A persistent metaphor in scientific circles is that of the career pipeline. This pipeline is a leaky one, only instead of dripping water, it leaks women and people of color, while white men apparently get transported to the pipeline's end: a career in science.

I don't like the pipeline metaphor--but more on that later.

Instead, let's take a look at a recent spat in the science blogosphere regarding the pipeline.

The kerfluffle began when Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles asked not to be blamed for the paucity of women in physics:

If you want to improve the gender balance in physics, beating up college professors isn't the answer. We can't be responsible for driving women out of the field if they never take our classes in the first place. The problem starts somewhere before college, and that's where the effort to fix it needs to be directed.

Zuska felt Chad was abdicating responsibility:

if you are just sitting back in your office, doing your research, teaching your one little intro class and congratulating yourself because you didn't drive all the women students away, then get out of my face and stop wasting your breath and internet electrons telling people they shouldn't complain about professors.

She goes on to point out very specific ways in which Chad could help recruit and retain women in physics.

Things heat up even more in the comments. When someone rushed to defend Chad and his ilk, Zuska replied:

Poor white men. So downtrodden.

Look dudes, when will you ever learn that a critique of while male power as a systemic problem is NOT a criticism of all white men, or of any one particular white man? If I choose to indict patriarchy, that doesn't mean your wife should divorce you (although maybe she should, if you can't understand this concept).

Chad has spoken up in favor of the system. "There is no big issue at the physics professor level. I know this because of the following data: I am nice and several of my colleagues are nice. Also I happen to personally believe that the problem lies elsewhere." If people - any people, white males, blue females, what-have-you - will make foolish statements to that effect, they may expect to be called out by me.

There are 2 ways to contribute to a problem: active and passive. Every good Catholic knows about sins of omission as well as sins of commission. I'm just trying to tell some of you good guys that it's time to start thinking about your sins of omission. If you cannot handle that without your feelings getting all hurt, that is not my problem. You're always so busy busting each other to act like a man and don't be a wuss and suck it up and be a hard-ass. I can't believe how easily men are willing to cry hurt feelings in public forums the first time a woman says something uncomplimentary about one of their number. Why is this?

We can turn to Virginia Woolf for an answer:

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size...it serves to explain how restless [men] are under women's criticism; how impossible it is for women to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be.... For if women begin to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks, his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

Indeed, how is man to go on dominating all the departments of science and engineering in all the universities and research institutes of the land and feel okay about it on a daily basis if all those women simply will not keep quiet and maintain a respectful attitude to the "nice" men while waiting for the promised change that is surely coming someday?

Yeah, it's a great post and comment thread. Set aside some time to read it, as well as Zuska's other posts on the subject here and here.

Dr. Free-Ride offers perspective on both sides of the argument, pointing out that it's unfair to expect any individual to shoulder the burden of the women in science problem. But she also points out that

Women who are students -- who are considering whether to try physics as a major, or to take physics courses -- are seeing things from the outside. They are looking at the current composition of a department (faculty and students), they are listening to what people in the dorms say about which majors are good and who's a reasonable professor and who's a jerk, and they are trying, on the basis of the information they can gather, to form a reasonable judgment about whether this is a community they want to join.

The fact that there are not weekly beer bashes with strippers is in the department is not decisive evidence that women will be welcomed or even treated at real members of the community. By the time they are college-age, many women already have experience of communities that look pretty nice from the outside, but where it sucks to be a woman. This is why the additional measures Zuska advocates -- doing active outreach and being aware that we aren't usually conscious of our unconscious biases -- are so important. Outreach is taking visible steps to say, "We want you in this community, and we will make every effort to help you become a real member of it." Recognizing that males in the community of physics have had a boys club -- and that they can't know what it's like not to be on the inside in this particular way -- is the only thing that's got a chance of really opening up the community.

Again, check out the comments in response to Dr. Free-Ride's post.

Syaffolee points out that women as well as men can contribute to the problem:

Elementary, middle, and high school weren't better--although, I wouldn't say the problem was with male teachers as much as with female teachers with low expectations and an ill-hidden distaste for the sciences. Physics teacher? She didn't think we could do the math. Biology teacher? She didn't believe in evolution. Chemistry teacher? She blabbed about how great her sons were instead of teaching orbital theory. With all that negative stimuli during my formative years, one could wonder how I retained any shred of love for science at all. I'm pretty sure none of my female classmates from high school have.

As for my own problem with the pipeline metaphor: I don't like its linear nature. I don't like that once women leak out of the pipeline, there's no reentry into it. If we think about science in all its manifestations as a career path that must be achieved by following a prescribed series of steps, we're doing women a disservice.

Since women are more likely than men to need to take time off of their careers--for childrearing or elder care, for example--constructing science as a pipeline (metaphorically or literally) is inherently unfair to women. Mothers returning to work, people who discover they love science after majoring in English, and others should be able to choose to practice science later in their lives.

I'm not advocating allowing undertrained people into labs or hiring them into faculty positions. Rather, schools and universities need to emphasize the vast web that is science--from science writing and illustration to faculty positions to industry research jobs to museum work. Had I known early on, for example, that people have worked full-time as science illustrators, I might have paid more attention in my dry high school biology and chemistry courses, or pursued more rigorously that geology stuff I was so interested in for several years.

So let's think of science not as a pipeline, but as a web or a matrix, with people at all its intersecting lines. People can move from one part of the web to another, and no matter where they are, they'll find support from others on the web. It's difficult to fall out of a web, but it's way too easy to drip out of a leaky pipeline.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks blogs at The Clutter Museum and Museum Blogging.