“Why Aren’t More Women in Science?” explores fairness and the fairer sex

Why Aren’t More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence—it’s a really great question and a really great title for a book in which “top researchers debate the evidence.” Two editors, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, compiled 15 very different essays, wherein authors attempted to sort fact from fiction in discussing just this dilemma.

I must admit, I personally wanted to know why there were so few women in the science industry. Although this book doesn’t answer the question definitively, it does address, with currently existing information, an unbiased consideration of the problem in thoughtful, articulated strokes presenting documented evidence—hard numbers, in other words—and an evaluation of the documented sources.

To a large extent, science drives our lives. The consumer products that we use every day—from telephones to computers, from medicine to traversed roads—require a core of people who understand the basics of science. Implementation, research, and development demand vision, drive, and the underlying skills in order create and build products and services. There are fewer women in the scientific fields even despite the awareness that technology is a prime force within in our lives. Many aspects including innate abilities, environment, heredity, sex difference, talent, and social expectations are critically examined in this book in an attempt to understand the “why” of so few women in the science industry.

The geek in me loved this book because it revealed so many avenues of exploration and so much analysis of pertinent and timely data. As the editors point out in their conclusions, ”the way many of the arguments are framed makes it difficult to pit one type of evidence against another. Often, all sides in the debate draw on the very same evidence but interpret it differently.” Indeed, it is so, and the old arguments remain in place, with such books as this one carefully and fairly exploring and challenging old questions and old assumptions. The fact that the question is seriously framed at all indicates an awareness of a stereotype situation within our society.