Thank you, John Tierney! Through your efforts, essentialist thinking about gender and intelligence may keep its hold on Americans for a while longer.
Tierney suggests in today’s NY Times “Findings” column that we look with skepticism on a new Congressional proposal to require workshops on gender equity for all those receiving federal science research funding. The results of standardized tests, Tierney reports, have shown that sex differences are real, gosh darn it; researchers have proven that gender gaps among the best-performing math and science test-takers persist from year to year, from generation to generation…why do we insist on resisting the obvious scientific conclusion? Think of the time, trouble, and money we could save, in classrooms, labs, and HR departments, if we just accepted the biological fact of women’s innate science and math inability!
The column’s title alone, “Daring to Discuss the Potential of Women in Science” (my itals.), ensures that this sort of reductive understanding of learning and thinking (something in the brain, that mysterious quaking organ, makes math easy or hard for people!) will continue to be cast as a brave, selfless, anti-PC act of resistance against…against….Against what? The dangers of inclusive educational programming? Of erring on the side of equity? Of maximizing occupational opportunities for every American?
No wonder the column’s accompanying illustration is a kooky, retro collage of a pretty blond 1950s “sweater girl,” with gears on her mind and a scientific formula spilling from her lips….Gals in the lab?! Zany! Let the high-jinks begin!
I know, I know: sarcasm is petty and unattractive. So before I lose any remaining credibility, let me defer to Troy Duster’s brilliant historical discussion of biological understandings of intellectual capacity. For almost 20 years, editions of his book, Backdoor to Eugenics, have laid out the very worrisome political and cultural implications of our pursuit of biological bases for intellectual and behavioral differences.
Duster makes it clear that the questions we ask about what counts as aptitude, and the ways in which we measure intelligence, themselves hide the discriminatory social forces at work in our schools and workplaces. Where we look for inherited, biomedical, or other biological determinations of human aptitude to explain differences among groups, we will limit our scrutiny of social, economic and political causes behind discrepant educational or occupational attainments. In this way the perceived value of biological research on intelligence is self-reinforcing.
Sure, experimental research on the physiological or genetic endowments associated with cognitive traits seems more objective than study of vague, illusory “social forces” or “values” or “bias.” But ideology underlies that preference. As Pierre Bourdieu writes in his forward to the book’s 2003 edition,
Conservatism has always been linked to forms of thought that tend to reduce the social to the natural–the historical to the biological.
Tierney and the researchers he cites are no doubt concerned about the nature of women’s experiences in science, as they claim; after all, they are probing the matter, not ignoring it. But they don’t really seem interested in the depth and breadth of inquiry that scholars like Duster suggest…that is, in asking questions about their own questions. Those would be the truly daring discussions.