This is one of those questions where the answer is going to take a good bit of explanation because it’s a multi-part problem. One problem is that scientists tend to focus on abstract problems and theories — especially in disciplines like physics and astronomy. They are looking for patterns that are damned difficult to detect and that requires a kind of mind and intellect that is rare among men and rarer still among women making scientists a minority among the human populace.
And if there’s one thing that humans love to destroy, it’s a minority population.
We’re social creatures (for the most part). We enforce conformity through social norms, laws, mores and folkways, ostracism, shaming, and praise for good (conformist) behavior. That means that people who do not observe and obey those norms tend to be punished early on and taught not to express those non-conformist behaviors and to suppress their native values in favor of what society values.
Now, society’s values aren’t always good things when it comes to scientific and technological progress. To break mankind out of the Neolithic took visionaries and inventors who had the personal fortitude to ignore the social shaming conventions (gossip, peer pressure, ostracism, etc) and move forward into a direction that the Neolithics had never considered. That’s hard for anyone, male or female. But, it happened. Some crazy fool invented writing. Some other crazy fools figured out how to heat metal and hit it so that it developed into a certain shape. Other fools figured out how to sharpen it. Some fools figured out how to use sand to make a road and suddenly a bunch of fools could talk to other fools faster than ever.
And, of course, these fools let the Neolithics they’d dragged kicking and screaming out of the caves have access to these cool things and what did the Neolithics do? Use them to beat the ever-living crap out of future visionaries. But still, visionaries who could take the beatings were born and continued to pull the rest of humanity forward even while the gifts they left behind were used to discourage more of their kind from expressing their own visions.
See, visions are okay — so long as they fit to cultural norms or what the Neolithic elites want. So, today, that means that walking around the Vatican topless is fine — it fits what the elites want. It means that wearing a dress that resembles something out of Picasso’s nightmares is fine (but men had best stick to suits that make them look like tall penguins or else). It means that peeing in a jar and dropping a cross in it is fine. See, avant-garde is cool. Worship of a time period from a half-century ago is cool.
But putting a probe on a comet is so not cool. Especially if you don’t look like David Tennant or Thomas Hiddleston (who are acceptably good-looking male representations of “okay geeks” that the elites will tolerate so long as they genuflect before their Neolithic masters and don’t do anything too geeky). Especially if, like most visionaries, you don’t pay much attention to the fashion dictates of the day and instead wear things you think are cool or that a friend made for you. If you insist on being below average in looks, nerdy in fashion, and brilliant at science, your historic achievement will be overlooked by the Neolithics in favor of what you were wearing.
Because, you know, that’s so much more important than learning more about our universe.
Now, everyone’s sensitive (on some level) to that kind of social pressure. Women, on balance, are more sensitive to it (or rather, more women possess temperaments that allow such tactics to work — the rest of us who don’t have those self-isolate anyway and usually discount what the Neolithics say about anything). So, when an entire generation of girls sees a scientist getting ripped to shreds over his shirt after he’s just landed a freaking probe on a comet, those girls are going to say “hey, obviously all this stuff that feminists have been saying about how we shouldn’t judge people on looks or their clothes is bull. If I were to make a historic discovery, those same people would be more concerned with what I was wearing and how I looked than they would be with the implications of my discovery so why should I bother?”
So, congratulations, Rose Eveleth, Chris Plante, and Arielle Duhaime-Ross and others of your Neolithic ilk. You’ve just done more to discourage girls who have native scientific temperaments (NT females) from bothering to tackle difficult subjects because you’ve shown that, once again, achievements matter not at all to you flea-bitten primitives — it’s how you look and what you wear.
— G.K.
