About a year ago I was asked to speak at a local women’s studies conference on mathematics, science and technology. I didn’t flatter myself at having been chosen, because nearly every local woman who was even vaguely involved with science or mathematics at a professional level had been invited to speak. Nevertheless, I had for some time been investigating female astronomers from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, so I volunteered to discuss my research.

What I had done was to read the diaries and correspondence of many female astronomers from the scientific revolution and to examine the written work of the people closest to them. The result of my research was a short paper entitled “Innovators or interpreters: the historic role of women in science.” From this anecdotal data, I concluded that, historically at least, successful women scientists tended to collaborate with a male partner or partners, usually a close relative. The astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), for example, worked with her brothers William and John.

I also found that, because women were not admitted to university or to any of the scientific societies, this relationship with male scientists tended to be of the utmost importance to them. The female partner in the collaboration was entirely dependent on the male for access to libraries and to current scientific thought. She would also rely on the male colleague to help her to disseminate her work.

Finally, social dictates of the period created an atmosphere outside the collaboration that was challenging, to say the least. Society in general frowned on women in science, and other non-scientific women were especially cutting. A woman who embarked on such a career did so at the peril of being considered unladylike, immodest or worse.

The problem is that the work of the female partner in such collaborations has often been more closely identified with the male colleague than with the woman, with the result that the women’s role in the partnership has been eclipsed. Worse, the female scientists themselves consistently downplayed their own accomplishments.

I therefore concluded that the male/female collaboration of the period was the saving grace for women in the sciences. It also forced modern women to be far too modest about their scientific achievements – something that is all too common, even now, as we enter the new millennium.

The feminist backlash

I didn’t think that my conclusions were particularly astonishing. So when the first wave of feminist reaction hit me, I was completely taken by surprise by the number and tone of e-mails from my female colleagues. Why wasn’t I more supportive of female physicists? Why did I assume that women only succeeded if they collaborated with men? What about mentoring younger women scientists: isn’t that working? And why did I cast women as their own worst enemies?

The real, unasked questions were even more insidious. Don’t you know who the real enemy was? Don’t you know who the real enemy is? Although I know what I am expected to say as a feminist – namely that men are entirely responsible for women’s lack of recognition and success in science – I am afraid that I just cannot agree.

Many efforts have been launched, in the US and elsewhere, to increase the number of women studying science at university. Others aim to raise the level of awareness of women’s accomplishments in physics. Some, like the effort by the University of California at Los Angeles to showcase 20th-century women in physics, are quite well done and thought-provoking. Its Women in Physics Web site reminds us that, while the number of women who are active in physics is still small, that percentage is increasing, and that women are doing important work in the field. Teachers can use the site to find women who have been overlooked (even in modern textbooks) and then present them and their achievements in the classroom.

However, these well-meaning attempts are often frustrated by the reality of the numbers game. No-one disputes the fact that far more men work in physics, mathematics and engineering than women. All of the department-shuffling in the world cannot alter the fact that, in spite of the best recruitment efforts in my own department – and in countless other physics and astronomy departments around the world – there is often only one female member of staff. The reason is not, as my sisters in science argue, because men are the natural enemy of women. There are simply not enough women with the right skills, especially in mathematical proficiency, who are interested in entering the field.

Into the classroom

Seven years ago I undertook a study in the US with Pamela Lanaro, an education specialist from the Northern California Education Foundation, who was convinced that the problem began at an early age. It is well known that up to the age of 12 or 13, girls and boys do equally well in maths and science, whether or not they study in single-sex or mixed classes. In fact, girls even appear to have a slight edge over boys.

According to the prevailing wisdom at the time of our study in 1993, it was believed that girls were somehow socialized to defer to boys, with the tacit encouragement of teachers, who favoured boys over girls. At middle-school level, when pupils are aged between 10 and 14, so the argument went, the impact on girls finally catalyses and girls give up. To test this belief we developed several exercises that were designed to demonstrate various abstract concepts in physics. We then tested how well the boys and girls in a mixed middle-school science class understood these concepts when they studied together, and compared the results with another group that had been split into boys-only and girls-only classes.

We expected to see a significant improvement in the performance of the segregated girls’ class, and just a moderate difference in the performance of the other mixed and the boys-only class. What we saw instead was surprising. The performance of the integrated class improved (girls and boys alike), as did the boys’ class. However, the segregated girls’ class did not show any marked improvement at all. From my anecdotal observations I knew why. The girls – unlike the boys alone or the boy-girl partnerships – were constantly trying to find consensus. It did not matter to the girls if the answer was right or wrong; the important thing was that everyone agreed on the conclusion. They were afraid to argue with one another.

We were stunned. Most other studies at that time had shown that girls tended to do better in single-sex classes. The only major difference between our study and the others was that we had been working with a slightly younger group of girls and in a relatively large class. When Lanaro’s subsequent studies produced similar data, we were left asking ourselves if sociological or biological factors affected girls’ leap to abstraction. There is evidence that the answer is: “a little of both”. Whereas boys at that age are making strides to stand out – in keeping with the biological and evolutionary imperative – girls are doing just the opposite and for the same reasons. For women there is safety in numbers, and bucking that trend, in nature, is courting disaster.

Timing may also have played a major role for the girls in our study. Our 12- and 13-year-old seventh graders were all within a year or so of the onset of puberty, and the biological and emotional changes that take place at that time are well documented. Unfortunately for girls, the onset of puberty coincides with the cognitive stage of human development at which abstract reasoning becomes possible. Boys, on the other hand, get a couple of years of blissful ignorance before puberty rears its ugly head, which may give them the “edge” that we see in late middle school and high school. It may be that many girls cannot cope with these overwhelming biological, sociological and intellectual challenges simultaneously.

Understanding the problem is one thing; knowing what to do to correct it is another. We recommended that children should begin to receive algebraic concepts in concrete form and be taught mathematical modelling at much earlier ages, suggestions that are currently being considered for inclusion in the curriculum for fifth-year pupils in California. It will be several years before we know if the jump-start programme increases the number of women entering mathematics and science, but we have some hopes in that regard.

Collaborate and succeed

The truly interesting thing from our study, I found, wasn’t in the test group at all. It was in the control group where boys and girls studied together, and it shed light on the dynamic nature of male-female collaborations. The girls in our control group, each of whom was made to partner a boy, improved their performance at more or less the same rate as the boys. When I went back to look at the performances of each of the partnerships, I saw, for the most part, little discrepancy between them. For some reason, each person in the partnership challenged the other – and both benefited.

I see this as being positive. Perhaps I am a little biased, because I am in a long-term male-female collaboration with my research partner and co-author David Madore. For the past two-and-a-half years we have been studying various apparent anomalies and symmetries in special relativity (see xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0001123). During that time, as with any close partnership, there have been times when we wanted to kill each other and occasions when we pushed each other so far away from accepted thought that we ultimately had to retreat, but we never, ever settled for the mediocrity of consensus.

Physics isn’t a search for consensus; it is a search for truth. When the truth sometimes contradicts the long-held consensus – as both my recent work with Madore and my earlier work with Lanaro show – the researchers have to challenge each other not to fall back into the comfortable. Similarly, while Newton’s work provided the fundamentals for all known physics, by the middle of the 19th century it was apparent that Newtonian mechanics was not the last word. Newton, however, was comfortable; Maxwell was not, which meant that the essential truth of the Maxwell equations was systematically overlooked for almost 50 years. Working on the edge of known truth is not a comfortable place to be. To work through it, and arrive at whatever new truth is there, a dynamic collaboration is necessary.

Whatever the gender make-up of the partnership, the important thing is for all members within it to challenge one another actively and constructively. Women may have an added burden. Although our evolutionary background encourages us to concede, to agree and to create consensus, our duty as physicists is to challenge known thought and to arrive at new and unimagined truth. We also have a higher duty, as humans speaking for humanity, not to hide behind our feminine modesty but to tell the world what that new truth is.

The key to this is collaboration. We must create collaborations that will challenge not only our own abilities and sensibilities, but also those of the scientific community and the world at large.

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