Hopkins, an MIT professor, walked out when the president of Harvard implied that women scientists were innately less talented than male ones. Now, the Nobel Prizes give her the last laugh.

It’s been a spectacular week for women in science, and a bad week for “the Larry Summers hypothesis.” In 2005, while president of Harvard, he suggested that women are inherently worse than men at math, science and engineering, particularly at the highest levels. This week three women won Nobel prizes in science: two in medicine and one in chemistry. That achievement should put the nail in the coffin of the question Summers raised: Can many women really be great scientists?

When I was a graduate student in biology at Harvard 40 years ago, my colleagues used to sit around discussing whether girls were capable of being great scientists. Could a woman really win a Nobel Prize in molecular biology? Men I knew wondered if women’s brains were so different from men’s that they couldn’t make the creative breakthroughs that lead to the greatest discoveries. That’s what I wondered too. Sure, there was Madame Curie–but there were too few Madame Curies to convince us she was anything but an exception.

It turns out that back then, in the dark ages for women in science, we were asking the wrong question. Instead of asking if women’s brains were inferior, we asked why there were so few women at the major research universities and laboratories that breed future Nobel laureates.

In the late 1960s there were essentially no women on the science faculties of places like Harvard, Cal Tech and MIT (where I now work as a professor of molecular biology). Things began to change dramatically in the early 1970s, thanks to affirmative action measures taken under Richard Nixon. Those included the “Shultz regs” (George Shultz was Nixon’s Secretary of Labor), which required universities to hire women onto their faculties or risk losing their federal funding. The Nobel prizes in medicine this week are the end result of those laws. Nobelist Elizabeth Blackburn joined the Berkeley faculty in 1978 and Nobelist Carol Greider was her star graduate student. (The third new laureate is Ada Yonath, an Israeli.)

Until about 10 years ago, women still comprised only five percent of the science faculty at Harvard and eight percent at MIT, with similar numbers at other high-powered research universities. (Today 17 percent of the MIT science faculty are women, as a result of specific efforts by the MIT administration in collaboration with senior women faculty.) But even those paltry numbers from 10 years ago have been enough to start yielding female Nobelists. In fact, if we assume that female faculty win these prizes at the same rate as male faculty, then only in the past couple of years have there been enough women employed at MIT to begin producing Nobel laureates.

Meanwhile, women faculty at MIT are now elected to the National Academy of Sciences at the same rate as men, and they have finally begun to win some of the most prestigious science awards. For example, yesterday a woman from MIT–the great chemist JoAnne Stubbe–received the National Medal of Science from President Obama, in part for developing a cancer-treating drug now in clinical trials. She has also worked to make science more welcoming for the young women who will come after her. Her accomplishments are off the charts.

Every time a female scientist wins one of these major awards, it is very emotional for me, reducing me to tears. Most are tears of joy at seeing these amazing pioneers recognized for their achievements after the decades-long struggle for women’s equality in science. But I am also sad, thinking of all the great discoveries that were lost when half the population was kept out.

My emotions may even include a trace of I-told-you-so. It’s shocking that as recently as 2005 Larry Summers could propose that women’s genetic inferiority might explain their small numbers at the pinnacle of scientific achievement. I walked out in protest. You’d expect Harvard to know better!

Maybe 2009 will be remembered as a watershed for women in science. At the very least it should mark the end of the nonsensical, outdated and damaging idea that women lack the interest or genetic ability to do great math and science.

Nancy Hopkins is professor of molecular biology at MIT and a founding member of The New Agenda.

The New Agenda has expressed excitement that several 2010 gubernatorial races may shape up to be a female Democrat vs. a female Republican (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida), because perhaps then the contest can be about issues rather than hairdos and ankles. But what’s shaping up to be a female vs. female competition in the New York Democratic Senate primary is more complex.

U.S. Sen. Gillibrand

The fight is for the U.S. Senate Seat now held by Kirsten Gillibrand, appointed by Gov. Patterson to fill the role when Hillary Clinton moved up to Secretary of State. Although U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney won’t officially declare for a couple of weeks, the NY Daily News quotes an Maloney advisor as saying:

She’s definitely decided to run. She’s in it.

Such a primary fight might get bloody. The Daily News says that Maloney has criticized Gillibrand:

for her “evolving” stances on guns, Immigration and the economic crisis. Maloney also questioned Gillibrand’s “character.”

Establishment Democrats would like to avoid a primary fight that might weaken the nominee prior to a general election battle. Daily News reports that:

At [Sen. Chuck] Shumer’s request, President Obama phoned Long Island Rep. Steve Israel in may to nudge him out [of the race]. Just last week, Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Gillibrand has the White House’s support.

The NY Times reports that Maloney:

has been thwarted in her efforts to hire staff members. Some longtime supporters and interest groups are abandoning her. And an initiative she has worked on for seven years – to help workers exposed to toxic particles at the World Trade Center site – is being advanced by Ms. Gillibrand with the support of Senate elders.

U.S. Rep. Maloney

However, Maloney is not totally without friends. Manhattan Media reports that Rep. Charles Rangel and former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro attended a fundraiser and that former President Bill Clinton will headline a fundraiser later this month. Since those events originally were set up to benefit Maloney’s House re-election bid, and it’s unclear whether any of the headliners will go on to endorse her Senate run.

Both of these women are laudable representatives, and I wish that rather than a primary that leaves one or both of them damaged, there were a way that both of them could continue to build their public service careers.  On the bright side, perhaps its a sign of progress that in a field where only 17% of the US Senate is women, there are two spectacular female candidates in the running from a single state (NY). Bravo!

Dr. Nancy Hopkins of MIT

In response to Summers’ remarks, the National Academy of Sciences, the premier scientific organization that advises the government, studied and concluded in a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers,” that there is no evidence to date of cognitive differences between men and women that can explain the under-representation of women on math, science and engineering faculties. In contrast, there is substantial research that gender bias exists and can plausibly explain, in part, the under-representation of women at the high end of these fields. Greater family demands traditionally placed on women have been shown to play a significant role as well.

Since 2005 additional research has appeared on this topic: particularly relevant is a 2008 study by Mertz and colleagues in Notices of the American Mathematical Society showing that women with extreme math ability emerge in very different numbers in different countries. This proves that culture plays a major role in the identification and development of high-end math talent. The individuals identified in this study possess math ability found in only approximately 10-15% of the Harvard or MIT math faculty. They are off-scale, genius-type students. As the authors of this study wrote,

“since the frequency with which women with extreme math ability are identified is largely due to CHANGEABLE factors, their lack of a Y chromosome (i.e., the fact that they are not males) can NOT be the primary reason for their scarcity. In some countries the boy:girl ratio on IMO teams (teams which test extreme math ability) and in the Study of Exceptional Talent (a test in the US) in recent years are ~ 3:1. (i.e., three boys for every girl.) The ratio in a truly gender-neutral society, if one existed, would probably be even closer to 1:1 (ie equal). Thus, socio-cultural factors can explain most, if not all, of the scarcity of women with extreme math ability, math professors, chess grandmasters, etc. There is no need to hypothesize gender differences as the cause.”

So decades of research fail to support Summers’ hypothesis. Why then do we have yet another article — in a respected newspaper — still arguing for women’s genetic inferiority as a plausible explanation for the under-representation of women in math, science and engineering fields? Why is Ruth Marcus defending Larry Summers? Why would a woman defend this sexist bigotry? I’ll offer one explanation based on research and another on hypotheses.

Research from psychologists shows that both women and men undervalue women’s achievements. Here’s the type of experiment they did to address this: Take a manuscript and Xerox it. Put a man’s name on one copy and a woman’s name on the other and mail the two identical articles out to be evaluated. The judges will tell you that the man’s work is better than the woman’s. But here’s the even more surprising finding: both men AND women think the man’s work is better than the woman’s! So women are sexist too. When do men and women begin to acquire their beliefs about the roles of men and women? The latest research suggests by about 6 months of age! So yes, there is reason to believe that Ms. Marcus may really think that women are inferior to men.

And now for the hypotheses for which I have no data. Perhaps Ms. Marcus has not studied the complex literature on this subject well enough to understand it and that is why she misrepresents the findings so egregiously, particularly those about women with extreme math ability. Additionally, Larry Summers is about to arrive in D.C. to take a high level-position on Obama’s economic team. Is it possible that Ms. Marcus is trying to cozy up to a powerful figure?

What I can say with surety is that Ms. Marcus’s ideas about women’s inferiority have the potential to set women back to where we were before civil rights and affirmative action made it possible for women to get jobs in universities like Harvard at all. As for math faculties, though Ms. Marcus herself suggests that at least 32% of math professors could be women, it is worth noting that Harvard has never had a tenured female professor of mathematics in its 370-year history.

Dr. Nancy Hopkins is a co-founder of The New Agenda and a professor of molecular biology at MIT.