Nature Chemistry: "Sex and the citadel of science"

"Sex and the citadel of science" by Michelle Francl

One hundred years on from Marie Curie being awarded her second Nobel Prize there has been only a handful of female scientists who have received the call from Stockholm. Why are women still under-represented? A lack of ability or passion, or could it be that we create labs into which women don't quite fit?

I suspect it was a bacterium that turned me into a chemist. The summer between third and fourth grade I was sick, too ill to get out of bed for a month. Once I was well enough to be bored, my mother, desperate to keep her invalid child amused and lacking the modern-day sickroom essentials of DVD players and video games, brought me a new book to read. It worked. I was transfixed from the first page, whisked from Chicago's oppressive midsummer heat to the crisp late-autumn days of nineteenth-century Warsaw to walk along the banks of the Wisla with young Manya Sklodowska and her sister.

The tale had everything you would expect to capture a young girl's heart: a motherless heroine, her odyssey across Europe to find the treasure she sought, wicked men bent on stopping her, a broken heart, true love, tragedy. Disney should have optioned it. I imagined myself in a Paris garret, bent over my books, so enthralled by my studies I barely remembered to eat. It was dark, sophisticated, full of mystery and intrigue, and deeply romantic. Ultimately the heroine — who had fainted from hunger in her Parisian attic — triumphs, winning not just the hand of her prince, but also two Nobel prizes. Long before I reached the last pages of Eve Curie's biography of her mother, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up — a scientist like Manya, or as she was known to her scientific colleagues, Marie Sklodowska Curie.

I was beguiled by the thought of discovering new elements and new physics — and also of having a lab to call my own. Growing up in the 1960s, the daughter of two chemists who met in graduate school, it seemed perfectly reasonable to think that women could be top-notch research scientists. Dinner-table conversations were sprinkled with the names of my parents' colleagues and mentors; more than a few were women. In 1964 Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first woman to do so since Marie Curie's daughter Irène Joliet-Curie 29 years before. The societal constraints that had compelled Agnes Pockels to do her pioneering experiments in surface chemistry in her kitchen — work that laid the ground for Irving Langmuir's 1932 Nobel prize — and forced mathematician and quantum mechanic Emmy Noether to list her classes under David Hilbert's name, seemed to have attenuated. Why then would it be a long 45 years before another woman chemist would get a phone call from Sweden early on an October morning?

In an interview in the New York Times, then ACS president Thomas Lane noted that Ada Yonath's 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the structure of the ribosome reflected "a tremendous change in the demographics of the field", and it is true that there has been a substantial increase in the fraction of women in chemistry since Marie Curie defended her doctoral dissertation in 1903 — the first woman in France to do so. Almost 40% of chemistry PhDs in the United States went to women in 2009 (ref. 1) compared with less than 5% earned by women in 1960 (ref. 2). Despite these enormous gains, women are winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry less frequently, not more.

If the demographics have changed for the better since Marie and her daughter became Nobel Laureate chemists, what hasn't changed? Or perhaps what has changed for the worse? Where are the twenty-first-century Marie Curies and Dorothy Hodgkins, and what stands between them and a Nobel Prize? Ability? Passion? Bias? Or could it be that women do not fit into the halls of science?

Many of the theories regarding the underrepresentation of women in science would have been familiar to Professors Curie and Hodgkin. In their thorough review of the current literature on sex and science, psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams group the working hypotheses regarding the relative dearth of women doing science into three broad classes, namely (1) the fraction of women who have the native intellectual capacity to do science, particularly at the highest levels, is much smaller than the fraction of men, (2) an inherent lack of interest among women in the hard sciences and engineering, and (3) societal and cultural biases that push women out of the pipeline and lead to the devaluation of the contributions of those who remain.3

Perhaps there aren't any hidden Marie Curies? The first of the theories would have it that Marie Curie, Irène Joliet-Curie, Dorothy Hodgkin and Ada Yonath are rarae aves — singular women with both the capacity and interest to excel in chemistry. The attitude that women in general are incapable or uninterested in doing science was certainly pervasive in Marie Curie's time. In 1890, not long before Manya Sklodowska left for the Sorbonne in Paris — because the university in Warsaw refused to admit a woman — Rudyard Kipling wrote a biting satire after visiting Chautauqua, a resort in New York State where women denied educational opportunities in more formal venues gathered each summer to study: "I'm awfully sorry for the girls who take it seriously. I suppose the bulk of them don't... One never gets to believe in the proper destiny of women until one sees a thousand of 'em doing something different. There is something wrong with it."4

In the twenty-first century it is easy to dismiss Kipling's characterization of education as unsuited to women as mere opinion. In these more measured times, however, statistics — not a satiric pen — are wielded to reveal women's proper destiny. Larry Summers, infamously speculating on the diversity of the US workforce, does precisely that: "So my sense is that the unfortunate truth — I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true — is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem [the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering faculties]." Citing statistics showing more variance in mathematical ability among males, Summers concluded that a greater proportion of men are truly gifted in mathematics, and by extrapolation, more capable of excelling in science. 5

A single counterexample is sufficient to disprove a theorem (though many more can be found3). The larger variance in mathematical ability among males that Summers cites is by no means universal. Twice as many males as females in the US scored in the top 5% on the mathematics section of the Programme for International Student Assessment6. But what about in the UK? The ratio of high-scoring males to females is very nearly one to one. The proportion of women at the top echelons of aptitude in maths, using a number of different measures, varies from nation to nation and culture to culture. These data strongly suggest that it is not nature that is keeping potential Marie Curies from the lofty heights of Nobel-class science. It would seem some places have, to use Larry Summers's phrase, "a serious social problem". I would argue that it is time to move the theory of naturally differing variance in mathematical ability far down the list of reasons that women are underrepresented in maths and science. As a hypothesis it is remarkably persistent — perhaps because it demands no remedy — still, the data strongly suggest that whatever immutable sex-based differences there are in the capacity to do science, they are secondary perturbations and should be treated as such.

Could it be that women, although capable of high-calibre science, inherently aren't all that interested? Perhaps gender imbalance in science is not the result of external social constraints, but internal cues; maybe the bulk of girls won't take it seriously. In a recent essay, George Will takes up Kipling's lament, citing as evidence the small percentage of women who major in chemistry at women's colleges (4% at Bryn Mawr, where I teach), where presumably there is no bias against women in science7. Although 4% of students majoring in chemistry sounds tiny, it should be put into context by considering the number of students majoring in chemistry at other institutions. In the US, only 0.73% of students — male or female — elect chemistry as a major. Women at Bryn Mawr are six times more likely to major in chemistry than they are at your average US college. One should perhaps ask what co-ed institutions are doing to discourage interest on the part of men and women both.

If the Marie Curies — women with the ability and passion to excel in chemistry — are there, why don't we see them? At the time Marie Curie was born, women chemists were explicitly kept out of the picture. In 1874, when a group of chemists gathered to honour Joseph Priestly, a meeting that led to the founding of the American Chemical Society, women chemists, including Lydia Shattuck of Mount Holyoke's chemistry department, were in attendance. The official photograph, however, shows only the men in attendance. The women chemists? Pushed off to stand with the men’s wives8. The year after she and her husband won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Marie was at least in the picture, shown in a 1904 Vanity Fair cartoon standing supportively behind Pierre as he holds up a tube of radium, though she had been as much a driving intellectual force behind the project as had he. Contemporary popular accounts characterized Marie as Pierre’s devoted assistant and muse, “[Marie] has associated her name with his discoveries”.

Decades later, women scientists were still contending with ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitudes. When my mother-in-law Gai Donnay, an eminent crystallographer and chemist (she co-edited the Crystal Data Tables), wondered why there had been no women speakers at a minerology conference, the organizer replied there were no women in the field to be invited. She promptly prepared for him a list of female Canadian geologists for the next time he found himself at such a loss. Peruse conference proceedings and photographs from the twenty-first century and it’s clear that women are not as utterly absent as they were in the past. The grounds on which the argument is based, however, have subtly switched from the explicit and deductive: women can’t do science at all, therefore there are no women who do science to recognize, to the implicit and inductive: if a woman has been recognized, it’s because she is a woman rather than because of her science, therefore, women don’t do good science. The assumption remains, whether stated overtly as in the past or now implicitly: if women are doing it, they can’t be doing it as well as a man. The most recent report on the status of women at MIT notes this automatic discounting, the tacit assumption that the standards are necessarily different (and lower) for women, as an emerging issue10.
 
Although it is conceivable that women fade into the background because they are doing work that is less interesting, creative or important than men, evidence suggests that just being male contributes to an aura of authority in science. When shown ten-minute clips of physics lectures, observers rated male lecturers on average as substantially more knowledgeable than female lecturers, despite the fact that the lectures were word-for-word identical; the lecturers were actors working from a script and knew no physics11. It was also found that women post-doctoral candidates in Sweden needed to be two and a half times as productive as their male counterparts to be considered equally competent12.
If women are intellectually capable and interested, why is it that we fail to see them as excellent scientists? Perhaps it is because they don’t fit — literally. Do we send a message, through subtle visual and architectural clues, that women don’t belong in the world of science?
 
Built space is not neutral, as Winston Churchill noted, “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”. As much as scientists use labs to create science, labs themselves create scientists. Laboratory space is indispensable for chemists, more so I would suggest than in many other scientific fields. It follows that the influence on chemists of their laboratory spaces is potentially higher. What are the spaces in which we do and speak about chemistry telling us about who should do chemistry, and how well they seem to do it? Are our laboratory spaces gender-neutral?
The amount and quality of space a scientist has access to are obvious markers of status, linked presumably, to a proven record of creativity and hopefully promoting future productivity. Space is hard to come by in most institutions, and how much space a scientist has is often a function of their stature — or at least their perceived stature relative to their local peers. And we read it as such. In some institutions, women have less space (adjusted for grant dollars) than men, signalling to visitors and students alike that whatever their productivity, they are not as important as the men13.
 
Marie Curie did her doctoral work in a leaking shed — formerly a dissecting room — behind Paris’s Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. The Sorbonne would not give her space. When Ernest Rutherford visited the Curies in Paris, he wondered at Marie’s ability to accomplish anything in that space, “It must have been dreadful not to have a laboratory to play around in”. Indeed.
 
There are also less direct messages being sent by the spaces in science buildings. I remember spending the first morning of my post-doctoral fellowship getting oriented. I found out where my magnetic tapes could be read and where the recent journals were kept. And of course, the location of the ladies’ room. The university had graduated its first co-ed class a decade earlier, but it was soon apparent that it had yet to come to grips entirely with the women in its midst. When I pushed open the door to the ladies’, I encountered a wall of urinals. I quickly ducked back out and checked the door. ‘Women’. In more than a decade, the only thing this highly regarded research university with a large endowment had managed to change was the sign on the door. It made me wonder, slightly tongue-in-cheek, if someone was thinking that women chemistry students were just a temporary aberration. The architecture sent a subliminal message, even if an unintentional one, about the building’s intended occupants — men.
 
I’d like to suggest that physical stature is a factor we often overlook in the ways the physical surroundings subtly shape our sense of scientists. I am old enough to remember Lily Tomlin’s character Edith Ann: a grown woman in an oversize chair, her feet swinging high above the floor, playing a child14. I think of Edith Ann often, about as often as I sit in a chair in our departmental conference room, where my feet don’t reach the floor. I feel like a child. I am not even all that short; my height is within one standard deviation of the mean for women. Still, the standard chair seat is 17 inches from the floor; the natural seated position for the average male is 17.1 inches from the floor. Chairs — in meeting rooms and conference venues are built to accommodate the majority of men, and the minority of women (less than 5% in fact)15. Most women will look — and perhaps feel — just a bit out of place, faintly childlike in an outsized chair. Lab benches, lecterns and blackboard heights are similarly designed for the average man. Every time I sit down, stand at a blackboard, lab bench or lectern, I'm almost imperceptibly reminded I don't fit — and so are my colleagues and students. Do we automatically downgrade what women have to say because when we see them in the context of the lab or the lecture space they look like children, not adults?

Part of this is the result of standardization and modularity in architecture, a trend that has grown since the time of the Curies, when mass production and the establishment of standards were in their infancy. A photo of Marie Curie standing next to a bench in the lab she designed, shows it well proportioned for her height.Architectural critic Thomas Gieryn argues that although standards enable architects to work efficiently, the result is that occupants of a space are generally unaware of the underlying assumptions made in design and construction16. If you're not asked about chair heights, it may never occur to you that they have been selected to fit a particular subpopulation.

It's not just the size of the furniture or height of the blackboard that sends these signals. Consider the noise as a session chair reverses the lapel mic so it can be clipped to a woman speaker's blouse. Or now that slide carousels and projectionists are a thing of the past, how awkward and unpolished a speaker can look juggling a laser pointer and the power pack for the microphone, while trying to advance to the next slide in her presentation with a remote. Ginger Rogers may have had to do everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in high heels, but a female speaker who forgets to don something with pockets or lapels may find herself having to do what her male colleague does, but with both hands tied up.

Colour cues in architecture and in equipment design are also communicating who should be working in laboratories. In Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine reviews the literature that explores the relationship between colour-coding and gender expectations17. It is, she says, relentless. Within an hour of birth, infant girls are labelled with pink hats, the boys, tagged blue. But when Marie Curie was born, such colour-coding was non-existent, and when her daughters were born, the code was the opposite; pink was considered a stronger, more masculine colour. Children quickly learn to read these colour clues (at least those who are not colour blind). Pink, purple and pastel things are for girls, whereas the blue, green and earth-toned stuff belongs to the boys. Even three-year-old children will reliably assign the colour pink as belonging to the category 'girls'18. The colour-coding can even trump other gender-linked cues — preschool boys will elect to play with a tea set as happily as a truck, as long as it's brown17.

It makes me wonder if one reason the science and engineering pipeline begins to leak girls at middle school is not due to some innate sex-linked lack of interest, but because that's often when 'real' lab equipment starts to be used regularly, the colours of which are drawn largely from the male-associated palette. Pick up a lab supply catalogue, what colour jumps out at you? Blue? Green? Google images for 'chemistry laboratory', and sort by colour (yes, you can do that!), many more images will be classified as blue or green (a factor of six in my search) as compared with purple or pale yellow — or pink. For children who have had their toys and clothes colour-coded by intended gender for years — you can find the aisle with action figures for boys, without recourse to signs, by looking for the strong primary and earthy colours and avoiding the pastel-toned aisles — it might go without saying that science stuff is for boys to play with.

I'm not arguing that lab colours are directly intended to signal 'women stay out' or 'these scientific instruments are for men only', but suggesting in a social milieu where colour encoding of objects for rapid identification is ubiquitous, it is hard to avoid reading the subtext colour provides. If the sign on the door read 'Men' and you walked into a pink space, might you not check twice?

Chair heights and the colour of NMR consoles may well feel like trivial details, it might be hard to imagine how such inconsequential factors could play a significant role in keeping women from being recognized as scientists, or discourage them from entering science in the first place. Of course, chemists regularly separate closely related materials, by simply repeating the separation process many times on a chromatographic column. The ability to chromatographically resolve two samples depends not only on the selectivity of the process, but on the number of theoretical plates. Think about the number of times a child encounters the standard gender colour-coding scheme every day — the number of theoretical plates is extraordinarily high.

If we want to see our next woman chemistry Nobelist before 2084, might I suggest that all of us, women and men alike, need to do as we do in our own fields, deal in data. Regardless of how we try to quantitatively dress up the nineteenth-century myth of women as unhappy, struggling scientists, lacking the passion and the intellectual power of the best men, it doesn't measure up. Yet something makes it difficult to imagine that women are fit to be scientists, and to see women as exceptional scientists. We may not be able to avoid the gender-linked colour-coding imposed by the larger society, but we can be more attentive to the spaces we create in which we do and talk about science, as well as the materials we use to do it. Even small tweaks in the conditions under which a chromatography column is run can affect the separation.

I wonder if what underlies the inability to fully acknowledge the social biases that obscure and downplay women's scientific achievements, and the ways in which our spaces silently speak to us about who belongs and who doesn't, who seems capable and who does not, is the assumption that if a Marie doesn't make a critical breakthrough, of course, a Pierre somewhere will. Will chemistry make all the critical leaps it could, without the contribution of half of its finest minds? I, for one, would rather not risk it. ❐

Michelle Francl is in the Department of Chemistry at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010-2899, USA.

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References

1. Doctorate Recipients from US Universities: 2009 (NSF 11-306, National Science Foundation, 2010).

2. Roscher, N. M. & Cavanaugh, M. A. J. Chem. Educ. 64, 823–827 (1987).

3. Ceci, S. J. & Williams, W. M. The Mathematics of Sex (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010).

4. Kipling, R. Abaft the Funnel (Doubleday, 1909).

5. http://president.harvard.edu/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php

6. http://pisacountry.acer.edu.au/

7. Will, G. F. Newsweek 156, 24 (2010).

8. Shmurak, C. B. & Handler, B. S. Hist. Educ. Quart. 32, 315–342 (1992).

9. Quinn, S. Marie Curie: A life 193 (Simon & Shuster, 1995).

10. Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011).

11. Bug, A. Phys. World 23, 16–17 (August 2010).

12. Wennerås, C. & Wold, A. Nature 387, 342 (1997).

13. http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48pdf/011204/GenderEquity.pdf

14. http://www.lilytomlin.com/charns/edithann/ea_book1.html

15. Kroemer, K. H. E. in The International Encylopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors (ed. Karwowski, W.) 199 (Taylor & Francis, 2001).

16. Gieryn, T. F. Theor. Soc. 31, 36–74 (2002).

17. Fine, C. Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference (Norton, 2010).

18. Leinbach, M. D., Holt, B. E. & Fagot, B. I. Cognitive Dev. 12, 107–130 (1997).

 

NATURE CHEMISTRY | VOL 3 | SEPTEMBER 2011 | www.nature.com/naturechemistry

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