I am all for hiring more female professors, congressmen, and senators. What I would really like to see is a female president.

It’s always difficult to understand why more women going into the science field is better for the future of science. For a start, we can more or less agree that today we have pretty advanced state of science, at least compared to hundreds (or thousands) years ago, or even compared to an animal kingdom. And ALL these scientific and technological advances have been made by MEN, without a single EXCEPTION. In other words, women haven’t contributed to a single bit to today’s complex science. And now people pretend that increasing women in the ranks of scientists is the single most urgent issue for the future of science. Remind you, women has 0% track record in the science field, but we want to do whatever we could do to increase their number, and reduce the number of men in the field who are responsible for all the advances made in this field in the first place. Is there something wrong here? How we could arrive at such twisted conclusion?

“More female science professor/teacher are needed if women are to get better grades in science.” What a self-serving non-sense.

The fact that female teacher/professor have a tendency to be show more ‘empathy” (as we all know women genetically have plenty of it) towards the student who belong to the same sex, is actually an argument against affirmative action programme for female science teacher/professor. It is abundantly clear that female professors are not capable of evaluating students' grades impartially, it's just that hormones intereferring with objective judgement.

And oh, yes, female students (or female cadets) are too timid and shy to show their true talent in science if their professor were men, ar at least not feminist men. And we want these young female cadets to be the future leader of US armed forces. Joke never ends.

And please, please, for the love of God, don’t tell me that the one of the criteria (or the ONLY criteria) for the outgoing female Xerox CEO in choosing her successor wasn’t a gender. It is the most blatant case of appointing people to senior position based solely on gender. I've never seen a more explicit case of affirmative action at the top level of Fortune 500 companies, and for that reason, I agree with the author that this one os for the record book.

By the way, why my previous post was deleted???

Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Mary Leakey, Margaret Mead. Help me out, people. There are a lot of women who made significant contributions to science.

Women have not contributed to complex science?? I guess the structure of DNA is "simple science" Surely you are not maintaining that the contribution of Roslyn Franklin and the elucidation of the structure of DNA in the 50s has not REVOLUTIONIZED modern biological science.

And she is just one example

Dr. Franklin did some very good x ray crystallography of DNA. However, it took Watson and Crick (who mostly just hung out in the break room drinking tea) to interpret the results and figure out what it meant. They even offered to bring Dr. Franklin in on their paper; she couldn't recognize the genius of their interpretation, even when laid out in front of her. Hard work is great, but nothing trumps genius in science.

Women haven't been doing science for nearly as long as men have, thus the only female names that spring to mind are Dr. Curie et al. However, there are currently many female profs making great contributions was will likely one day be recognized. I say this because the biology courses I took in undergrad were about 70% female--- and that was four years ago. the trend continued in my grad chem classes. The only class where the ratios were reversed were the upper level physics courses I took for fun (a chemist can never know too much physics!). I never had any issues with this, and in fact met current boyfriend in a sophmore level physics class. Perhaps this is due to my being willing to embrass myself in front of the prof in the pursuit of knowlage. My lab partner in organic chem (a girl) was unwilling to talk to the prof even one-on-one, and certianly never raised her hand in lecture (she made me ask all the questions, since I never minded making a fool of myself).

While it is true that there are more men with a "genius-level" IQ (~140 and up, I think), there are more women than men with what I'll call a "smarty-pants" IQ (120 - 140). Sciene, particularly in biology and medicine (although I hesitate to call medicine a science), needs these middle-level smart folks more than it needs the heads-in-the-clouds, Einstein-level geniuses who do no tend to do well in the lab (in fact it is usually contidered unlucky to have a theorist in the lab while you are running an experiment. I think this is due to have simple fact that they tend to have lower hand to eye coordination and will break the glassware.

While it is true that there are more men with a "genius-level" IQ (~140 and up, I think), there are more women than men with what I'll call a "smarty-pants" IQ (120 - 140). Sciene, particularly in biology and medicine (although I hesitate to call medicine a science), needs these middle-level smart folks more than it needs the heads-in-the-clouds, Einstein-level geniuses who do no tend to do well in the lab...

Your suggestion is: A) Men in biology tend to be genius level intelligence B) Women in biology tend to be simply above average intelligence C) Above average intelligence makes a better biologist than genius level intelligence. The obvious conclusion from this rediculous syllogism is that women make better biologists. How is this implication different than people who make the opposite insinuation, that men make better scientists? Aren't you simply engaging in the same sort of prejudice and sexism?

I hesitate to call medicine a science

There are those in medicine who hesitate to call people with PhDs real doctors, you share with them a level of pretention which makes the rest of us not want to hang out with you twits.

You raise some interesting (non-PC!) points, but undermine yourself by exaggerating, and by not considering counter-arguments.

For example, "women haven’t contributed to a single bit to today’s complex science." (sic) Not to be rude, but that is just bone-headed. You should have said, "women have not so far contributed much to science, in comparison to the contributions of men." That statement is much more defensible. But what about the obvious counterarguments? That, until recently, women have not been allowed to contribute? You don't deal with that at all. Also, one could easily counter-argue that we might have done TWICE as well if we had drawn from 100% of the population instead of just 50%. You don't have any answer for that, either.

So, your post gets dismissed as a bigot's rant.

Your suggestion is: A) Men in biology tend to be genius level intelligence B) Women in biology tend to be simply above average intelligence C) Above average intelligence makes a better biologist than genius level intelligence. The obvious conclusion from this rediculous syllogism is that women make better biologists. How is this implication different than people who make the opposite insinuation, that men make better scientists? Aren't you simply engaging in the same sort of prejudice and sexism?

A) I was not addressing any particular discipline, but there were quite a bit more girls in my bio classes than there were in my physics classes. There just just a post about the IQ bell curve that you may want to look at. That being said, IQ is likely not the best way to measure intelligence. B) The biologists I know tend to have middling intelligence for math but very, very good lab skills. C) I suppose you could state it like that, yes. Biology is still not a fully developed science like math or physics because humans have not been doing it as long, and only just now are we starting to fully understand the richness and complexity of biology. Chemistry is about halfway between bio and physics.

There are those in medicine who hesitate to call people with PhDs real doctors, you share with them a level of pretention which makes the rest of us not want to hang out with you twits.

NO. Medicine is not an experimental science, it is a service industry that uses the results of experimental science. You would not want your medical doctor to do experiments on you. The FDA has all kinds of rules about that. All the MDs I've talked to agree with me, as well as the premeds who were my friends and the premeds I taught.

Medicine is not an experimental science

Ha ha hahha haha... In rating yourself at an IQ of 120 you give yourself way too much credit. Physicians are scientists. No one can conduct research on humans in the US without physician oversight. Physicians are unique among scientists in that their experiments must have a reasonable expectation of helping, or at least not harming, research participants; and they are the only one group of scientists sworn to uphold a standard of ethical principles and who must be licensed by the state in order to conduct research. Clinical experience, which a physician builds over the course of a lifetime, is nothing more or less than hypothesis testing, treating each patient as an independant trial. Of course physicians are scientists. (In fact much of modern biology was created by physicians... Koch, of "Koch's postulates" immediately comes to mind, as does Dr. John Snow, the London anesthesiologist who created epidemiology and biostatistics in response to a tasking from the Queen; also more evidence as to the importance of genius).

In rating yourself at an IQ of 120 you give yourself way too much credit.

Well, the journals in which I publish (ACS, JMB) seem to be ok with me...

Physicians are scientists. No one can conduct research on humans in the US without physician oversight.

Yes, and any "experiments" done on human must be tested on animal models first (there are strict rules about animal research as well, of course). I guess we are getting into an argument over what "real" science is, with the chemists says biology is not, the physicists saying chemistry is not, and the mathematicians laughing at us all. I'm inclined toward the viewpoint that physicians should be focused on patient care- which is an important service. Keeping updated about the latest discoveries is important, and of course requires being literate in science in order to determine if the results are to believed. But the (modern!) drugs they perscribe are for the most part discovered by biochemists working with organic chemists and cell biologists, which are then tested on animal models, and only then may proceed to the clinical trials in humans which are indeed overseen by an MD.

Also, your reference to Dr. Koch is interesting (I used to work in a TB drug discovery lab), however back when he was working (the late 1800s) MDs had a bit more leeway to work with (many feilds like microbiology were still in their infancy), and were indeed expected to branch out. Now it seems like everyone must overspecialize. I would hope that the MD perscibing me something knows the chemical structure, mechanism of action on the target, and solubilty/pharmacokinetics of the drug but I have found this to not always be the case. However, they are usually well versed in the side effects and interactions with other drugs, with is quite a bit to know in and of itself.