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Review Of Swarthmore College Works Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works Physics & Astronomy 9-1-2010 Review Of "The Science On Women And Science" Edited By C. H. Sommers Amy Lisa Graves Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-physics Part of the Physics Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Amy Lisa Graves. (2010). "Review Of "The Science On Women And Science" Edited By C. H. Sommers". Physics Today. Volume 63, Issue 9. 55-56. DOI: 10.1063/1.3490501 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-physics/216 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Physics Today The Science on Women and Science Amy L. R. Bug Citation: Physics Today 63(9), 55 (2010); doi: 10.1063/1.3490501 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3490501 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/63/9?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to IP: 130.58.64.71 On: Mon, 04 May 2015 15:04:13 books Inequity certain, cause disputed “attribute the gender disparity to char- Lawrence Summers from Harvard Uni- The Science on acteristic gender preferences grounded versity to the trial of Galileo, you will Women and in biological differences,” says enjoy Murray’s concluding Sommers in the introduction. chapter. Science For example, David Geary The political becomes per- Edited by (chapter 7) claims that males sonal for me in chapter 4, in Christina Hoff Sommers have an evolutionary advan- which Sommers attacks both AEI Press, Washington, DC, 2009. tage both in spatial cognition my alma mater, MIT, and the $20.00 paper (330 pp.). and mathematical reason- NSF ADVANCE program, ISBN 978-0-8447-4281-6 ing. But wait: Elizabeth Spelke which supports projects to Reviewed by Amy L. R. Bug and Katherine Ellison (chapter enhance the participation of 2) counter that core systems women in science and engi- Scientific information often collides with for math emerge in human neering. The gender reforms ideology in the area of sex-differences infants and in “no case have championed by MIT dean of research. Many people agree on a host of male infants or children been found to science Robert Birgeneau in the late quantifiable differences between the have a general advantage over females 1990s clearly did not diminish the uni- sexes, but intense debate surrounds in any of these core domains.” But in versity’s scientific reputation or power. which, if any, are relevant to the scarcity, older children they do, says Richard And I’ve seen firsthand the resulting the slow academic-career progress, and Haier (chapter 8), for there are “more scientific progress and development the “second-classness” of women in sci- boys than girls in the extraordinary of human capital from just one ence. If you enjoy multidisciplinary and range” of the SAT math test. However, ADVANCE award, which benefited emotive scientific debates—which are chime in Jerre Levy and Doreen Kimura more than four dozen senior chemists rare in physics—then The Science on (chapter 9), some crucial abilities (rea- and physicists. Another gripe with the Women and Science, edited by Christina soning) in mathematics favor males, book concerns a couple of simplistic Hoff Sommers, will be of interest to you. while others (computation) favor graphs that are meant to be illustrative Also rare in physics is a single-topic females. Depending on your views on but are instead misleading because they volume whose editor doesn’t agree gender and science, a given chapter will either improperly characterize the data with all the authors. The Science on offer either an infuriating refutation or that are being discussed or conflict with Women and Science grew out of a confer- a delightful confirmation. The mixture the author’s statements in the text. ence sponsored by the politically con- of evidence in this book might even Do these 10 chapters give a balanced servative American Enterprise Institute change your mind . but probably not, representation of our current state of as a reaction to findings reflected in the speculates Joshua Aronson (chapter 5). knowledge? It’s a tough question and National Academies’ 2007 report titled And so the debate continues: Simon requires evenhanded searching of the Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Baron-Cohen (chapter 1) argues that extensive literature. Why Aren’t More Potential of Women in Academic Science thanks to “liberal and fair-minded” Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate and Engineering. The report minimizes professors, academic misogyny is a the Evidence (American Psychological the role of biology and ventures that thing of the past, but men dominate sci- Association, 2006), edited by Stephen the root causes of gender bias in science ence because they tend to be natural Ceci and Wendy Williams, may have are psychosocial and can be fully “systemizers,” whereas women tend to achieved that remarkable balance. Also, addressed by educational and work- be “empathizers.” In his chapter, Aron- mainstream views that question the sig- place reforms. Those findings, as well son discusses the stereotype-threat the- nificance and immutability of brain- as actions such as the efforts to enforce ory, which posits that negative stereo- based sex differences are not well rep- Title IX—the US law that prevents types contribute to a particular group’s resented in The Science on Women and gender-based discrimination in educa- poor performance. By not overinter- Science. For those views, curious read- tional programs—are generally incon- preting those findings, he goes a good ers might want to peruse, for example, sistent with fundamental, socioeco- way toward deflecting criticism in the the forthcoming book on that subject by nomic beliefs held by scholars who are following chapter, in which Amy Wax Rebecca Jordan-Young of Barnard Col- for the free market and against govern- challenges his handling of stereotype- lege or works by Janet Hyde at the Uni- ment regulation. This book’s bent is to threat data and the degree to which versity of Wisconsin–Madison or Anne they explain the gender gap in scientific Fausto-Sterling of Brown University. Amy Bug is a professor in the department achievement. Charles Murray’s conclu- Though falling short of the synthetic of physics and astronomy at Swarthmore sion (chapter 10) goes where angels fear excellence of Ceci and Williams’s work, College in Pennsylvania. She conducts to tread and violates Sommers’s dictum The Science on Women and Science is rich research in computational condensed- that comparing sexual brain dimor- in data, descriptions of real-world matter physics, teaches across the physics phism research with its racial analogue reform efforts, and essays by acknowl- curriculum, and has taught a course called is inappropriate. If you want to read a edged experts. However, a few other- Gender and Physical Science. view that compares the resignation of wise strong chapters are weakened by This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to IP: © 2010 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-1009-240-9 September 2010 Physics Today 55 130.58.64.71 On: Mon, 04 May 2015 15:04:13 polemics. Scholars, whether on the of matter in various physical situations. post, which had right or the left of the political spec- Both authors are leaders in that domain. been vacant since trum, do not serve their cause by Going beyond the stability problem Ludwig Boltzmann preaching a loosely reasoned sermon to in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, moved back to his the choir. Although choir members will the authors also model the correspond - native Vienna in receive it with enthusiasm, guests in the ing quantum mechanical systems 1893. In the first congregation may not. with relativistic kinematics. Although quarter of the 20th only toy models, they are frequently century, Sommer- used for calculations of atomic and feld corresponded molecular energies. In relativistic quan- with the leading The Stability tum mechanics, a new feature occurs: physicists of the day, including Max of Matter The product of the charge of the Planck, Woldemar Voigt, and Albert nucleus and the fine structure constant Einstein. He also corresponded with the in Quantum must be bounded to ensure the finite- younger contemporary mathematical ness of the energy. The stability of large physicists, as theoretical physicists Mechanics systems also implies a bound on the were then usually called, including Elliott H. Lieb and fine structure constant, which charac- Max Born, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Robert Seiringer terizes the strength of the electromag- Schrödinger. Cambridge U. Press, New York, netic interaction. The authors also take In writing Crafting the Quantum: 2010. $50.00 (293 pp.). into account gravitational interactions, Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of The- ISBN 978-0-521-19118-0 in which can be seen an even more spec- ory, 1890–1926, Suman Seth has mined Why is the matter around us stable? By tacular result: Stars collapse under those correspondences extensively. A “stability” I am not simply referring to gravity, and their critical mass—above historian of 19th- and 20th-century the absolute limit on the amount of which they become unstable—depends physical science at Cornell University, energy of an atom; every student who on the gravitational constant. Seth traces Sommerfeld’s roots in has taken a quantum mechanics course The discussions of those and other applied mathematics, which led to his has solved the fundamental example of topics make the book a rich source for rise in theoretical physics.
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