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from the March 2005 AN The Scientific Gender Gap Should Be Understood Comparatively Carol Mukhopadhyay
Current research on cognition reveals the powerful role cultural models play in everyday reasoning, whether by ordinary folk, experts or college presidents. The recent comments of Harvard President Summers, billed as a “provocative” challenge to accepted dogma, instead invoke cultural themes that have long permeated American theorizing about gendered science. One is the biologically-rooted “intellectual superiority” of males, an essentialist theory that goes back at least 150 years. Another is the idea of “math as a masculine domain” and the crucial filter for females. Less commented upon is the individualistic, psychological, internal barrier, “self-selection” orientation of contemporary American theorizing. In an article published in the December issue of Ethos, I cast a critical anthropological eye on all these theories, challenging their universality by arguing they are not applicable to other cultural settings such as India, nor are they adequate in fully understanding the scientific gap in America. Rather, I contend such theories embody deeper, long-standing and questionable cultural assumptions about educational achievement, occupational choices, psychological development and human capacities, demanding more critical scrutiny. Drawing upon ethnographic and questionnaire data from four urban areas in India, I took a comparative look at the scientific gender gap, noting that at first glance, college science enrollments look similar for the US and India, with Indian women most underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering. In 1995, for example, Indian women comprised about 30% of all science students and barely 15% of engineering and polytechnic students in India. Yet, this scientific gender gap, which, on the surface, looks similar to that in the US, is actually produced by features of Indian culture, particularly a patrifocal family system, that interact with Indian educational, economic and occupational structures, such as the desirability, competitiveness and “costs” of science degrees. Social Context is Important Patrifocal family cultural models, then, educationally favor boys over girls and more so in desirable, competitive fields like science and engineering, where family investments are greatest and social dangers to females highest. Economic considerations affect all children but within the same family limit girls more than boys. And while boys’ academic success in science and engineering enhances their marriage prospects, for girls their families must weigh potential benefits against increased risks. Nevertheless, there are countervailing pressures for girls’ education in science and engineering, particularly among families who can afford college for all children or have only daughters. For these families, science degrees increase “earning potential,” can make a girl more marriageable, offset or lower dowry demands, or reduce pressure to marry; they also can bring prestige to the family and provide support for siblings or other family members, even after marriage. For well-off, urban, education-oriented and non-orthodox families, the benefits of girls’ science degrees increasingly outweigh potential social costs, as apparent in recent educational statistics. Such data challenge the universality of American beliefs about female intellectual inferiority and of gendered academic achievement as rooted in internal, individual biological or psychological deficits. Such explanations are virtually absent from the Indian accounts I heard during my ethnographic research. My Indian expert consultants reject American notions of gendered brains, of mathematics as inherently “masculine” and cannot understand why American girls fear academic success or experience gender identity conflicts from excelling in mathematics. They counter with stories of female mathematicians in Indian history, the well-known predominance of high-scoring girls in statewide math exams and in graduate math programs at prestigious institutions. Alternative Cultural Models
In India, mathematics is crucial for academic success and for high-ranked academic fields, even non-math fields like medicine. But in the Indian context, mathematics is socially inappropriate for some girls because of its linkages to socially inappropriate (or irrelevant) academic fields, occupations and future goals. Mathematics is a non-gendered means to a social end that is gendered. Such comparative research raises questions about the applicability of American theories to the scientific gender gap in the US. It suggests that these applications are mired in taken-for-granted American cultural models of gender and causality that prevent us from seeing alternative theories. American expert models, for example, are virtually devoid of social context. Individuals appear to select activities, academic subjects and occupations in a social void, in a world of infinite choices, constrained only by one’s natural (or in feminist accounts, socially acquired) abilities, pre-dispositions and personal preferences. Absent are economic or social constraints, social groups within which choices are made and social purposes for which activities are performed. Clearly there is an important role for anthropological, cross-cultural data in advancing gender theory and our understanding of the scientific gender gap. Systematic research not only can generate alternative theories applicable to settings outside the US, but it can force us to critically examine American expert and popular American cultural models that have for too long dominated American discourses about gender. Carol Mukhopadhyay is a professor of anthropology at San Jose State. This commentary is based on her research on the scientific gender gap in the US and India published in “A Feminist Cognitive Anthropology: The Case of Women and Mathematics,” Ethos 32(4): 458-492. |
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