The CBE Scroll

In a Wall Street Journal article today, “He, Once a She, Offers Own View On Science Spat” [July 13, 2006; p. B1], Sharon Begley reports that Dr. Ben Barres has a specially unique viewpoint on the issue of whether women make good scientists. Barres, in today’s issue of Nature, strongly disagrees with the “Larry Summers Hypothesis,” named for the former Harvard president who attributed the paucity of top women scientists to “lack of intrinsic aptitude” since he’s been able to view the situation from both sides of the gender fence.

Begley:

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.”

There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn’t have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.

In high school, Barbara was steered away from MIT despite being the top math and science student, and at MIT was told that her boyfriend must have solved a particularly difficult math problem when she was the only student that could solve it. Neither could she get hardly any of the lab heads to work with her on her thesis, while her equally adept male friends had their pick of labs.

Begley again:

There is little evidence that lack of testosterone or anything unique to male biology is the main factor keeping women from the top ranks of science and math, says Prof. Barres, a view that is widely held among scientists who study the issue. Although more men than women in the U.S. score in the stratosphere on math tests, there is no such difference in Japan, and in Iceland the situation is flipped, with more women than men scoring at the very top.

All this makes a lot of sense to my wife who is also a scientist (MD) and who also was the top science student at her university. When all the stereotypes just don’t apply to you, you have to discount the purveyors of the lies and look around for other explanations. Let alone working hard to follow up on the options that seem to work best for you.