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Gender Discrimination and Gender Bias:
Different Sides of the Same Coin

Rosalind Williams 

The publication of the Reports of the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty is a bittersweet occasion for the MIT community. Their evidence shows that throughout MIT's history, the talents and lives of many women here have been warped and wasted by gender discrimination. At the same time, the act of publication demonstrates that MIT's well-known capacity for creativity is accompanied by an even more important capacity: to reflect upon what we have created.

These Reports show a sophisticated level of self-reflection. As might be expected at MIT, they present compelling quantitative evidence. Somewhat less predictably, the Reports present with care and seriousness what is often dismissively called "anecdotal evidence." When women tell the same stories over and over again, these narrative patterns, when integrated and analyzed, also provide valid evidence of social and cultural patterns. For example, the Sloan School comparison of six paired male and female professors uses coding techniques to analyze interviews with striking results (in the nineteenth century, it might have been called a "felicific calculus"). Finally, the Reports convey a strong sense of history, by emphasizing repeatedly the social effects of cumulative actions over time. If anyone thinks the MIT community is stuck in clunky technocratic ways of examining complex social problems, they should read these Reports and think again.

Yet, at the end of the introduction, the four co-authors suggest that MIT has to become even more sophisticated in its approach to social and cultural complexity. While praising the "can-do, entrepreneurial, even upstart confidence of the engineer" that motivated these studies – a confidence based on the "belief that data-gathering, analysis, design of goals and development of metrics can solve most problems" – the co-authors give another turn to the cycle of self-reflection: "But will it work, this engineers' approach to gender equity?" They suggest that MIT still lacks sufficient awareness of "the gendered nature of academic rules" and conclude that "What still needs doing…is to question and rethink the nature of the rules themselves."

In my own reflections on the benefits and limits of the "can-do" approach, I have found it helpful to make a distinction between gender discrimination and gender bias. The Reports use these terms more or less interchangeably, but gender inequality encompasses two rather different problems. Discrimination involves obstacles to full participation in a human activity; bias involves the cultural identity of the activity. In a democratic Western society, it is relatively easy to get consensus on the proposition that discrimination is unfair – in this case, that women should have equal access to the professional rewards and opportunities of engineering and science. It is harder to achieve consensus on the propositions that engineering and science are culturally defined as masculine activities, and that this inherent gender bias should be modified. Yet the gender bias of science and engineering, as they are presently practiced, is real, and it will continue to present obstacles to the full participation of women even if gender discrimination were to end tomorrow.

Gender bias in science and engineering leads to what is often described as the "pipeline problem." This unfortunate metaphor implies that the difficulty to be addressed is the tendency of women to "leak" out of a well-understood career track. When the problem is defined in this way, its obvious solution is to redouble efforts to retain women in that well-established career track.

That is not the problem. Women do not usually drop out of science and engineering, as they move on in life, because they are worried about getting a job or keeping a job or being paid a reasonable wage or otherwise being discriminated against. They drop out because the more they look at the world where they are heading, the less they want to go there. Why should they? Only half of the women faculty in the School of Engineering have children, while well over three-quarters of the men do. In a 1995 survey of MIT faculty, twice as many women faculty (67.4%) reported extreme stress as did men (31.1%).

The big problem at MIT today is not that women are excluded by men. The big problem is that women exclude themselves because, to use a phrase I hear from women all the time, "Who needs it?" They say – we say – "I want a life." We want to make a difference in the world, but not if the cost is a lifetime of anxiety and loneliness.

So why not just let them walk, and reserve science and engineering for men and the few women willing to pay this price? Why is it important to have more women in science and engineering? If science and engineering are too strongly identified with one gender, one personality type, one race, one way of viewing the world, over time they will stagnate as they cumulatively exclude perspectives and talents. The ultimate reason for diversity is not to let "different" people into an enteprise, but to improve the enterprise. In the case of science and engineering, this means ensuring that these activities involve the full range of human concerns, that they remain varied, that their latent possibilities are explored, that new problems are opened up, that new sources of creativity are brought to bear on human needs

MIT is actively addressing gender discrimination in science and engineering. It will take even more time and effort to address the gender bias of science and engineering. The two are interconnected, of course. The cultural identity of science and engineering as masculine activities results from, and feeds back into, the overwhelming prevalence of men in these activities up to the very recent past. Only when the numbers start changing, as quickly and dramatically as possible, will gender bias also begin to change. The "engineers' approach" is a good start, but only a start. At MIT we are rightly proud of having our feet solidly on the ground. We must also be sure to keep our eye on the far horizon.

Ed. Note: For most of the period 1995-2000 Rosalind Williams was the only woman faculty member on Academic Council. These remarks are drawn from her forthcoming book Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (The MIT Press, fall 2002).

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