Re gender and ease of getting a job: I usually reply (wishing I remembered the
woman whom I'm quoting and I bet someone out there will tell me:-> ) this way:
When there are as many mediocre women holding responsible, well paid jobs as
there are mediocre men, we really will have equality. Until that happens, I
guess you have just as much chance as I have, dearie!
That usually shuts them up.
I stayed off this net for over a year because I was too busy to take all the
nastiness, but am dipping in again to see how things are. Hm.
One aspect of the 'real scientist' debate which strikes me is that many
respondents are bench scientists or are bench-oriented, and that the answers
appear to be structured by the high data-to-hypothesis ratio which
characterises bench science as opposed to systems-oriented science. Is there an
implicit linguistic conflict between positivist and probabilist approaches
underlying this debate, or is it macha/macho posturing, or what? I ask because
the issue of what-is-science in the first place ought to be agreed or at least
parameeterised in some way; and the use of 'real' in 'real scientist' strikes me
as a little inflammatory.
She's a real woman. He's a real man. Those are real emotive sentences - in one
context. Is the real scientist thread about science as such or about
performance?
My 2 p's worth is that a real scientist is someone who does science, and that
this can be done at many levels of achievement and recognition. Perhaps some of
the people arguing that sole authorship in refereed journals, etc. are actually
arguing that this is a definition of a _professional, mainstream career_
scientist. It is possible in many of the natural sciences (the zoological
sciences, for example) for a person employed in a non-scientific field to be a
published sole author in a refereed journal, have no PhD, have little or no
access to the mainstream grant-awarding system and still to make substantive
and robust contributions to their field of specialisation.
THe arguments defining what I call 'Career Scientists' do a disservice to the
spirit of enquiry, IMHO; and I am strongly reminded of Aldo Leopold's comments
in 'A Sand County Almanac' to the effect that what academic science does is
restrict access to knowledge, basing those restrictions on a dogmatic approach
to who may practice real science and what real science is. We must have rigour,
we must have standards, no question about it: we can't be doing with people who
fudge their results or skew their experimental designs and make false claims
about their work, and so on. But in my philosophy, all scholars are always
students: Barbara McClintock was a student until she died, so was Peter
Medawar.
"Gladly wold he lerne and gladly teche". So why use 'until.... [this or that
performance parameter has been fulfilled]... you are only a student of science'
as a put-down?
end of tuppenny-ha'penny speech!
Katherine J. Kaye (Dr.)
School of Geography
University of Oxford (kkaye at vax.ox.ac.uk)
