There’s an article in the SF Chronicle today about a transgender professor who’s writing about sexist bias, particularly in the sciences:
As an Ivy League-trained neurobiologist who oversees a research lab at Stanford, Ben Barres feels qualified to comment on whether nature or nurture explains the persistent gender gap in the scientific community.
But it wasn’t just his medical degree from Dartmouth, his Ph.D from Harvard and his studies on brain development and regeneration that inspired him to write an article blaming the shortage of female scientists on institutional bias.
Rather, it was that for most of his academic life, the 51-year-old professor who now wears a beard was once known as Dr. Barbara Barres, a woman who excelled in math and science.
“I have this perspective,” said Barres, who switched sexes when he started taking hormones in 1997. “I’ve lived in the shoes of a woman and I’ve lived in the shoes of a man. It’s caused me to reflect on the barriers women face.”
I’ve heard of–and to some extent experienced–changes in people’s perceptions upon changing sex. “People assume I’m competent now,” as one person put it. Kate Bornstein described a steep drop-off in job opportunities in Gender Outlaw; Julia Serano describes being treated like, well, a child. It can be difficult to track these changes from the inside, particularly if you’re gaining privilege. It might not occur to you that the job you’ve just received is one that you might not have been offered if you were still presenting as female. There are also components of male privilege that are affected by masculine presentation. Nevertheless, passing as male has shielded me from sexism in many situations. I’ll probably notice the difference much more as I go on to search for jobs and apply to academic programs.
I’m glad Barres is speaking up about the problem, and I’m glad that he can provide a very good example of sexist treatment, but I wish that his perspective weren’t privileged because he’s lived on both sides of the fence. Women are perfectly capable of perceiving sexism even when they don’t subsequently experience male privilege; it’s not difficult to notice that the guy sitting at the desk across the hall is advancing more quickly than you are. The story he tells here:
In his article, Barres offers several personal anecdotes from both sides of the gender divide to prove his own hypothesis that prejudice plays a much bigger role than genes in preventing women from reaching their potential on university campuses and in government laboratories.
The one that rankles him most dates from his undergraduate days at MIT, where as a young woman in a class dominated by men he was the only student to solve a complicated math problem. The professor responded that a boyfriend must have done the work for her, according to Barres.
Barres makes a point of saying that he never felt mistreated or held back as a female scientist. At the same time, he wonders if his personal experience somehow shielded him from the more insidious effects of gender bias.
“I wasn’t subject to the same stereotype threat because I never identified with women when I was growing up,” he said. “In a way that was one of the lucky things for me about being transgender.”
…could be one of my mothers’. Given the classroom treatment he describes, I don’t understand the distinction he’s drawing between being held back as a female scientist and being held back as an aspiring female scientist. School is where you go to make the connections that will make your career. It is interesting that he sees transgender identity as having protected him from internalized sexism; I can’t say that it accomplished that for me, but it may well allow transmen to reject the idea that they are inferior.
Anyhow, it’s an interesting article.
Men, Generally speaking are taller than women.
You can produce a really short man or really tall women…and yet.
Men, Generally speaking are taller than women.
“….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”
B.S. – Men (generally speaking) across a bell curve have higher spatial reasoning capacity.
The tail ends of the curve are much longer for males, and shorter for females.
(i.e. – less Math geniuses)
Larry Summers was hung out to dry by Feminists.
Men and Women may or may not be better at math and science on average. (that we can argue)
The one point that is unarguable is: that in today’s University environments you cannot assert innate differences between men & women. (Without being attacked by the wild hyenas of the feminist left)
When their done passing out over the mere mention of it.
A generalization serves very little purpose in assessing the strengths of an individual. I’m five-foot-ten. My sister is more than six feet tall. My mother, a brilliant psychologist, is also six feet tall.
“A generalization serves very little purpose in assessing the strengths of an individual.”
But they are indispensable when discussing the differences among groups.
Fitz:
Even if this is true, it’s very hard to separate the biological truth from social conditioning. If women are treated different in math/science/etc. during school, it’s likely that they aren’t going to do as well on tests. If other people percieve that they’re incapable of math or science, many women may internalize that.
Piny:
I think there is a certain benefit – not necessarily privilege – to having been both a male and female when exploring issues of sexism and gender bias. When one is simply observing “the guy sitting at the desk across the hall,” it can be hard (in some cases!) to separate the gender bias from other circumstances. Dr. Barres’ perspective is useful because he has experienced radically different treatment despite the fact that nothing else about him has changed. This is a glaring example of inequality and is absolutely incontrovertible truth of a gender bias. There’s no way to write this one off as anything but sexism, and in the struggle for equality it’s useful to have as many cut-and-dried cases as you can get your hands on.
I think that might just be a really simple thing: I’m not going to slam the people I worked with when I was an adult scientist (that I still know/work with/am friends with) but here’s what it was like with more anonymous folks; you do the math.
I’m guessing his personal experience didn’t allow him to see the more insidious effects of gender bias – making him no different from the majority of men and women.
Telling a female student that her boyfriend must have done her homework is not insidious. It’s blatent. That type of blatent behavior is obvious to almost everyone and is fairly rare these days. The insidious behavior is when the male group members invite the new guy to lunch and continue to ignore the woman who has been working there all year. It’s when the male students discuss the homework with each other but not with the women. It’s when the only women the men do make an effort to include are the hot women. It’s the men and women both thinking there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all these things and not once questioning why it is that these exclusionary experiences are universal for women but rare for men.
Is it just me, or is Fitz’s tone getting more and more hysterical?
I agree that there is a contradiction between the MIT story and this quote:
I don’t know if it is true in this case….but, I know some people that would say this in a public forum but would say something very different in private. Usually because former/current colleagues, managers, peers, etc. still have a direct impact on on their lives and they don’t want to take any chances.
If you can read Barres’ Nature article it is awsome.
From the Nature article….
“Mansfield and others claim that women are more emotional than men. There is absolutely no science to support this contention. On the contrary, it is men that commit the most violent crimes in anger — for example, 25 times more murders than women. The only hysteria that exceeded MIT professor Nancy Hopkins’ (well-founded) outrage after Larry Summers’ comments was the shockingly vicious news coverage by male reporters and commentators. Hopkins also received hundreds of hateful and even pornographic messages, nearly all from men, that were all highly emotional.”
“In my view, when faculty tell their students that they are innately inferior based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, they are crossing a line that should not be crossed — the line that divides free speech from verbal violence — and it should not be tolerated at Harvard or anywhere else. In a culture where women’s abilities are not respected, women cannot effectively learn, advance, lead or participate in society in a fulfilling way.”
Thank you so much! And Hell Yes! This article pulls no punches, and it’s about damn time. This innateness crap is untrue and unethical, and untrue. As a female scientist I’ve had to listen to similar bullshit and I’ve always called it, but it can be a tiring road. I am so glad to se someone else stand up and fight with fire. There are some great graphs in the Nature article too, nothing brings it home like a graph. It’s time for this bullshit to die, noone thinks the sun revolves around the earth so why should I have to put up with summers-like dumbasses?
Another Nature article quote
“Shortly after I changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”
Blatant sexism. Amazing.
I’d jus like to add that possibly since Barres went ahead and got tenure and was thus successful he didn’t feel held back, even though there was significant buttshit along the way. I wouldn’t characterize myself as being held back becuae I got a PhD and a postdoc, and am thus successful but I did have to hear a lot of bullshit. It could be that it would have been easier for me, I might have gotten more job offers etc but I don’t know that bc I have nothing to compare it to, also my research group doesn’t graduate tons of people a year so I can compare expereinces that well.
I remember when I first transitioned from male to female so many years ago: I was left with the distinct impression that people were treating me like a child. Men were far worse in this respect than women, although some women tended to treat me like a child as well. It was a really weird sensation and frighteningly enough, I stopped noticing the severity of this change over time. I just grew accustomed to it, and plodded onward.
However, I still notice this child-like treatment when I’m interacting with men on the topic of technology. For instance, I can’t count the number of times I’ve left small computer stores fuming over the disrespectful treatment I’ve received at the hands of male clerks. I rarely received this kind of treatment as a guy. These days, I restrict my technical purchases to on-line shopping or to the impersonal touch of large, corporate stores. The service is generally sub-par, but the lucky side effect of crappy service is that I can avoid interacting with sexist jerks while I’m shopping. I get ignored for the most part, and that’s preferable to the treatment I receive at smaller stores.
I wish that his perspective weren’t privileged because he’s lived on both sides of the fence.
Remember John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me? I read it, oh, early high school? Something like then. I read it and felt pretty much what I was s’posed to feel, and than a year or five later I thought about the book again and thought that it was a really weird, involuted, and convoluted sort of thing. Then again, if you want more than witnessing, that’s about as close to scientific as social science gets, absent only a larger sample. Then again again, WTF? Did anyone seriously doubt what they’d been hearing from African Americans all those years? Then again again again, you want to have something the racists can’t refute… etc.
Yeah, this is something like that.
Just by the way, isn’t it interesting that Griffin started that book two years after regaining his sight after a decade of literal blindness?
You know, it’s interesting, StacyM, but not surprising: I got very similar treatment in academia, while partway into transition.
I would go to a class with people who knew me and my capabilities well, and who might have even dealt with me as a man the day before, treating me like an idiot. I started keeping track, and on a day where I presented female, the number of times I got interrupted midsentence, my point was ignored until a man restated it, etc., went through the ceiling. People who would treat my arguments with respect on Monday, when I dressed androgynously, would laugh the same ones off on Tuesday, when I was in a skirt. Monday I’d be told, “That was a good point you made.” Tuesday I’d be told, “You look nice today.” On every count, down to people’s tone of voice, treatment changed.
Even when I was making feminism-based points in classes emphasizing gender studies, I’d find that all I had to do to get people to nod along with what I was saying was deepen my speaking voice, and the best way to get shrugged off or considered irrational was to put on a little eyeliner.
I hear you, little light. I often have to make a conscious decision to let go of people’s sexist treatment just to avoid being angry 24/7.
Also, it’s been so long since I transitioned that I have to think long and hard about what things were like before. I suspect that I experience crappy treatment from people that I no longer notice. That’s kind of scary. Sexism is so, so common place, that people look past it as though it weren’t there. If you spend your whole life—or in the case of transpeople, many years of one’s life—experiencing sexist treatment, much of that behavior is rendered invisible.
On a somewhat different topic: when I encounter people like Fitz, I look at my own experiences and just roll my eyes at them. I’m not about to enforce the status quo with convenient biological explanations. There’s a whole world of unchallenged sexist behavior out there that shapes and divides us—every day of the week, every month of the year. The same can be said of homophobia, racism, classism and any number of common prejudices.
I wish the SF Chron author would have explained what Barres was talking about when he mentioned stereotype threat. That’s the idea that members of a group about which there is a particular stereotype are often afraid of confirming that stereotype, to the point where it can effect performance. For example, women’s performance on math exams can be negatively affected by a reminder of the stereotype. Toni Schmader, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who bases much of her work on this concept, did a study a while ago that suggested that the role the stereotype threat plays in women’s math performance varies by how strongly the particular woman identifies as a woman (and how strongly she believes in the stereotype, but that’s another discussion). Barres seems to be an example of that phenomenon. Schmader’s info.
Just seems like the writer missed an opportunity there to help translate Barres’ explanation of his experience.