Women in Science Report

This article from the New York Times is so biased as to be unbelievable. It's about a study from the National Academy of Sciences that concludes there's too much bias in the scientific community for women to succeed. Now if that isn't hogwash, I don't know what is.

I won't comment on the fact that all but one person on the 18-member panel (that's 18, mind you) were women. Imagine such a panel of men finding that the scientific community is biased against men, you'd hear howling of prejudice claims from all corners. No, I won't comment about that.

I will comment that while I was in undergraduate school and then graduate school for 6-1/2 years (Master's and Ph. D.) women got special attention. They were held to lower standards than the men, not always, but sometimes. Plus, when it came time to look for a job, colleges heavily recruited every woman but didn't recruit men much at all. If there was bias, it was directly against men and in favor of women.

And here's more, women who go into academia are then gagainst iven special grants and financial support exclusively for women. How is that bias against women?

The truth is that science is difficult. It's difficult work, difficult to find funding, difficult to balance the demands of a job with a family, and difficult to keep at it, year after year. If the Nataional Academy of Sciences wants to know why more women aren't in science, they should look at social demands, not the environment of the scientific community.