birdbrains

Science Times is awesome. I look forward to getting it every week, and this week they had a great piece on the brains of birds, long assumed to be inferior to mammalian brains because of the way their brain cells clustered. Now, they're finding that birds are highly intelligent and that the formation of their brains enables adaptation and complex reasoning. Here's my favorite story from the article:
"At a university campus in Japan, carrion crows line up patiently at the curb waiting for a traffic light to turn red. When cars stop, they hop into the crosswalk, place walnuts from nearby trees onto the road and hop back to the curb. After the light changes and cars run over the nuts, the crows wait until it is safe and hop back out for the food."

A couple of things occur to me. First, I can't believe how long it has taken scientists to understand that human intelligence is not necessarily the only peak of evolution. The fact that men have spent literally hundreds of years testing animals on human intelligence scales would be funny if it weren't so stupid. After all, how many of us can do what squirrels, dogs, or birds do? If they ran the world, wouldn't we all look pretty dumb to them as well? Furthermore, men make the persistent error of determining that different from them is always lesser. Consider again the ongoing "biological differences" argument regarding differences between the sexes. This is the same error in assumption, repeated across disciplines and across time and applied to widely varying cases, from birds to women.

On that note, today there is also an article by Cornelia Dean, the first woman science editor of the New York Times. Here are some of her stories:
"At a dinner for scientific eminences, a colleague introduced me to one of the nations leading neuroscientists. 'Oh yes,' the scientist murmured as he scanned the room clearly ignoring me. 'Who is the new science editor of the New York Times, that twerpy girl in short skirts?' Dumbfounded, I replied, 'That would be me.'"
"Not long aftter I answered the office telephone, and the caller, a (male) scientist, asked me to speak to several of my colleagues, all male and all out. 'May I help you?' I inquired. 'No, no, no,' he replied. 'I don't want to talk to you, I want to talk to someone important."
"Another friend, graduating as a math major, was advised not to bother applying for a graduate research assistantship because they were not given to women. She eventually earned a doctorate in math, but one of her early forays into the job market ended abruptly when she was told she should stay home with her husband rather than seek employment out of town."

I've been having great conversations with friends about this subject lately, and here's what the conversations have come to: most of the high-achieving women we know tend to personalize their own failure or lack of advance in the field. They assume that they are not achieving at the level of men in their field or department because they simply aren't trying hard enough, or aren't dedicated enough. What most of us do not see is that we are all facing the same kind of attitudes and barriers repeatedly, across fields and almost without exception. Consider, for example, my good friend who was told by a man in her husband's department that if she got a Ph.D. in the same discipline as her husband, it would be "really cool," because then she could be his [her husband's] full time research assistant.

We must reconsider the way we relate to other women, in the world and in our fields of study. We are rewarded for disliking women. In fact, I have for my whole life prided myself on being someone who was 'not girly,' not interested in fitting in to all female groups, and so on; being someone who was good at science, good at math, and friends almost exclusively with guys. I have received a lot of positive male attention for not being like other women and for openly disparaging women's perspective, attitude and approach to the world. I thought it was a compliment. Now, I don't. As friend A. put it, when we meet a woman we don't like, we think "I don't like women"; when we meet a man we don't like, we think, "I don't like him."

We personalize failure. Men personalize success. We as women will not be able to change the underlying gender relations in society until we realize that we women are all in one lifeboat, and rather than beating each other with paddles (in order to get the attention of the men on the yacht above us) we should start rowing together.