Particle physicist Sarah M. Demers shares her experience of being a woman in science, and why it’s a problem that she doesn’t see gender equity around her yet. Image: Thinkstock.com

I just might have the best job in the world. As a particle physicist and professor at Yale, I am a happy cog on the wheel of humanity, trying to understand the universe. I collaborate with brilliant people, young and old, from all over the globe. But while I love my job, the truth is I am part of a system that is rigged.

We have come a long way since the day in 1900 that suffragist Susan B. Anthony pledged her life insurance policy to the University of Rochester on a fundraising deadline. This desperate move clinched a deal with trustees that allowed women to enroll. I was admitted there as a graduate student in physics almost a century later.

I remember reading the orientation materials with excitement. I looked over the roster of my classmates and my enthusiasm dimmed a bit as I counted only six women out of thirty. (And when I finally met one of the six, Marion, “she” turned out to be a man from Romania.) How, in 1999, could I be joining a club that was so small?

First, for the good news. The club may be small, but at least it exists. Pioneers like Anthony, Marie Curie and Bernice Sandler (the “Godmother of Title IX”) have opened institutional doors, modeled scientific brilliance and changed the climate. Women can now build up their credentials and compete for the same careers in science as men. Reports from my younger colleagues of being steered away from the labs because some misogynist says, “Women shouldn’t do science” are still coming in, but less often.

Even claims about men having more innate scientific ability are becoming rarer. It just doesn’t fit the evidence. Girls outperform boys in science exams sometimes, and sometimes it’s vice versa, depending on the country in question. From Columbia, where boys scored 4% higher on average, to Jordan, where girls scored 9% higher on average, the data do not jibe with a gender explanation, as this New York Times infographic shows. (Intrigued? This country-by-country data comes from Andreas Schleicher’s PISA test; watch his TED Talk to learn more.)

And yet, despite this progress, this data, women still only account for about one in ten physics professors in the U.S. As much as scientists talk about eradicating bias from our experiments, we sure haven’t done a great job eradicating it from our profession.

A framework to produce good scientists on an equal playing field requires objectivity. Students take tests, receive grades and apply for the next phase of school. Researchers submit papers and grant proposals that are returned with the feedback of peer review. We apply for jobs, and if we get them, funding. Only the highest rated work is funded and published.

Susan B. Anthony made an unusual deal to get women admitted to the University of Rochester. About 100 years later, gender bias in university science departments continues.

In this environment, even a small bias will have a huge ripple effect on the quality of scientific results that emerge and the make-up of the researchers left employed and standing at the end of the day. Unfortunately, we have a growing body of evidence that subconscious bias is alive and well. A few of my colleagues at Yale conducted a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that shows gender bias among science faculty members. They sent an application for a lab manager position to hundreds of science professors at six leading research institutions. Half of the applications were labeled as coming from John. The other half, in all other ways identical, came from Jennifer. The professors were asked to rate the application they received and suggest a starting salary.

The results? Jennifer was rated as less competent than John, though she was viewed as more likable. Jennifer was less likely to be recommended for hire and less likely to be considered worth mentoring. Her average suggested starting salary was lower ($26,508 compared to $30,238). The bias against Jennifer showed in both male and female faculty members, both younger and older professors, across the fields of physics, biology and chemistry.

I have been around the block and back on the topic of women in science. I would much rather be writing about the Higgs boson, the physics of music, or what we know about effective science education. But subconscious bias against women in science is real, it is damaging and while the studies we see suggest that it is almost universally practiced, it is far from universally acknowledged.

In a recent Time Magazine article about a prominent woman in physics, the reporter wrote, “Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t.  But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes.”

It is difficult to solve a problem that we won’t admit we have, but good science demands that we stamp out subconscious bias. Luckily, raising awareness and continuing the conversation is much less of a sacrifice than signing over a life insurance policy. A century from now I hope that identical work from Jennifer and John will receive, on average, identical marks. I hope that our great-grandchildren will not be scratching their heads asking, “Why so little progress?” And I hope that an article by a physicist will be about her latest discovery, not gender.

Sarah Demers is an assistant professor of physics at Yale University. She wrote this piece through The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship Program.

Want to learn about more women in science and tech? Watch today’s talk from mechanical engineer Katherine Kuchenbecker, who is exploring the “technology of touch.” And check out our list of 70+ TED Talks from female physicists, biologists, engineers, doctors, technologists, oceanographers, roboticists, and astronauts »

By Daniel Colón-Ramos

I could not have designed a better experiment if I had tried.

I am a neuroscientist and I am the father of two-year old triplets—two identical and one fraternal. As a professor at Yale University, I spend most of my time designing experiments, researching or teaching about the brain and the nervous system. The rest of my time I spend surrounded by my three daughters. To understand the dynamics in my household, think terrible-two’s, and then cube it.

In the quiet sanctity of my lab, we study how the nervous system forms during development. In all animals, from humans to the tiny worms that we use for our experiments, neurons connect to each other and form circuits that underlie behaviors. Genes (made of DNA) underpin many aspects of development — from how our brain forms to the color of our eyes.

James Watson: How we discovered DNAMy identical twin daughters look identical because they share all of their DNA; they are essentially clones of each other. They teethed exactly the same day, and their funky hairstyle is not the result of a visit to a stylist, but of genetics. Their personalities, however, are not identical. Not even close. The twin’s personalities, which share 100% of their DNA, are curiously more similar to their fraternal sister than to each other.

That certainly came as a surprise to me. After all, argue all you want about nurture, but behaviors do have genetic underpinnings in the animal kingdom. Take reptiles; soon after hatching from its egg, a baby crocodile can hunt dragonflies with the same dexterity that its parents can hunt antelopes. Who taught the baby crocodile to hunt? Genes.

I reflected about this a lot as I held my newborn daughters in the nursery room of the hospital. Human brains, at birth, do not appear nearly as impressive as a reptilian brain. For crying out loud, the tiny nematodes we use in the lab for our experiments can move around better at birth than a human baby! Newborns appear as blank slates. Are we really a “tabula rasa”? What are the roles of nature (genes) and nurture (our environment) in the development of our brains, in making us human?

Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?My epiphany came with the first visit to the pediatrician. She closely monitored our daughters as they met, in unison, one developmental milestone after the other. As a neuroscientist, I knew what this timely emergence of complex behaviors meant: it is a hallmark of pre-programmed brains. But our pre-programmed brains are not for hunting dragonflies. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped our brains are different from those that have shaped the brains of swamp-bound reptiles.

We are born into complex societies and quickly have to learn to negotiate our place within them. My three kids, the ones playing with my iPhone, are the same species as my ancestors, who 40,000 years ago were figuring out how to sharpen a rock and fit it into a spear. The Homo sapiens brain is wired in a very particular way: to allow us to connect to other human brains.

Our home is testament — a cross between the Tower of Babel and a Univisión soap opera. It is filled with sound, from the tonal Chinese my wife has taught the triplets, to the slurred Puerto Rican Spanish they have learned from me. During the past two years I have witnessed how each of my daughters have masterfully decoded the complex rules of language and social interactions, in three very different and overlapping cultural contexts, and simultaneously. They confidently navigate between languages in a way that sometimes neither my wife nor I can follow. Chatty conversation and festive giggles are only one disagreement away from despair and temper tantrums over a train-set, a Crayola or a dinosaur shirt. But most melt-downs end with hugs, sometimes all three at the same time, as they can’t wait to make up.

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies My daughters’ desire to connect is not just cute, it’s a matter of survival. So important is our need to connect to other human brains that extreme cases of child neglect have resulted in developmental problems not unlike those seen for mental retardation. These extreme cases tell us something profound about the brain. It tells us that even in cases in which normal genetics prime the brain to connect to other brains, the absence of human input cripples brain development. Our brains need other brains to develop properly.

These seemingly delirious thoughts of a sleep-deprived scientist are neither new nor original ideas. Today it is broadly accepted that trying to separate nature from nurture is as asinine as trying to debate if a cake is made out of milk or flour. But this is important beyond a mere academic debate. In science, extreme cases are used to understand concepts.  If no human contact during critical developmental periods can cripple brain development, what are the consequences of reduced stimulation due to a defective and underfunded educational system? The United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world — what are the consequences of growing up in a prison?  We are social and co-dependent animals — what are the hidden costs to our society when we ignore the “nurture” part of the human development equation?

The human brain has over 100 billion neurons — there are more neurons in a single human brain than stars in the Milky Way. When a parent stares at the lost, unfocused gaze of a newborn child, they are literarily staring at a constellation of possibilities, at a brain primed through evolution to connect to other brains, to devour information, to adapt and to reach its potential. In truth, I’m highly trained, but not that special; we are all born scientists, and our brains are molded by our favorite subjects of study, other humans. And I have the perfect experiment to prove that — my brain, which has been transformed by my daughters.

Daniel Colón-Ramos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and the Program in Cellular Neuroscience at the Yale school of Medicine, and is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project. Watch his talk from TEDxSanJuan, “Lost in Translation: The value of basic research in medicine,” below.

By Andy Robertson

New art forms are polarizing. We love or hate Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animals or Tracey Emin’s unmade bed but roundly understand that avant garde art has value, the artist trying to challenge us and make us think something.

Video games draw similar fire. Detractors hem and haw that they’re all about shooting guns and wasting time, and worry about the harm they may be doing that we haven’t identified yet. Supporters congregate into defensive groups, highlighting not only their entertainment and relaxation value, but touting that they have educational and self-improvement benefits too.

Having spoken about the meaning of video games at TEDxExeter, I read the recent TED Blog posts “10 online games with a social purpose” and “7 talks on the benefits of gaming” with great interest. However, even with all the talks available, the posts still focused on justifying games by their secondary benefits. Games are redeemed by their ability to “be more effective than pharmaceuticals” or “help people heal from injuries” and “achieve greater wellness in the face of disease.”

Don’t get me wrong — this is a significant and fascinating piece of the puzzle. But it isn’t the whole picture. The irony in this equation is that if we judged novels, films or music solely in terms of potential harm or self-improvement, we’d miss their value in just the same way as we are missing a key part of what makes video games culturally significant.

A better way, I’m suggesting, is to not rule out the possibility that games may have intrinsic value beyond the harm or improvement sphere. This leads to the risky step of suggesting games can be about something more than entertainment. Like books and films, games engage our minds and emotions about particular topics. But unlike books that tell us a tale or films that show us a story, games invite us to overhear and interact with their narratives.

Although video games like to think they are leading the pack, board games have actually been doing this for years already. Brenda Brathwaite’s TEDx talk, “Games for a Change” is a great explanation of how her board games challenge the player to think, reconsider and reflect in a way we usually associate with books and films. Only here, as Brathwaite explains, the player is culpable in the story in a totally new way.

“Games for a Change changes how we see topics, changes our perceptions of people involved in those topics and it changes ourselves,” she says in this talk. “We change as people through games because we’re involved.”

This is new thinking, and hard to grasp at first because of our preconceptions about what games can be. In fact Brathwaite’s meaning-focused talk was renamed to be more educational sounding — “Gaming for Understanding” — when it was re-published recently on TED.com. Of course there’s no conspiracy here, but this curation reflects our tendency to file positive stories about games away in the educational or self-improvement pigeon hole.

Another interesting TED talk on this topic, that shows this idea has been brewing for a while, is David Perry’s “Are Games Better than Life?” from 2006. Although a little overshadowed by advances in realistic visuals, at its heart, this is Perry’s case for understanding games as more than entertainment. As he sums it up at the end, “Games on the surface seem like simple entertainment, but to those that look a little deeper, the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big.”

(In his talk, Perry brings onstage Michael Highland, who’s gone on to do some really interesting thinking about gaming as a spiritual state, which he shared at TEDxPenn. While this is “games as religion,” rather than “games supporting religion,” it’s fascinating nonetheless.)

My TEDx talk, “Sustainable perspectives on video games,” is about critiquing video games on a similar level to books and films, while at the same time allowing them to be themselves. In it, I make the case that we need to start talking and thinking differently about video games if we are to capitalize on their unique version of storytelling. This talk led me in surprising directions, as people were both perplexed and intrigued at how a video game could offer a meaningful cultural experience. One such direction — an invitation from Exeter Cathedral to incorporate a video game as an integral element of their Sunday worship. I have to admit I was both taken back at the invitation and surprised by how well the game we chose, Flower on the Playstation 3 (pictured at the top of this post), fit into the spiritual setting. Even the Cathedral clergy agreed.

It’s perspectives like these that will enable us to escape our polarized harm-or-improvement mindset when it comes to video games. Instead we can be honest about the existence of problematic game experiences and consider whether there is more than entertainment here.