Hearing from Tiresias
The old Tiresias trick comes in handy sometimes. The neurobiologist Ben Barres started out as Barbara, and he reports on what it’s like to be an intelligent woman.
The top science and math student in her New Jersey high school, she was advised by her guidance counselor to go to a local college rather than apply to MIT. She applied anyway and was admitted.As an MIT undergraduate, Barbara was one of the only women in a large math class, and the only student to solve a particularly tough problem. The professor “told me my boyfriend must have solved it for me,” recalls Prof. Barres…
Although Barbara Barres was a top student at MIT, “nearly every lab head I asked refused to let me do my thesis research” with him, Prof. Barres says. “Most of my male friends had their first choice of labs. And I am still disappointed about the prestigious fellowship I lost to a male student when I was a Ph.D. student,” even though the rival had published one prominent paper and she had six.
Well…women should just all do the transgender thing; problem solved. Right? Or would that be slightly inconvenient.
Some supporters of the Summers Hypothesis suggest that temperament, not ability, holds women back in science: They are innately less competitive. Prof. Barres’s experience suggests that if women are less competitive, it is not because of anything innate but because that trait has been beaten out of them.
“Female scientists who are competitive or assertive are generally ostracized by their male colleagues,” he says.
And called shrill strident bitches for good measure.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by toomany tribbles, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Hearing from Tiresias http://dlvr.it/8XHmj […]
Well let’s see.
We can each run across a pasture. I’ll choose the one with a cow, you can run past the bull. I’m sure there is no difference in aggression between the genders– that’s just a product of society. So no problem.
OK, so I just re-read Oedipus Rex today for this paper I working on (strange how the Fates work), so I have to ask: What’s the Tiresias reference?
Well, actually I have had the experience of having to deal with very aggressive cows and more than one even-tempered bull. As a child, I was attacked and injured by sows – female pigs. Generalizing about farm animals is as lame as generalizing about people.
OTOH, running across a pasture, regardless of the sex of the beasts inside is a really stupid idea.
If I recall, and I could be wrong, two of the Greek gods were arguing about which sex had the most sexual pleasure. So they turned the male Tiresias into a female to get his input. He said the female did, so Zeus made him blind (I think by hitting a snake with a staff). But they leavened Tiresia’s punishment by giving him the ability to see the future.
This myth was recalled by T.S. Elliot in The Wasteland, wherein he referred to “I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives (male and female), saw all (his clairvoyance)”
This is all from memory from decades ago (I was an English major, so shoot me), so the errors are all mine.
Thanks. Learn something new every day. (Here’s wiki on Tiresias.)
Just to add my $0.02 on farm animals. I’ve been flattened by a cow but never a bull. Get between a cow and her calf and even if you are a bull, you’re in for a rough time.
But on topic. I find the whole male idea (and I’m a male so I probably do it without thinking) that women have equal laws, so they should just stop winging or build a bridge to be quite exquisitely captured by the phrase ‘blaiming the victim’. I also see it when people call aboriginals lazy because you know, they’ve not become millionaires in great number and many end up in jail. Both cases would have nothing to do with the structural or cultural iniquities that mean some people, like me, get a massive head start, and few if any barriers (hey, he’s white and has a penis, he’s a winner! yay me!) in contrast to the stigmatized group would it? Blaming the victim indeed.
To Physicalist: Wow, my memory of Greek myths is not as bad as I thought. Ophelia’s Tiresias reference was spot-on, by the way, and warmed my literary heart.
Nancy Wexler titled a 1992 essay on the future impact of genetic testing The Tiresias Complex. In it, she expressed concern that persons at risk for Huntington Disease would feel social pressure to undergo genetic testing.
Both seems to be true: there are unavoidable differences between the sexes, no matter how far we will progress with providing equal chances – if you think that being born with a different set of organs, and either being able (or risk) to become pregnant or not, does not have any impact whatsoever on your psyche and mentality, then you are profoundly deluded.
However, these differences are simply much too small to explain why you only see a tiny handful of professors even in faculties where 60% of the grad students are female. Maybe, in those cases, only having 40% female professors could be explained with different priorities resulting from “nature”, but having only 10% or so is more likely to be due to discrimination.
Alex, This is a bit off topic, but if you will allow me to play Tiresias and look into the future, I can see a day when women actually giving birth will be viewed as primitives, and most of the educated classes will give birth outside the womb. Many will react with horror at this prospect, but I think technology will give women this option and it will become more socially acceptable over time.
On topic, I wish people would be held accountable for conveying what Summers actually said. It’s widely understood that he suggested that women, as a class, are less likely to succeed in careers in mathematics and physics because of some underlying cognitive deficiency. What he actually suggested is that the sort of cognitive anomaly required to succeed at the highest levels of mathematics and physics might arise more frequently in men than in women. He could still be wrong, but it’s a very different hypothesis.
And it’s a hypothesis that, at this point, is impossible to test. Women are not especially under-represented among those pursuing careers in the natural sciences and medicine, but few succeed at the highest level (shout out to Cathy DeAngelis) due to the barriers Professor Barres identifies. We can’t know if many more women wouldn’t pursue careers in mathematics and physics were it not for those barriers. In that sense, Summers’s hypothesis is irrelevant.
It doesn’t have to be an either/or, of course, and it probably isn’t. But I think the experiences of Barres (and of Jonathan–>Joan Roughgarden) are interesting and significant. Sexism is incredibly robust.
Ken – yes – I did a certain amount of pointing out what Summers really said at the time he said it. It’s all in the archive………..
If you’re talking about physics, your grad student percentage is off by a factor of three. The gender problem in that field goes well beyond breaking barriers to advancement.
There are so many factors. I remember reading that, among members of the American Physical Society, some 40% of the women are married to physicists. So, on top of everything else, they face the academic two careers problem.
And not all barriers are external. I once attended a session on encouraging young women to pursue careers in science and engineering, led by the chair of electrical engineering at a research university. She disclosed that, as an undergraduate student, she nearly abandoned her aspiration to be an engineer because, although she was doing well in her classes, calculus didn’t come naturally to her, and she thought that it should. She suggested that, perhaps, such self-doubt is more likely to afflict young women, while young men are more likely to convince themselves that they’re going be able to bullshit their way through.
I have a PhD in a mathematically-based hard science from an Ivy League school. I’ve spent 20 years working in this field. Summers’ thesis implies (to me) that lots of those guys in my grad school class, as well as similar classes in previous and succeeding years, should end up doing great things. Or, at least, that, 20 years out, they should distinguish themselves by being smarter and better at their field, than people who didn’t go to those Ivy League schools. Gosh, it’s a disappointment to find that they “top out” around age 35, and by age 40, are typical middle managers. If Society were making the investment in their graduate careers, it’d be a really bad one. (yes, I know: Society -did- make that investment, which is sorta my point). This ridiculous idea that somehow it takes outlier ability to get into the best grad schools, or to get onto the academic track …. for anybody who’s actually had to -work- with these people, it’s farcical on its face. These guys (and, yes, they’re mostly guys, as am I) are no different from the businessmen I work with at my customers. What the successful ones have, that successful men everywhere have, is the ability to grab the main chance and push it for all it’s worth.
They’re more audacious. That’s all. Not smarter. Not deeper thinkers. Just more audacious.
Ken
But that could easily be because of external barriers. Women know damn well that they can’t bullshit their way through because of the external barriers, while men know something different. So it’s unlikely that the external barriers are not at least part of the reason for self-doubt.
“L’Audace, L’audace, toujour l’audace” – Napoleon
“Toujours gai, toujours gai” – mehitabel.
Agreed.
“She suggested that, perhaps, such self-doubt is more likely to afflict young women, while young men are more likely to convince themselves that they’re going be able to bullshit their way through.”
Young men may think that, and some women may think that of young men, but no-one bullshits their way through math, science or engineering. That said, my cousin Joanna who does research into immune-deficiency diseases, or my niece Chantal who is an electronics engineer, or my wife Virginia, a highly qualified critical-care nurse, are in no way inferior to any man in the same fields. Thy have got to be where they are by dint of hard work and aptitude and intelligence. As well as having to do all the work they have had to overcome the cultural conditioning that still tries to steer women into certain jobs and away from other endeavours – and creates that self-doubt.
As for bullshitting one’s way through, it didn’t work for me as a young man; i still had to do all that work…..and I didn’t get calculus either until I had a really great math teacher – a woman BTW.
I won’t call you Ophelio just yet then.
Interesting discussion on this subject here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
The whole transgender dimension here is making my head hurt. Isn’t one of the usual arguments there that a TG person ‘is’ their target gender, ‘trapped’ in a different body? I can’t begin to decide how that plays as a counterexample against a Summersesque ‘innateness’ argument. If you’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, wouldn’t you expect your perceptions to be different from a ‘real’ woman’s? Perhaps we need Germaine Greer on the case. Or perhaps not…
As a matter of interest, is there any difference in the way women get treated where the arts or subjects connected with the arts are concerned?
Dave, I know – that’s always made my head hurt with regard to the Tiresias trick, too. Did Tiresias really find out what it’s like to see things from a woman’s point of view? How could he have? Etc.
Just to clarify, she wasn’t suggesting that anyone was actually bullshitting their way through. The suggestion is that young men are less prone to examine themselves as to whether the coursework comes naturally, and to think they could pull it off regardless. Of course they could succeed, as could she.
To answer Tim – traditionally, at great places like Oxbridge, great stock was placed on the ability to come up with verbal arguments off-the-cuff, and to respond to unseen exam questions with ‘flair’. This was generally regarded as something males were better at. Possibly because it’s essentially bullshitting, cf supra…
Bingo.
I remain agnostic on whether there are innate biological tendencies that affect gender-related performance in certain fields. It could be that there is no effect; it could be that there is a small effect on the extreme tails of the curve; it could be that there is a significant difference in average ability (though this seems highly unlikely at present); and for each of those possibilities, it could be men that innately “do better”, or it could be women.
Regardless of any of those possibilities, it’s pretty much undeniable that right now women are being systematically discouraged from certain fields, (and the reverse as well, to a much lesser extent) and that this is having a much more tangible effect than any possible innate biological bias. So the possibility is entirely irrelevant at present.
(On a side note, we know pretty much for sure that gender effects the tails cases of physical ability, i.e. you are extremely unlikely to find a woman who could even in principle play left guard in the NFL — but then again, due to significant overlap in the bell curves, it is true that many women could play left guard infinitely better than I could, and in any case that is only in the physical realm. The point being that even in a case where we know that there is an innate gender bias on the average — men tend to be taller and heavier — and where we know there is an even more pronounced bias on the tails cases — a 300-lb man who can also run hella fast and rapidly shift his balance is a rarity, but a 300-lb woman who can do that is pretty much unheard of — even then, it would be silly to say without qualification that “men are better at left guard than women”, because of the huge overlap within the bell curve.)
As a rule of thumb, the answer to any question of the form “Is there any difference in the way women get treated etcetera”, is probably yes.
I should have phrased that better: the question of the maltreatment of women in the sciences comes up again and again, and one doesn’t hear so much about this problem where the arts are concerned: is it significantly more difficult for women studying sciences than for women studying arts? And if so, why?
The phrasing was fine, Tim – I just don’t really know, so I didn’t bother mumbling about it. Probably the same for other commenters. I think it is the case that some subjects are seen as more “suitable” for women than others and that the difficulties and maltreatment also differ – but I have no idea of the stats. I do know that the stats are really bad for women in philosophy; TPM has published stuff on this more than once.
I tell you who would probably know: the people at Feminist Philosophers.
Tim,
The answer to the first question is probably “yes”, but the second question is much more difficult.
Just giving a microcosm of the full picture, an unfortunate and probably unchangable part of the answer is summed up in this SMBC comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php??db=comics&id=1989#comic
As an undergrad, I was more less the guy with the beard. And you know what? Even with all I’ve learned in the meantime, all the understanding I’ve gained about what it must feel like to be a woman in that kind of environment — if I went back to being a single engineering student, I’d still be pretty much the same. Don’t think I could help it. Gender exclusion is self-perpetuating: Assuming a predominantly heterosexual population, if you are in an environment when one gender dominates, it will always be intimidating for the other gender (particularly so if the dominating gender is male). Why? In part, because we have deep-seated instincts to want to find a partner, and if the demographic that represents an eligible partner is a rarity, than that demographic will have difficulty getting anyone to perceive them as anything but an eligible partner first and foremost, and whatever else they may be second.
There’s far more to it than that, of course. But that aspect is depressingly self-perpetuating.
Ken,
I was thinking of biology as an example of a field where there are so many female grad students that you would expect to also see a lot of female group leaders and professors – but you don”t, even though they will certainly again be a few more than their counterparts in math or physics.
Yes, some areas are particularly dreary. Being a biologist, I was used to more or less balanced audiences in lectures, and then when I took informatics as a minor subject, suddenly there were ca. 10 women sitting among 200 male students. That just did not seem, let us say, healthy to me, and I found myself wondering how bizarre it would be to have such a skewed composition in all your courses.
Locutus7,
Artificial wombs seem to be very much SF at this point. And as a biologist, my feeling is they will still remain so for a looooooooooooong time.
Oh, and to reaffirm what Ophelia said, yeah, your phrasing was fine. No worries :)
Yes, artificial wombs… PZ Myers was talking a few months ago about using sows as surrogate wombs as I recall… I am no biologist, but both ideas seem to assume that there is no real connexion between a baby and its mother until it comes out of the womb, and that presented with her new baby, just emerged from an artificial womb or a sow, a mother is at once going to feel that strong and intimate bond that is so much talked of out of the blue as it were. But surely the connexion between a mother and the child growing in her womb is a profound and extraordinarily intimate one. Again, babies hear and remember things in the womb – the rhythms of what will be their native language, music – the first of which certainly is surely not unimportant. In an artificial womb (unless you provide piped conversation), there is not going to be that intercourse with the external world that is already taking place within the womb, and though the grunts and screams of pigs are doubtless important to pigs… well, you get the drift.
Tim: Look on the bright side. A baby born by surrogacy to a sow, particularly if raised as one of her litter, would probably go on to a brilliant career in the corporate sector.
Actually, I got to know old Tiresias rather well years ago in Sydney. It was in a production of Oedipus Rex (Yeats translation) and I played the Priest. Not a bad show, though. Tiresias was drunk on opening night and blind drunk the night it closed. But still got through his lines OK. Played by Jack Fegan, a great TV actor. But I digress.
The Barres story just goes to show that as ever, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil.
I spent nearly a decade teaching science at the high school level, and saw nearly the opposite of what Summers proposes. Namely, the girls tended to grasp scientific concepts far more easily than their male counterparts, but overcompensated by putting in substantially less effort on the whole, with a glib remark that “I’m a girl; I’m not supposed to be good at this stuff.” It used to drive me bonkers.
Funny, Ian!
Arrgh, Kirth.
Glad you thought so, Ophelia.
I opened the show with a full page speech as I recall, lamenting how crook things were generally. Then I introduced Tiresias to the audience with a line like “Behold the Blind Prophet comes!”
As Tiresias was usually as full as a tick, I had a hard time keeping a straight face. His high volume (in the liquid measure sense) backstage gargling of whisky or whatever it was added a whole new dimension to his blindness.
Well I meant the actual joke, about the baby born by surrogacy to a sow, but the Tiresias thing is funny too. Must have made him seem terrifically occult and Dionysian and all.
Tiresias and sows AND INCEST (and not merely heterosexual)! I am reminded of the story of the brothers Gwydion and Gilfaethwy in the Mabinogion who, because of their killing of Pryderi and their robbing him of his otherwordly pigs, get turned into,respectively, a sow and a boar (among other things) by Math fab Mathonwy, the Venedotian king, and actually produce offspring, which are presented to Math. I don’t recall whether the Mabinogion says at what trough the offspring subsequently fed… No, as Ophelia says, Ian, that was a grand joke.
There’s one important part of Summers’s statement that’s being left out, and that’s the fact that he said the supported biological differences are the primary reason for gender imbalances. He said this to a room including at least one researcher who had studied the effects of socialization in depth and found them to be powerful–so powerful that we can’t yet speculate about whether and how biology may be adding to the effect. What he said was dumb and arrogant for that reason.