Science needs to address the gender discrepancy in its ranks. It is failing to recruit a diverse workforce, a problem that is especially dire in a technological age. Most scientists working in physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and computer science (the so-called “hard sciences”) are male. According to Stephen G. Brush in his article “Women in Science and Engineering” (American Scientist 79, 404) and the 2002 Digest of Education Statistics, men are in the majority at all levels in these fields, constituting 60 to 80 percent of undergraduates and up to 95 percent of tenured professors in some fields. Female scientists are paid less than male counterparts with the same experience, and women’s accomplishments are consistently devalued or rendered invisible. They drop out of science at higher rates than similarly accomplished men, resulting in increasing discrepancies in higher ranks of science, noted a 1992 Physics Today article.

Once an exclusively male enterprise, science began to accept significant numbers of women after the 1960s and the advent of the women’s liberation movement and feminism. These movements were crucial in asserting that aptitude and ability are independent of gender. As women attained increasing status in society, they earned positions in the hard sciences in universities, laboratories and industry. This progress was rapid and consistent between 1950 and 1980, with percentages increasing from around 1 percent to around 30 percent. During the ’80s and ’90s, improvement temporarily ceased, and percentages even declined in some years. After the mid-90s, the increase in percentage of women in the hard sciences picked up again, continuing through the current year. 

Feminism must be credited with opening the doors of science and engineering to women during the 1960s and 1970s. It launched a two-pronged attack on the legal and social barriers to women in all fields, non-discriminately including science. It gave a name to many of the struggles women had faced, including discrimination, sexual harassment and gender stereotypes. In a survey of successful scientists, women who had experienced sexual harassment credited the movement with “clearly articulating or naming experiences of discrimination.” Women gained the conceptual tools to recognize an experience as discriminatory, according to Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton in “Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension.” In addition, as detailed in the book “Feminism in 20th Century Science, Technology, and Medicine,” feminist scholars identified and described the overall oppressive male culture of these fields, including engineering, which some scholars concluded “equates professional competence with masculinity.” Combined with the conviction that they could do anything a man could do, these tools helped female scientists make inroads into these traditionally male fields. It is no accident that the upward trends in the numbers and percentages of female scientists coincide with the wide-scale liberation of American women.

In the late ’70s, the women’s movement lost its momentum, and in 1979, pundits like Ruth Rosen, author of “The World Split Open,” declared the women’s movement “dead.” Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in the same year and the religious right began to gain visibility in mainstream America. The Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress in 1972 at the height of the women’s movement, then stalled during the ’80s trying to secure ratification, and failed in 1982. The movement’s accomplishments lost their novelty and power; feminism was now seen as annoying or crippling rather than empowering, and many women blamed it for saddling them with responsibilities in the workplace in addition to those they had at home. For the first time in history, “feminist” was widely understood as an unsavory term.

At the same time, an increasingly technophobic and anti-science brand of feminism was emerging that would discourage women from entering such a hostile workplace anyway. In “Has Feminism Changed Science,” Londa Schiebinger notes that in the early 1980s, “difference feminism” emerged, a new school of thought that emphasized the difference between men and women and revalued femininity. The feminism of the ’60s and ’70s had emphasized women’s ability to do anything men could do. It had emphasized equality, not difference, perhaps at the cost of appreciating feminine styles of learning and interacting. Difference feminism reacted to this inattention, and it became a major, if not the mainstream school of thought during this period. Subscribers to this philosophy held that a new “feminist science” or “feminine science” had to emerge. As Stephen Brush puts it, these feminists believed that science was “an enterprise so dominated by masculine values and behavior patterns that women could not be successful in it unless they violated their own natures. By implication, at least, the argument was that women should not try to enter science until it was reformed.”

The emergence of this school of thought further polarized science and feminism. Scientists, taking a cue from society at large, had begun to marginalize feminism in their institutions; now feminism rejected science in its current form as a legitimate enterprise for women.

The rewriting of the relationship between feminism and science was not the only reason for the recession, though. Other important forces were also at play. Primary among these was the publication and successive media attention given to a study undertaken during the 1970s by Camilla Persson Benbow and Julian C. Stanley from Stanford University. They studied the standardized test scores of boys and girls who had the same amount of formal training and concluded that “superior male mathematical ability” was the cause of the sex difference in scores. After the study was published and publicized, Jacquelynne Eccles and Janis Jacobs observed in “Social Forces Shape Math Attitudes and Performance” that it became popular to believe that boys possessed an inherent mathematical aptitude that girls do not. Benbow and Stanley’s study was preceded by other studies concluding that girls were more verbal and boys more mathematical, and media attention focused on this issue from 1975 to 1985. The media often exaggerated and simplified the findings, using headlines such as “Male Superiority” and “Do Males Have a Math Gene?”

The effect of this study on parents is well documented. Mothers who had heard about the study felt “their daughters had less mathematical ability…would find mathematics more difficult, and would have to work harder in order to do well in math courses.” Fathers who had heard about the study felt that math was more useful for their sons than fathers who had not heard about it.  Female children raised under the influences of this publicity were consequently less likely to pursue science. A child aged nine or 10 when the study was publicized would be in college during the documented recession of the late ’80s and early ’90s, showing the correlation between the study’s release and its effects upon would-be female scientists.

Beliefs in innate difference between boys and girls are less popular now, and Benbow, Stanley and other researchers have been disproved and discredited. Feminism, though, is still a touchy subject and not the social force it was during the ’60s and ’70s; “difference feminism” remains a popular school of thought. The reasons for the recession’s end remain an important subject for further research.

At Harvey Mudd College, six of the 36 full professors are women. Of 77 tenure-track faculty, 27 are women, constituting 33 percent. As for students, 33 percent are female. Gender disparity in the sciences is a reality for our community, one that cannot be dealt with passively. In my experience, student awareness and education regarding this issue is currently inadequate. Student attitudes reflect those of mainstream science at large—that science, an inherently objective pursuit, need not be concerned with social patterns.

I believe HMC professors do make an effort to write gender-neutral problem statements and to call on women and men in equal numbers. However, I feel they do not, in general, explicitly alert students that gender is an important issue.

Students and young scientists need to recognize their approaches to gender, and teachers of science need to recognize their important role in cultivating consciousness, as well as their responsibility to reach out to women who wish to pursue science. The barriers to women in science are well documented, and the slump of the 1980s has demonstrated science’s vulnerability to social forces. In a fully technological society, facing these realities is a prerequisite for cultivating the best, most accurate, and most inclusive science possible.

Herbie HUFF ’08 of Simi Valley, Calif., is majoring in mathematics and English (Pomona). She is a goalkeeper for the CMS lacrosse team and plays percussion in the Pomona College orchestra.