http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060712/ap_on_sc/transgender_scientist;_ylt=AleE4K7SRET1q4Vs5s1MG5is0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MzV0MTdmBHNlYwM3NTM-

Transgender prof defends female scientists

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jul 12, 7:05 PM ET

As an Ivy League-trained neurobiologist who oversees a research lab 
at Stanford, Ben Barres feels qualified to comment on whether nature 
or nurture explains the persistent gender gap in the scientific 
community.

But it wasn't just his medical degree from Dartmouth, his Ph.D from 
Harvard and his studies on brain development and regeneration that 
inspired him to write an article blaming the shortage of female 
scientists on institutional bias.

Rather, it was that for most of his academic life, the 51-year-old 
professor who now wears a beard was once known as Dr. Barbara Barres, 
a woman who excelled in math and science.

"I have this perspective," said Barres, who switched sexes when he 
started taking hormones in 1997. "I've lived in the shoes of a woman 
and I've lived in the shoes of a man. It's caused me to reflect on 
the barriers women face."

Barres' opinion piece, published in Thursday's issue of the journal 
Nature, was a response to the debate former Harvard president 
Lawrence Summers reignited last year when he said innate sexual 
differences might explain why comparatively few women excelled in 
scientific careers.

Summers' clashes with faculty - including over women in science - led 
to his resignation, though not before he committed $50 million on 
childcare and other initiatives to help advance the careers of women 
and minority employees.

Even so, Barres thinks a meaningful discussion of what he calls the 
"Larry Summers Hypothesis" ended too soon, leaving missed 
opportunities and a bad message for young female scientists.

"I feel like I have a responsibility to speak out," he said. "Anyone 
who has changed sex has done probably the hardest thing they can do. 
It's freeing, in a way, because it makes me more fearless about other 
things."

In his article, Barres offers several personal anecdotes from both 
sides of the gender divide to prove his own hypothesis that prejudice 
plays a much bigger role than genes in preventing women from reaching 
their potential on university campuses and in government laboratories.

The one that rankles him most dates from his undergraduate days at 
MIT, where as a young woman in a class dominated by men he was the 
only student to solve a complicated math problem. The professor 
responded that a boyfriend must have done the work for her, according 
to Barres.

Barres makes a point of saying that he never felt mistreated or held 
back as a female scientist. At the same time, he wonders if his 
personal experience somehow shielded him from the more insidious 
effects of gender bias.

"I wasn't subject to the same stereotype threat because I never 
identified with women when I was growing up," he said. "In a way that 
was one of the lucky things for me about being transgender."

Aside from his unique vantage point, the thrust of Barres' article is 
that neither Summers nor the prominent scientists who defended his 
position used hard data to back up the claim that biology makes women 
less inclined toward math and science.

He cites several studies - including one showing little difference in 
the math scores of boys and girls ages 4 to 18 and another that 
indicated girls are groomed to be less competitive in sports - to 
support his discrimination argument.

"If a famous scientist or the president of a prestigious university 
is going to pronounce in public that women are likely to be innately 
inferior, would it be too much to ask that they be aware of the 
relevant data?" he writes in Nature.

"It would seem just as the bar goes up for women applicants in 
academic selection processes, it goes way down when men are 
evaluating the evidence for why women are not advancing in science."

Harvard University psycholinguist Steven Pinker, whom Barres names in 
his commentary as a leading defender of Summers, already has written 
a letter to the editors of Nature criticizing the piece as "polemic" 
that "contains numerous falsehoods and scurrilous statements."

Pinker said both he and Summers relied on "a large empirical 
literature showing differences in mean and variance in the 
distributions of talents, temperaments, and life priorities" among 
men and women to explain why women might be underrepresented in some 
scientific disciplines.

"He should learn to take scientific hypotheses less personally," Pinker said.

Barres said he won't be surprised if the Nature article makes him the 
kind of lightning rod for criticism that Summers was last year. He 
said he is disappointed that more senior women faculty have remained 
silent on the issue.

"Women have heard this stuff so much from people like Larry Summers, 
some corner of their brain starts to believe it," he said.

___

On the Net:

Nature journal: http://www.nature.com