Dream about a golden castle

Recently I needed to rummage through about twenty websites on energy. There, naturally, all positions of any significance are occupied by men. I wouldn’t have paid attention to this if it weren’t for the beauty contest that energy workers recently held. They have girls on their websites, but they are all on the competition banner, in dresses, with arched backs and painted eyes. And below is a comment something like “our work is hard even for men, but these beautiful women still work, can you imagine?” - signed with a man's name, of course.

And then I also went to the opening ceremony of the year of chemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences. There was a report about Marie Curie. The first three minutes of the speech went something like this: “She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. Woman, can you imagine? Even two Nobel Prizes! The first woman to receive two awards.”

Of course, Marie Sklodowska-Curie is a great scientist, and, of course, as a woman, at the beginning of the 20th century it was more difficult for her to become a Nobel laureate, more difficult to become a teacher at the Sorbonne, and she was not elected to the Academy of Sciences precisely because of the absence of a Y chromosome. But here's the problem. If you take the sentence “imagine, a woman became a Nobel laureate” and replace the word “woman” with the word “negro”, you will obviously get a politically incorrect phrase. The surprise inherent in it would have sounded natural fifty years ago, but now the author of such a statement would be killed, because from his words it indirectly follows that blacks are generally less capable of scientific activity. At the same time, if you replace the word “woman” with the word “disabled,” then this sentence will sound more natural: it is clear that it is objectively more difficult for a disabled person to engage in science.

It turns out an interesting thing: gender discrimination and its absence are intertwined in a very bizarre way. Some real differences are hushed up and ignored: for example, many people do not believe in PMS, although the drop in progesterone is a completely measurable thing. At the same time, contrived differences, such as a woman’s inability to study, bloom wildly and penetrate even decent society.

There are indeed few outstanding female scientists. Wikipedia, for example, puts them in a separate category, in which there are 50 names. In the list of active members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (very long), I counted five women. The existing inequality can be caused by two reasons: the inability of women to science or the confidence of society in this inability.

If we try to weave in gender differences, we can imagine that men, on average, may show a greater tendency to try to implement crazy ideas (some of which later turn out to be scientific discoveries). But by the same logic, it turns out that women carry out experiments more carefully (and this is also a good way to make a discovery). In addition, it is more difficult for a woman not to fall out of life when a child appears - but this event is still rare in a person’s life, and it can be compensated for.

If we assume that the problem is related to the rigidity of society, then we need to understand in what areas, besides science and technology, it exists. The absence of women in some jobs may be due to society’s desire to protect them from danger (army; filming in revolutionary Egypt), the belief that women are unable to make decisions in a stressful situation (surgeons; pilots), or reluctance to share money (any board of directors of a large company). It is not entirely clear how much of this relates to science.

The third possible option is “women just don’t want to.” But it is also implausible - in fact, there are a lot of women in laboratories, why do they want to work there and not want to become academics?

While I was finishing this column, data from a survey from the superjob.ru portal appeared in the news feeds : “a third of Russian women would like to be born men.” And he reminded me of the fourth, most likely option: the existence of gender discrimination is beneficial to women themselves and is supported by them. It’s much more pleasant not to become an academician because the Russian Academy of Sciences doesn’t accept girls than not to become an academician because you didn’t particularly like your job.