Another reason that women aren’t commonly found in science is one that is really difficult to overcome. It’s not sexism. There’s no government program that can fix the problem. There’s no amount of social pressure that can ease it. You can shove a million girls into science and math education and you’re still not going to come out with a 50/50 mix in the scientist gender pool unless you start killing a lot of men.
The reason is temperament. As in the kinds outlined by Myers-Briggs. There are sixteen personality types and four temperaments. The four temperaments are SF, SP, NF, and NT. People who go on to become scientists will generally be of the NT temperament with the odd ball from one of the other three thrown in there (usually an ISTP or ISTJ). Now, out of these four temperaments, NT is the rarest in the general populace. It’s the second rarest for men and the rarest for women. Additionally, not all NTs are going to be interested in science and math. A good many will be interested in other things like law, writing, language, history, computers, etc.
NTs are called the “Rationals” because well…we are. I speak now as one of those rare evil unicorns (a female INTJ). We’re not touchy-feely. We don’t care how something makes you feel. We don’t care if it hurts your feelings or makes you unhappy. Your emotions are completely irrelevant unless, for some reason, we’re trying to subject them to testing or modification (like if we were testing psychiatric drugs). We’re not out to deliberately make you feel bad but we’re not going to sugarcoat things and if you can’t keep up with us, well, that’s your problem. Not ours. For those of us who have survived to adulthood and are at peace with being NTs (especially us INTs), we honestly couldn’t care less about the “in” crowd or what anyone outside of our extremely small circles of acquaintance — friends — family “feels” about anything.
That, of course, is part of why we’re drawn to science and research or other cerebral areas like law or writing. Even those of us who don’t go on to become scientists tend to appreciate the field and keep track of research that interests us. Science fits nicely in with how our minds work. It’s abstract. It requires careful thought. It seeks to tease meaning out of what seems, to most people, to be random noise in nature. It’s about looking beyond the surface and figuring out the deeper meaning of things. It’s something you can do on your own. Science doesn’t care about who has the fanciest title. It doesn’t care about who’s the oldest, the youngest, who went to the “best” schools, whose father is related to someone important, or if you look like a runway model or a run-over armadillo. None of that matters in science. The only thing that matters is the continual search for the answer to the greatest question ever asked: “Why?”
The most famous scientists in history weren’t part of a “team.” They were individuals working on their own. They communicated mostly with other like-minded sorts. They didn’t check opinion polls. They didn’t listen to tavern gossip. They couldn’t have told you if a woman’s dress was from Paris or London or one of the Jovian moons. And they gave us things like the Laws of Motion. Perturbation theory. The law of gravity. The theory of evolution by natural selection. Calculus. Geometry. Telescopes. Genetics. AC power transmission. They bequeathed to us the modern world and all of the mini-miracles we up-jumped hairless great apes take for granted every day. They gave us the tools to survive and thrive. And, for the most part, the non-Rationals have treated these great personages like crap. Many of them died penniless.
Now, set aside thoughts of utility, prestige, success, wealth, or recognition of any sort. How many of you can confirm that you are non-Rationals (having a non-NT temperament) and would be perfectly happy sitting alone in your office doing nothing but reading technical books and developing theories with nothing more than your brain (no computer simulations)? How many of you would be perfectly happy to stand in front of a whiteboard with a marker and run through decades’ worth of accumulated knowledge to try to tease out an equation that would define how silicon-based proteins might fold? How many of you would be content to sit in a legal library working on a treatise about the evolution of marriage as a legal institution?
Remember, you’re doing this alone. You don’t work with other people. You’re not soliciting opinions. You’re not even really interested in finding out what anyone thinks about what you’re doing. You’re working your ass off out of pure curiosity. You might never accomplish anything. Your work might sit on a shelf for five hundred years, unread. You might die poor and friendless, your passing noted by nothing more than a hasty engraving of your name, date of birth, and date of death on a charity marker. You’re not guaranteed anything — money, success, status, respect.
Nine out of ten of you will not be interested in this at all. You’d want something practical. Or concrete. Or that let you work with people. Or that involved something physically tangible. And that’s fine. But that means that you’d make mediocre scientists at best. You haven’t got the makings of an Einstein or Newton in you. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Out of the one of you left, for every three of you, one will be a woman. It’s not because women can’t do the things that men do in science — it’s because most men can’t do the things that scientists do and it just happens that, by nature, there tend to be a few more men who can do it than there are women.
And, none of those women is going to give a damn what shirt some guy was wearing. They’ll care more about that guy landing a probe that is sending back valuable information on a comet. They’ll wonder if they could get a probe on another comet and if it would be shorter to do that in order to get information on Kuiper Belt Objects than to wait for Voyager (or a similar probe) to get out there. Pictures on a shirt won’t interest them at all because they have their minds set on more interesting and enduring matters instead of that petty kind of gossip columnist tripe.
— G.K.
Ok, this is both awesome, and accurate.
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