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8 January, 1999
We associate a lot of things with the concepts of "masculine" and "feminine" that really have no business being classified that way.
Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Cosmology are among the topics I love to collect books and articles about. In the last year there have been many fascinating discoveries, and articles have listed some of the strange acronyms of modern theoretical cosmology. My two favorite are MACHOs and WIMPs. MACHOs are MAssive Compact Halo Objects - these are objects with enough mass (and therefore gravity) to act as gravity lenses for more distant objects, but don't put off enough light or other radiation of their own to be detected directly by our telescopes. WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles - these theoretical sub-atomic particles which seldom interact with other particles, and therefore are nearly impossible to detect.
MACHOs have actually been detected in telescopes (you can read about them here). We don't yet know what they are, just that they exist. WIMPs were proposed as a possible solution to the famous Dark Matter or Missing Mass problem. They never have been detected, and since several other, less esoteric solutions to parts of the Missing Mass problem are cropping up, I'm doubting that they will.
At least half my fascination with these two acronyms is purely ironic appreciation of that mis-application of masculine and feminine I mentioned above. When I was in grade school, my fascination with Math and Science got me labeled a "sissy" or a "wimp." Math was a girl's topic, back then. In junior high, Math started morphing into a guy's topic, while science became neutral. It was okay for a guy to be good at Math and Science. By high school and beyond, things became more complicated. In college, my physics classes were inhabited almost exclusively by male students. The same was true for most of the upper mathematics courses, not all, because over in the biology and chemistry classes, the gender balance was tipped in favor of female students. And, since you needed to take a certain amount of higher math for all the science classes, we had a few more women in our math courses.
Even in the purely theoretical upper-division math courses I saw a gender-biased distribution. There wasn't a single woman in my Non-euclidean Geometry class, for example, that was planning to go to graduate school, become an engineer, or go into an applied science career. Every single one of them (and I can say that because, since I was attending a private school, all my upper-division math courses had fewer than a dozen students in them, so we all got to be chums) was planning to become a high school or junior high math teacher. Among the guys, one third were planning to be teachers, one-third wanted to go to grad school in math or science, and the other third wanted to go into a science-related career. (Just for the record, I sort of fell into all three categories: I was seriously toying with the idea of graduate school, I wanted to become a science writer, and maybe teach)
My suspicion is that most of this bias is a product of our culture. I certainly have met plenty of women who tell stories of being told (during childhood) by teachers or parents that either math or science weren't good topics for girls to study. Though I am well-aware of the research showing fundamental, undeniable physical differences in the typical brain developments of males and females, I just don't think believe those differences are significant enough to create such a wide disparity.
It's really too bad, because us guys shouldn't be having all the fun of playing in physics and related sciences. And kids, particularly in school, should be encouraged to try anything that interests them. Not get told they "can't" do something.
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This page is copyright 1998 by Gene Breshears. Photograph is copyright 1998 by Julie Rampke. All Rights Reserved.