Once again, someone has claimed that women aren't pursuing degrees and jobs in math and computer science because we just don't want to be there.

You know, just like women have never been president of the U.S. because none of us want to be president.

In response, the tireless Aunt B. of Tiny Cat Pants is asking women to share their experiences in learning--or, in some cases, attempting to learn--math and science. Check out the comments for some horrifying stories, as well as some horrifying responses, such as the amazingly asinine "If you don’t want a man to look at your cleavage, don’t wear tops that reveal anything. It’s really that simple."

The history, in brief
I've blogged before about my own experiences in high school physics, and much of my Ph.D. study involved examining why exactly, in a historical sense, women haven't surged into the sciences in large numbers. Historically speaking, it's safe to say: It's the men.

In fact, science used to be taught more to girls than to boys (for more on this, see Kim Tolley's excellent book The Science Education of American Girls). It was only once science became professionalized that girls and women were pushed from taking up science (other than botany) as a pastime or career. Sure, there were plenty of (very valid and useful) manuals on the science of home economics, but even if women understood the workings of the digestive system and knew how to build an early composting toilet thanks to Catherine Beecher and her book The American Woman's Home, it was only the exceptional woman or two who managed to have successful careers in the sciences in the U.S. (Another great book on the subject: Maresi Nerad's The Academic Kitchen, about the establishment of a home economics department at Berkeley, and the sequestering of women in this department.)

In the early- to mid-twentieth century, thanks to the wars, women were more likely to find work as technicians, or as mathematicians known as "computers." Peggy has a terrific post about the women of ENIAC if you're interested in the history of women in computer science.

The present
Fast-forward to today. We have more women in the sciences than we did in the 19th and 20th century, and as far as I know, women's brains haven't been busily evolving to be more mathematically inclined. There's a good chance, then, that women still aren't being given the opportunities to succeed in math and science. And who are the gatekeepers of these opportunities? Largely men. And as Laura illustrates nicely with her aborted review of Wikinomics, men in the sciences and social sciences can be blind to how poorly they perceive and judge women:

The authors were writing about a successful female computer scientist/businesswoman, explaining her accomplishments and how much she was respected. But then, they said, ". . . and her looks didn't hurt either." And I closed the book and I'm not going to finish it.

Look, asshats, if you're going to write about the looks of the people you're profiling, fine, but do so equally. You didn't say anything about Linus Torvald's looks or Steve Jobs or any of the other men you discussed in the preceding pages (and there were lots!). When you said that about this obviously talented woman, it became clear to me that you're pretty shocked that an attractive woman is also smart or that it doesn't matter how smart a woman is, but damn, she has to be attractive. And you probably have no idea why women don't read your books or pursue careers in your field. Possibly because they don't want to work with asshats like you.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen comments in forums and on blogs expressing the exact same sentiment about men in computer science. "It's not that our brains are wired differently from yours--it's that you're all asshats!" (My new favorite word is "asshat," but "shenanaganza," which I learned from this blogger, is a close second.)

The academy
Ancarett refers to Aunt B.'s post and reflects on her own experience in the academy--specifically on her own blind spot regarding male privilege:

I’m gobsmacked because it’s more than twenty years on and it never occurred to me until now that I am so deeply entrenched in male privilege that I never thought about this. That the only professors to really connect to my undergraduate self were the only two women I ever studied with.

What's even scarier to me than Ancarett's situation is the fact that the belief that women are biologically inept at science is being passed down to a new generation of students. Time and again I've had male students tell me that women's brains are wired such that we can't think like scientists are supposed to think (whatever that means). I counter their belief with anecdotes about women's biology from an earlier era--such as the late-nineteenth-century contention that women's ovaries would shrivel up if women received a higher education. These male students then try to say our science is more advanced than in the nineteenth century, and I ask them what scientists a hundred years from now might think of our science. (They'll probably find it pretty damn rudimentary, if scientific progress continues at its current pace.) It's my nice way of saying to college boys, "You sound like an asshat when you say such things."

So. . . How do we change this attitude? We recruit more women--and especially women of color--into the sciences, and in particular into the "hard" physical sciences. We build up a critical mass. Women will attract more women. But this is a long, slow process.

In the meantime, we can use the tools of web 2.0 to demonstrate to the world that women can do science quite well, thankyouverymuch. Check out the videos made by UC Davis professor Dawn Sumner, for example, or Tara C. Smith's excellent blog on epidemiology.

How do you think women can best make their way into math and science? And how can those women who are there become more visible in their professions?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.