"Are unattractive women particularly attracted to
neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain?"
Not sure how to answer that, but perhaps we can address why
more women, in total, aren't attracted to neuroscience: one reason could be
that they're concerned they're not going to be judged solely on the quality of
their ideas, presentations, posters, or publications, that some asshole will
say to them, "Excellent controls, brilliant experiments: but you really
should wear more makeup, smile, and wear a tighter shirt. That is what is really important: for women
to look pretty for men's enjoyment."
Now, you might say that I am now attacking a straw man: that
even you would never actually go up to a woman as an individual and tell her
that she wasn’t pretty enough, recognizing that such comments are neither kind
nor productive. But the fact of the
matter is that when you post such comments to facebook, you are, in effect,
broadcasting them not just to the individuals you had in mind when you wrote
the comments, but also to any young woman in science who happens across your
facebook page, or the story on Jezebel, or the link from the Association for
Women in Science. You were, in fact,
addressing the entire world, including all of the graduate students and
post-docs attending that conference who, in addition to thinking about
questions to ask after the seminars they’ve attended, and the next experiments
they want to do based on what they just learned from someone’s poster, now also
stop and think: wait, am I not pretty enough?
If it were just you, it really wouldn’t be a problem. But the fact is, it’s not just you. Nor is it just the professor at a proteolysis
seminar I recently attended who made a joke about cleavage. These are but tiny components that, in
aggregate, contribute to a much larger culture that judges women not just on
their science, but also their sexual appeal, and that is one of the factors
contributing to one of the greatest challenges to our field, the mass exodus of
women from academic science between the postdoctoral level and the assistant
professor level, as they leave one line of work that is hostile to them and
seek out others that appreciate them more.
(Just yesterday I met (yet another) former biochemist who is now a
stay-at-home mom.)
You can argue that women shouldn’t care what assholes think
of them, precisely because they’re assholes, and that if something as small as
a mildly offensive facebook post is enough to make you quit science, then your
passion for your work must not be very great.
That sentiment is not without merit, but rightly or wrongly, the
sexually hostile environment is going to exert a pressure that causes people to
leave. In fact, it might provide exactly
the kind of selective pressure that then leads to the phenomenon you observe:
the sexually hostile environment will enrich for people who don’t care whether
other people think they’re pretty or not, and might also cause attractive young
women to play down their attractiveness because giving a poster is difficult
enough without also having to deal with creepy older guys coming up and hitting
on you.
