San Francisco
— As someone who studies brain development and
regeneration, Stanford University <http://www.stanford.edu/>
neurobiologist Ben Barres feels qualified to comment on
whether nature or nurture explains the shortage of women
working in the sciences.
But it wasn't just his
medical degree from Dartmouth, his Ph.D from Harvard and
his research that inspired him to write an article
blaming the persistent gender gap on institutional
bias.
Rather, it was that for
most of his academic life, the 50-year-old professor who
now wears a beard was once known as Dr. Barbara Barres, a
woman who excelled in math and science.
"I have this
perspective," said Barres, who switched sexes when he
started taking hormones in 1997. "I've lived in the shoes
of a woman and I've lived in the shoes of a man. It's
caused me to reflect on the barriers women
face."
Barres' opinion piece,
published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature
<http://www.nature.com/>,
was a response to the debate former Harvard president
Lawrence Summers reignited last year when he said innate
sexual differences might explain why comparatively few
women excelled in scientific careers.
Summers' clashes with
faculty — including over women in science — led
to his resignation, though not before he committed $50
million on childcare and other initiatives to help
advance the careers of women and minority
employees.
Even so, Barres thinks a
meaningful discussion of what he calls the "Larry Summers
Hypothesis" ended too soon, leaving missed opportunities
and a bad message for young female scientists.
"I feel like I have a
responsibility to speak out," he said. "Anyone who has
changed sex has done probably the hardest thing they can
do. It's freeing, in a way, because it makes me more
fearless about other things."
In his article, Barres
offers several personal anecdotes from both sides of the
gender divide to prove his own hypothesis that prejudice
plays a much bigger role than genes in preventing women
from reaching their potential on university campuses and
in government laboratories.
The one that rankles him
most dates from his undergraduate days at MIT, where as a
young woman in a class dominated by men he was the only
student to solve a complicated math problem.
The professor responded
that a boyfriend must have done the work for her,
according to Barres.
Barres makes a point of
saying that he never felt mistreated or held back as a
woman scientist. At the same time, he wonders if his
personal experience somehow shielded him from the more
insidious effects of gender bias.
"I wasn't subject to the
same stereotype threat because I never identified with
women when I was growing up," he said. "In a way that was
one of the lucky things for me about being
transgender."
Aside from his unique
vantage point, the thrust of Barres' article is that
neither Summers nor the prominent scientists who defended
his position used hard data to back up the claim that
biology makes women less inclined toward math and
science.
He cites several studies
— including one showing little difference in the
math scores of boys and girls ages 4 to 18 and another
that indicated girls are groomed to be less competitive
in sports — to support his discrimination
argument.
"If a famous scientist or
the president of a prestigious university is going to
pronounce in public that women are likely to be innately
inferior, would it be too much to ask that they be aware
of the relevant data?" he writes in
Nature.
"It would seem just as
the bar goes up for women applicants in academic
selection processes, it goes way down when men are
evaluating the evidence for why women are not advancing
in science."
Harvard University
<http://www.harvard.edu/>
psycholinguist Steven Pinker, whom Barres names in his
commentary as a leading defender of Summers, already has
written a letter to the editors of Nature criticizing the
piece as "polemic" that "contains numerous falsehoods and
scurrilous statements."
Pinker said both he and
Summers relied on "a large empirical literature showing
differences in mean and variance in the distributions of
talents, temperaments, and life priorities" among men and
women to explain why women might be underrepresented in
some scientific disciplines.
"He should learn to take
scientific hypotheses less personally," Pinker
said.
