  One distinctive anecdote from his own speech that he believes illustrates his point is a story about his own daughter.  According to numerous accounts of the talk, the story goes that when his daughter was a toddler, he gave her two trucks to play with (as part of an attempt at "gender neutral" parenting).  He was surprised to see her treat them like dolls, calling one of them the "daddy truck" and the other the "baby truck."  From his perspective, this demonstrated the female tendency to reframe observations within a nurturing, reproductive framework to which they are predisposed, rather than making objective observations about phenomena to construct understanding.  So let's unpack all of that, shall we?

Difference is Real

No one can deny that some part of sexual difference is biological, rather than the result of socialization - breasts, vaginas, and penises for example.  Similarly, since all of those gross anatomical differences come with associated hormonal differences, it's not a controversial argument in my mind to suggest that men's brains and women's brains might also manifest certain differences that might cause them to look at the world differently.  I confess that have a very materialistic view of the world (in the sense that I think that our physical corpus, the matter in our brains, the cocktail of chemicals surging through our bodies are sufficient to explain human behavior without resorting to some kind of indescribable soul or essence); it's also my personal experience that within men and women there exist a tremendous range of personalities, tendencies, and world views, and that any generalization will fail to capture many peoples' experiences.  However, I think that the statistical, epidemiological level, one could observe differences in the behavior patterns of men and women that could be attributed to genetic, biological differences.  So I suppose you could say that I don't object per se to the explicit premise of Summers's argument: in the big picture, there are real biological differences between the ways men and women see the world.

Objectivity is a myth

HOWEVER - what I find extremely objectionable is the implied premise that follows: that the way

Rachel Carson.  She's the reason we're
not all getting cancer from DDT.

men look at the world is somehow inherently better, and therefore when women engage in scientific pursuits, they do so with an inherent disadvantage.  I've blogged before about Paul Feyerabend's argument that an exclusionist attitude towards the production of knowledge is foolish and counterproductive, and Summers's attitude is a prime example of how a representative of the dominant group attempts to preserve dominance by privileging his own perspective, at the expense of the oppressed group in particular and of society more generally.  Summers' tacit conceit that there's a right way and a wrong way to do science and that men do it the right way is a not-so-subtle entrenchment of patriarchal elitism that tells men that what comes most naturally to them is best and what comes most naturally to women is inherently less valuable.  To put it more simply - I don't think it's wrong to point out differences between men and women, but the attachment a value statements to tendencies associated with one gender or the other should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

But what about all the awesome stuff that we've gotten from science?

That's what you might be asking about now.  If Summers is suggesting that the male way of doing science is best, perhaps its because it has yielded such tremendous technological dividends.  Well, here's a few quick thoughts on that point.

1. The goods of the status quo aren't an argument against doing things differently, and particularly doing them more inclusively.  We have no matriarchal alternate universe to compare with our own that might help us understand what the scientific world might look like if it were dominated by female knowledge production.  In any case, Feyerabend's original argument emphasizes inclusion: any practice, any approach that yields useful insights for life or inquiry has value and validity, and we'd all be better off if we could take an instrumental, "all of the above" approach to our understanding of the world.
2. Science has done plenty of horrible things as well.  Summers critiqued his daughter for the nurturing attitude she took towards her toy trucks; perhaps that ethical dimension might have diminished the likelihood of the invention or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or fostered more attention to environmental and resource preservation at an earlier stage in human technological development.  One might argue, in fact, that to the extent that typically "masculine" traits are manifested in science, they've endangered the survival of the human race and the entire ecosphere.  That's a consequence worth considering.
3. The idea that there is a proper "methodology" is really a myth that's deployed to silence voices that the dominant group finds threatening.  Feyerabend's entire book centers around an analysis of Galileo's challenge to the heliocentric theory, and systematically demonstrates that he disregards nearly all aspects of the process that has been enshrined as the "scientific method."

Perhaps I could have summed this post up much more succinctly with the following statement and question.  "Larry Summers thinks women are bad at science.  But who gets to decide what good science is?"