How To Increase STEM

I have vivid memories of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard, where they let me hang around when I was still in high school but trying to learn some very fascinating things about medicine and science.

There was a hall lined on both sides with pictures of famous doctors who had made great contributions,

One of my favorites was Sir William Osler, a pioneer in Medical Education who spoke several wonderful aphorisms that were supposed to condense medical knowledge into some sort of easy to swallow bits.

I felt he condensed pharmacology pretty well when he said of new remedies, “Use it while it still works.” (it took us years after their release to understand, for example, the complications of antidepressants.) Another quote, in some ways closer to my heart, is the one that heads this astounding list of quotes about medicine:

“The good physician treats the disease. The great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

That one is especially great for psychiatry.

The problem for me was that there was not a single woman’s picture there. I remember, the first time I saw that corridor, wondering if there were a way to even meet a woman doctor, although I had heard of a couple. The men mostly had mutton chop sideburns and all looked terminally angry (although I later learned Osler was an inveterate practical joker, something I loved about him….)

No role models for a young female want-to-be doctor. Zip.

I was going to try to be nice to people, no matter what they had all been like. The only role models I could think of were my mother or grandmother asking the neighbors their health.

Yuck! I could only press forward into the darkness.

I did wonder if there were something in the sex differences between men’s and women’s brains that would account for men gravitating to science. Nope. It is known from the most prosaic of psychological tests that women do better verbally and men do better in spacial relations. Whoopee. Nobody would be terribly interested in a scientist who could not provide articulate explanations of original ideas. As for spatial relations, that may be relevant in a couple of the more specific fields wanting for women, like mechanical or civil engineering, but nobody is going to convince me it is essential to math (How much innovation are we looking for in solid geometry?) or computer science.

I remember a fairly intelligent and not blatantly sexist male telling myself and a female colleague that he did not think there should be any difference between “everyday achievement” in science between the sexes, but that the great innovative ideas and the big geniuses were more likely to be male than female. I remember us admitting he “might” be right, especially if we look at the past, primarily because after some library searches (pre-internet, mind you) it was pretty hard to come up with any significant counterexamples. Now it takes milliseconds to find articles like this:

Looking at the brain, using the wonderfully well adapted tool of functional MRI (fMRI) to look at the brain the results are equivocal. This article impressed me on the scholarship level. The best they could come up with was female processing of math is probably not superior to male. Here is another scholarly article that digs into the problem that basically between “nature and nurture” factors everything is too damned complex to figure what the heck is going on anyway.  One of the authors, Camilla Benbow, is especially well-known in this field, and has said things in the past that bear at least a little resemblance to things that my college debate coach said. For this sort of thought she seems to have a bit of a running difference of opinion with the American Women Mathematicians. My personal feeling is that while earlier mentoring and support for women in science can only be helpful, there seems to be a “loss of interest” in scientific careers early in college. Mentoring in the early university years might be the most powerful of all.