By now, for anyone not trapped in their own black hole of current affairs, we should all have seen the ground-breaking image of a black hole. Many of us have been excited to share the news that one of the key contributors to the breakthrough was a woman – Katie Bouman – who helped create the algorithm which took a vast amount of telescope data from all over the world and turned it into an image. In response, there have been some who have asked why her gender mattered, especially when over 200 researchers have contributed to this achievement, shouldn’t we focus more on achievements than gender? Here’s why I think it matters that we celebrate her achievement and the fact that she did it as a woman.
Image from https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=24028
Diversity benefits science
Science has a bit of an image problem. We are too enamoured by the “lone genius” trope, the idea that one person (usually a man) has a stroke of genius which changes the way we perceive the world. The likes of Tesla, Darwin, Hawking, and of course the man whose name is synonymous with intellect – Einstein – are all pretty obvious examples. Yet that is rarely how science functions. Scientists collaborate. They work in teams, often crossing borders, and their work builds on the work of others. Scientific research is problem-solving conducted by a group, not the unleashing of individual genius. You might then think that diversity is not what matters, it’s collaboration we need to focus on – get the best minds together to solve the problem and innovation surely awaits. According to one study, diversity is more important than high ability when it comes to problem solving. Being intelligent is not the key to a breakthrough; seeing problems differently is. Diversity in STEM allows for more approaches to problems and a larger variety of research questions asked, something which is harder to achieve when the researchers are homogeneous.
Science is often applicable. It impacts on lives throughout the world, everything from their diet, to reproduction, to transportation, healthcare and even entertainment. It often has to meet the needs of an enormous diversity of people and to do that it requires input from scientists with diverse backgrounds. Science benefits humanity best when the scientists are diverse.
That does, however, leave us in an awkward position. Promoting the work of Bouman is a way to highlight the benefits of diversity in science, yet we are still elevating an individual intellect, potentially pushing the perspective that science is achieved by singular geniuses and not teams; it is worthwhile not forgetting the collaborative context of her achievement.
Obstacles all the way down
I’m going to keep this next part short as it could get very long. Girls/women face obstacles through the entirety of their advances into STEM, starting as children. There are a lot of them and a lot of time could be spent talking about it, but I’ll be brief.
Starting from an early age, gender stereotypes discourage young girls from the sorts of behaviours which can lead to an interest in science – it can even be as seemingly innocuous as telling them not to get dirty or telling them that dinosaur toys are for boys. The idea that science suits boys better is one which still lurks amongst us. See here and here.
There is also a lack of role models. Katie Bouman has now, hopefully, become a potential role model for girls wanting to go into science, but we are still, as a society, more familiar with male scientists. An absence of prominent female faces in a field can lead to the perception that there is no place for a woman there.
Women are awarded Bachelors degrees in science as often as men, sometimes even more for some fields. During their degrees, they are often perceived as more hardworking but less intelligent (less brilliant!) then their male counterparts. And that’s a problem. Women are stereotyped in STEM as not having raw, innate talent, leading to a disparity in fields where brilliance and genius are considered key attributes.
One they’ve graduated, things get worse. Out of 115 STEM fields, only 28 have reached 50% female authors overall. When review panels are all male, they accept significantly fewer papers with female last authors or corresponding authors (no difference for lead authors), whereas all-female or mixed gender review panels show no such bias. Journal editorial boards and journal reviewers are majority male. With their papers already more likely to be published, men are more likely to be cited too. See here.
Those biases aren’t just found in publishing – the labs themselves show gender bias (not the actual physical laboratory, though that wouldn’t surprise me – the world is often designed with men in mind and companies regularly neglect to test their products with women). Male candidates for management positions are rated as more competent and are offered higher starting salaries. Male faculty employ fewer female grad students and post-docs compared to female faculty. And, perhaps the most alarming, female candidates are half as likely as male candidates to receive excellent letters of recommendation. More men get the jobs, those men hire more men, then they all write nice letters of recommendation for each other and the cycle continues.
Going to a conference? Even in fields where women are prominent, if the people organising the event are all-male, the number of female speakers drops substantially compared to those organised by all-female or mixed gender panels.
Want to collaborate with another scientist? Well, men are more likely to share their data when it is requested by another man.
These gender biases don’t just come from men helping men, as it may seem like I am implying. Some of them are ingrained in women too. Students are biased towards male lecturers, rating them higher in evaluations regardless of the quality of their teaching, and that doesn’t change depending on the gender of the student. See here, here, here and here for examples.
As you can probably tell from my under-referenced stats and statements here (if I haven’t cited a claim, check here for it), this is being heavily studied. You’d think that, perhaps, shining a spotlight on the issue would help combat it, right? Well, whilst men will often agree that diversity benefits STEM, they are less receptive of any discussion on making effort to address the imbalances, perceiving it as an affront to the meritocratic system of science, they even perceive the research on gender imbalance to be of low value. When men don’t recognise gender biases in STEM, addressing them properly is going to unachievable.
So far, I’ve not touched on one of the biggest problems in STEM which disproportionately affects women – sexual harassment. It creates a hostile environment which drives women away, wrecks their morale and often even blames them for being victims. It ranges from poor attempts at humour which crosses boundaries to sexual assault. It’s not a problem exclusive to STEM (obviously) and the same issues occur in many careers – promotions offered for sexual favours, women criticised for their sexuality, sexual assault which goes unpunished because the victim is of lower status and risks their job if they complain. And if they do complain? They are often perceived as bringing it upon themselves, or maliciously attempting to ruin a man’s career. (For more on this issue, see here, here and here). When they speak up about any of these issues, they are perceived as pushy, as mean, as “unfeminine”.
We could look into all sorts of other ways in which women are silenced or overlooked in science. How many women have won Nobel Prizes in science? (It’s about 20, compared to around 600 men, I think.) How many of the top popular science books have been written by women? I honestly don’t know many. How many female science communicators do you see on the TV presenting documentaries compared to men? How many are invited to speak on the news about their findings, or are mentioned in newspapers? I did intend to find information on all of these but I’ve run out of time.
Back to Bouman
In summation, Katie Bouman matters. Her achievements are inspiring, hopefully to many young girls who might previously have felt discouraged from STEM. She did it as part of a diverse team and that sort of diversity matters for science, it fuels its engine. Women face more obstacles in science than men, they face more harassment, and they face more discouragement earlier in life. When we celebrate the achievements of the Katie Boumans of the world, we are celebrating women who, against the odds, are up there standing on the shoulders of giants achieving great things. Science is still very much a man’s world, it’s time to embrace diversity and achieve greater things.
As a science communicator, seeing a larger diversity of people communicating science is a huge benefit. It broadens the audience and participation, which can only ever be a good thing.
This is also a handy resource: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/08/gender-bias-in-academe-an-annotated-bibliography/
(As an additional note, a lot of these issues apply to race too but I didn’t have time to look up the stats. Naturally, the situation is even worse for non-white women and we need to shine the spotlight on POC in science too.)
The Palaeobabbler 