Susan M. Barnett

Women's Underrepresentation in Science: Sociocultural and Biological Considerations

The underrepresentation of women at the top of math-intensive fields is controversial, with competing claims of biological and sociocultural causation. The authors develop a framework to delineate possible causal pathways and evaluate evidence for each. Biological evidence is contradictory and inconclusive. Although cross-cultural and cross-cohort differences suggest a powerful effect of sociocultural context, evidence for specific factors is inconsistent and contradictory. Factors unique to underrepresentation in math-intensive fields include the following: (a) Math-proficient women disproportionately prefer careers in non-math-intensive fields and are more likely to leave math-intensive careers as they advance; (b) more men than women score in the extreme math-proficient range on gatekeeper tests, such as the SAT Mathematics and the Graduate Record Examinations Quantitative Reasoning sections; (c) women with high math competence are disproportionately more likely to have high verbal competence, allowing greater choice of professions; and (d) in some math-intensive fields, women with children are penalized in promotion rates. The evidence indicates that womens preferences, potentially representing both free and constrained choices, constitute the most powerful explanatory factor; a secondary factor is performance on gatekeeper tests, most likely resulting from sociocultural rather than biological causes.

The Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise: Developing Childhood Proclivities into Adult Competencies: The Overlooked Multiplier Effect

In this chapter, we tackle a problem that has been at the heart of the debate over the relative influence of genes and environments in producing cognitive competencies. Our goal is to attempt to reconcile the disparate claims of behavior genetics researchers who stress the prepotency of genes in producing intellectual competence (for example, Bouchard, Lykken, Tellegan, and McGue, 1998) with those whom Scarr (1997) refers to as “socialization theorists” because of their stance on the crucial role of the social and material environment in shaping developmental outcomes. Our means of making this reconciliation is to describe recent efforts by diverse scholars to explain cognitive growth in terms of theories, models, and metaphors that are inherently multiplicative, more so than prior ones. We do not intend to delve into a comparative analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each model or metaphor, as that is not our goal, but instead we want to make the point that various researchers, coming from very different orientations, have found the need to postulate similar types of multiplier effects to account for cognitive growth across a wide range of attainments (reading, intelligence, mathematics, motoric). In the treatment that follows we use the terms “proclivities,” “penchants,” and “abilities” interchangeably, to refer to basic, underlying “resource pools” that are undoubtedly biologically based. Thus, we speak of a newborns penchant, ability, or proclivity to stare, attend, remember, and process the perceptual world.

Balancing Professional and Personal Life

Women in science do not have enough hours in a day to do everything they might ideally aspire to do—and this realization leads to inevitable compromises. The key for women is to identify the compromises that they can live with, and that will lead to the highest level of overall life satisfaction. Barnett’s and Wethington’s stories illustrate alternative solutions to this dilemma: the former prioritizing family and the latter career. The tenure system exacerbates this problem—women may be too busy to have children before tenure, and too old after. Men are not subject to the same biological constraints and also tend more often to have home-based spouses or spouses in flexible careers who can raise their children while the men devote their lives to academic work. Many of the most helpful strategies for dealing with life balance issues focus on reducing the career costs of motherhood. More flexible careers paths and timing would help, but, with an abundant supply of PhDs, the academy has little incentive to explore them.