Science and Society: The perspective of an Indian woman scientist

scientist

Anita Mehta

Associate Professor, S N Bose National

Centre for Basic Sciences, Calcutta, and

Visiting Professor, ESPCI, Paris

It is best not to take oneself too seriously

if one is dealing with a rather serious subject,

and wishes it to be taken seriously; it is in this spirit

that I would like to start my talk with a light-hearted

anecdote, which nevertheless illustrates three of the main

points that I will touch on during its course.

When, as a young

post-doctoral researcher, I was trying to pioneer a new

field of research (the physics of granular media, or more

colloquially,

the physics of sandpiles), I came

across various reactions to this. Let me attempt

to classify these under the more solemn subheadings of my

abstract:

1. (Dis)respect for gender identity.

____________________________________

I was frequently referred to as 'that sandpile woman', which

conjured up

visions of a laid-back woman

lazing on the beach, dabbling in sand. The implication in most

such cases was that only a dilettante would dabble in a subject

as frivolous as sand, and of course as a woman, I was more than

likely

to be not completely serious in my pursuit of the sciences. I am

sure

that my love of subjects outside the sciences, such as music

and literature, only added to this perception in certain scientific

circles, of an essential light-hearted- (and alas, light-headed-)ness!

2. (Dis)respect for gender/cultural identity / Links

of the enlightened across countries/genders.

__________________________________________________________

As time went on, and I was exposed to more and more seminar

audiences

as an invited speaker,

I occasionally had to confront somewhat hostile ones, as do we all.

However, it was in fact a French (male) colleague who on one

memorable

occasion alerted me to the fact that sections of the audience

were PLANNING to be confrontational at an invited talk for one of the

European

Gordon Conferences. His advice to me was to shine the laser pointer

into the eyes of those people who tried to heckle me! - although

in the end I did not need to resort to this somewhat extreme

option, I did tackle the

hecklers

appropriately, much to the relief of my colleague.

After my talk was over, my colleague

asked me why I had been a target for heckling: after all, he

said,

I had given a sensible talk, and a man in my place would not have

been similarly targeted. Was it, he asked, because I was an Indian,

or a woman? My reply was, none of the above: my real crime was that I was

unprepared to apologise for being either...

3. Rights of authors.

______________________

This story does, however, have at least a partially happy ending.

The field I was trying to publicise was in fact taken very

seriously

within a couple of years, and many of my early ideas soon gained

reasonably wide currency. The fact that they were/are not normally

ascribed

to me is, I feel, a small price to have paid for this.

************************************************************************

I apologise for this rather personal introduction,

but much of what I will say has been informed by my personal

experience

as an Indian woman scientist. Of course, it has been fed by the

experiences of those who are Indian scientists, but not women, or those who

are women scientists, but not Indians, which is why there is a certain

universality about the admittedly personal observations in this talk.

I should also add that the reason why I am giving this talk in

such a distinguished forum is that I am now personally easy about

its subject matter; put simply, I am older than I used to be,

and this is at least in part the reason that

I need to struggle far less than I used to have to,

in order to be heard. This on the other hand puts on me a

responsibility

to be able to give voice to the problems of those suffering

gender/racial

biases which are still ongoing, whose continuing bitterness would

not allow them to be taken seriously in a dispassionate forum such

as this one.

It has also been my good fortune to forge very strong alliances,

across the gender/generational/racial spectrum, which have helped

me to overcome hostility at a personal level; at a collective level,

these links have allowed me to be

heard with empathy

by those whose life experiences on the other side of various

divides

have been rather different from mine.

Let me repeat the question that my French colleague had asked,

in a more impersonal way -

why are women, and/or people from developing countries

treated less seriously in an academic forum (of which science is

one,

but not a unique example) than a man and/or someone from

the developed world would be? Let me add another question:

why, in most of the seminars that I attend as a practising

physicist,

are many women afraid of asking sensible questions, when many men

are not afraid of showing their ignorance rather loudly, or

to ask questions which can be paraphrased as 'I ask, therefore I am'?

(In the following

I will use quotes to denote `women' as shorthand

for women/people from developing countries, with in turn

'men' denoting men/people from developed countries).

Now, instead of giving the stock answers that

are usually produced at this point,

let me say that we (`women' as defined above)

are late starters in science, and naturally have not had the cumulative

time required to put us as easily at par with our 'male'

colleagues. I will admit that just as one is more likely

to find students ready for Oxbridge in elite public schools

in England rather than in comprehensive schools, one is perhaps

more likely to find more natural scientists, trained

to perfection in their objectivity, among 'men' than `women'.

However, even in this probabilistic scenario, it must be conceded

that there might well be some deserving

'women' who have clambered up

a rather difficult path and attained a point of some professional

visibility. Their reluctance to

ask questions at other peoples' seminars, or the audience's

still slightly patronising responses to their own seminars,

can only be put down to the mindsets of the audience,

which are conditioned (unconsciously, in most cases)

to suspect their intellectual training.

This is based largely on the following reasoning:

given the late starter phenomenon in science,

more 'women' than otherwise would be likely

to be weak in their conceptual backgrounds in science,

thus more 'likely' to give ill-conceived talks,

to ask questions based on misunderstanding.

However,

there is also a question of cultural or gender-based diversity.

There are ways of self-expression that are unique to 'women',

that are distinct from 'men' - for example a certain enthusiasm

or impulsiveness of expression is rather more common, even in

scientific talks, to people from tropical countries,

or to women (regarded as women rather than as 'women'),

which carries no external value, and is no more or no less

indicative of the content of the talk than the more stony-faced

countenance typical of more temperate climes, or of men.

Unfortunately the vast preponderance of the latter among

the rungs of successful scientists has created an image

of the 'scientific countenance' where scientific

objectivity is sometimes linked to a neutrality, or even

a lack, of expression and expressiveness.

What are the ways out of this situation?

Equality of perception is clearly the objective,

but this is not a solution; one needs to

suggest the means of attaining this equality.

An oft-suggested and sometimes implemented

remedy has been affirmative

action. However, even as a person who is

a 'woman' both from the gender and the

racial points of view, I have strong reservations

about this. First because

it only adds, however unfairly, to the perception of women

as 'weaker' - thus even a woman who has justifiably

made it to the upper echelons of science research or administration,

without the need for affirmative action will, in an institution

where affirmative action would normally be implemented,

be seen as someone who was pushed up unfairly

against a more deserving male candidate. In her professional

interactions, she will have a greater degree of

explicit or unstated hostility than she would in an institution

where there was no affirmative action. Since the point of

affirmative action is at least in part to eliminate

such prejudice, it is then counter-productive, since

NO appointments of women, however deserving,

would then be immune to hostility and doubt.

The second point is that, in order to be eligible for

the benefits of affirmative action, the 'woman'

concerned must have attained at least some degree of visibility;

if she then NEEDS to have the extra leg-up of affirmative

action, she is likely not to be deserving of it.

An example that comes to mind in this context

concerns the admission of students to medical colleges

in my country about twenty years ago. Special reservations

were made for students of low caste or students from villages:

however, the upshot of this was that rich and rather

undeserving students of intermediate or low caste

were able to use the regulations in their favour to gain

admission to medical colleges. A couple of instances

will illustrate this: one concerned the daughter

of a very influential Central Government minister (himself

a token appointee for his 'low' caste),

who was, as can be imagined, extremely well connected;

her low marks notwithstanding, she gained admission

to one of the most prestigious medical colleges in the country,

because she was able to use the 'caste card' as well

as the 'woman card' in her favour.

Another instance was when a friend, resident in my city,

used her father's country home in the suburbs as her legal

address, to apply for admission to a medical college - which

would have been refused her had she applied from her real city

address. A rather unfortunate throwback to all of this

can be seen in the recent trend in my city, where doctors

whose graduation dated from about twenty years ago, and who

have low-caste surnames, are avoided, not because of caste

prejudice, but because their clientele assume (often wrongly) that they

were undeserving beneficiaries of affirmative action! Finally, on this

topic, I would like to say that those 'women' who succeed

deservingly do often have to be three times as good as the `men'

around them, given the state of society - there is a feeling

then of insult being added to injury when they too are brought

within the general ambit of suspicion caused by affirmative

action, when they would perhaps be far too proud ever to

have considered availing of any such consideration, when they

would typically want to be considered on their merits alone. The only

affirmative action that I think is generally free of these

drawbacks is that which is implemented at inception; at the school

level, for example, girls, or people from the developing world,

or low castes, or poor people, should all have the same

opportunities - but of course this needs a utopian world!

A second possible, if partial, solution

is freedom of circulation. For example,

exchanges between the developing and the developed

world, or the ability for women to be trained in male-dominated

scientific environments via hand-holding programmes, could

be seen to provide avenues for freer professional development,

for the liberation of both 'men' and 'women' from traditional

mindsets.

This is of course a good, as well as an ongoing method

of solution - but

not one without its problems, the most obvious

one being that it causes a brain drain. It is difficult for

people who have made the transition from being perceived

as 'women' in science to being 'men' in science, to return

to situations where these perceptions would be reversed.

Once again, I speak from personal experience as an Indian woman

scientist

who took the decision to return to my roots after 17 years

in the west, and at least initially encountered problems of perception

both in India and in the west.

In the case

of certain colleagues at home, and to do with

many instances apart from my own, there were jealousies

associated with education and training in the west,

and claims were even made

that these long stints abroad were the reason that our

papers continued to be published in reputable journals after our

return!

In the case of colleagues in the west, there was at least for

an initial couple of years, a feeling that a return to India

would diminish one's productivity, a feeling that

this was associated with the environment rather than the

individual: if, then, a 'woman' returned

to an environment of 'women' both in the gender and in the

racial sense, would not her future productivity

be doomed? In both cases, once again, it was freedom

of circulation which corrected some of these perceptions

; although based in India,

I and many returning scientists like myself, continue

to be associated with western institutions of research which

we visit regularly. I should mention that the role of

the UNESCO-funded Institute of Theoretical Physics at Trieste,

set up precisely to promote free circulation of scientists,

to reassure them of continuing contact with the west, and thus

to counter the brain drain, has been utterly crucial for this.

More and more scientists in India, for example, now choose to

return to good places in their countries rather than, for instance,

opting

to stay on in second-rate places in the west;

this trend has led to a growing perception of

India as a scientifically developed country.

Freedom of

circulation

has in this sense brought about a partial success story;

scientists

from at least some parts of the developing world, are beginning

to be taken as seriously as their counterparts in the developed

world. In this sense, at least some 'women'

are benefiting in perceptual terms, although

the women among them may not always be as lucky.

There is also another, somewhat subtler, problem;

'women' or more generally minorities who have been

able to climb the professional ladder are sometimes

less than sympathetic to those of their kind who

are starting the same process; partly in a desire to conform

to the establishment (to become 'honorary men', in some sense),

so that they are viewed as part of a suitably defined 'old boys'

network', and partly because of a sense of insecurity that the

next incumbent might be more

successful,

occupy more of the limelight, than themselves, that the share

of the visibility cake for each 'woman' might decrease

as more and more `women' make it to professional success. This

is often viewed as a typically female trait by uncharitable

male critics, but I would like to emphasise that I have seen

this trait exhibited as often by successful men from developing

countries who have suddenly attained a position of prominence

in the developed world; these are sometimes the worst impediments

to the professional development of young people from developing

countries, and their prior knowledge of the latter's backgrounds is often

used to convince colleagues from the developed world of the

unworthiness

of the young aspirants in question.

Despite these problems, however, it is clear

that the maximising of exchange between the different

communities that I loosely label 'men' and 'women'

is what, in time, will contribute significantly to the lowering

of barriers, to minimising the strangeness of one community

vis-a-vis the other, to make for a better understanding of the

complementary roles that all of us can play together

in the pursuit of science.

In part this freedom of circulation is precisely what

leads to the links of the

enlightened across nations, genders and generations.

Once again, drawing on my personal experience and that of similar

individuals, it seems to me that there is in fact

a network of people

cutting across all barriers,

who are instrumental in recognising, and extending a hand

to, another kindred spirit, no matter what the diversity of

background

in each case. These links are not just essential, it seems

to me that they are possibly the only foolproof way of correcting

false perceptions, of rooting into society in general

more unbiased attitudes towards minorities or newcomers of any sort. This

is possibly why I tend to regard with some reservations

the formation of women-only societies in the sciences,

which has become customary in some universities in the US, for

example - these reinforce barriers, and by excluding

the very people whose perceptions need changing, they are

detrimental

to their own cause. Even if the perceived militancy of such societies

is able to ensure a couple of affirmative action positions,

(and in any case it is not clear, for the reasons mentioned above,

that these will go to deserving people), they will be regarded with

suspicion and mistrust; while they might occasionally influence the

actions of the majority community, they will never influence their hearts

and minds, or in particular their perceptions. Links of the

enlightened, formed typically personally and by coincidence,

are, on the other hand, a real, if not a reliable way of making progress; setting

them in stone, or creating official societies for this purpose,

is counterproductive since this takes away the element

of spontaneity

which can unite generations,

genders

and nationalities. Of course such random events (we call

them stochastic processes in physics!) which depend

on like-minded people meeting each other in the right

circumstances,

are bound to be few and far between compared to those

for which official channels exist; but given the demerits

of officialdom, and given the divisiveness that results

from making things mandatory, I think that such individualistic processes merit the

patience which must accompany them.

At the basis of these 'networks of the enlightened'

is of course universality; that word which conjures up

what all of us think or sense or experience in unison

when confronted with life's turns, irrespective of our respective

backgrounds. In the context of this talk, this is

what allows a man to believe that although the scientist

in front of him is of a different gender, what she says

'makes sense', i.e. it is at one with his intellectual perception.

Even where he may not agree with her scientific viewpoint,

it is universality which allows him to respect her intellect enough

in order for him to accept that discussion or argument with, rather than

dismissal of, a differing viewpoint, is in order. It is this

that allows a starting scientist from a developing country

to be respected by a senior scientist from a developed country,

despite the obvious lack of training and experience in one

case relative to the other. Once again let me draw

on a personal experience to illustrate this point; as a starting

postdoctoral scientist in Cambridge, I was somewhat in awe of my

research supervisor, an extremely distinguished scientist

with one of the most brilliant minds that I have encountered.

What I had expected was that he would treat me with

condescension and reserve, and in this I was wrong; his manner

with me lacked any airs whatsoever, and, on the contrary,

I felt that he provoked me on scientific and social matters wherever

possible. My initial scientific

discussions with him were characterised by his

assertion

that he didn't believe a word of what I'd said;

however this was said without condescension, and with

sufficiently much of a twinkle in his eye that I felt

propelled, even emboldened, to defend my point of view. It was only much later

that I realised that he used these tactics to sort the wheat

from the chaff, that in essence he lost intellectual

respect for those who did NOT challenge him, and who

had no intellectual fidelity or consistency when attacked;

and after we had established this 'equality' on the battlefield

of ideas, I started, and continue to enjoy, a relationship

based on close intellectual and personal ties with him. His method

of establishing universality with his research associates,

though based on a jocular `dismissiveness', has been

an effective one which has united generations, genders

and nationalities, which has allowed him to interact closely

with those who are far junior, far less trained than himself. It is

clear that this happens

because he senses a universality of intellectual perception,

is able to imagine a unified scientific goal,

across a plethora of social, cultural

and scientific barriers.

This universality of perception, where it exists,

is of course based on a respect

for

cultural diversity: it needs the liberty, liberalism and tolerance

of an unfettered mind

to imagine that

not all originators

of good scientific thought come from from the same social,

economic,

sexual and cultural backgrounds. This freedom from prejudice

is of course characteristic of the true intellectual objectivity

from which all good science originates, and it thus usually

characterises

those whose scientific research is outstanding; few outstanding

scientists in one's experience are, as a result,

grudging of the place they

need to make for others, be they women or other minorities,

who are deserving of acclaim. This is often a consequence of their

own security of personality, where they are confident of themselves

to the point that they do not question the integrity of others

without

good reason. On the contrary, it is often, unfortunately, those

who are themselves discriminated against, who transmit this

discrimination

to people more vulnerable than themselves. Two examples, both from a social

rather than a scientific background, come to mind: one concerns

Mahatma Gandhi's statement when he was told that a certain

villager (an untouchable, or 'Harijan', as Gandhi termed members

of this caste) epitomised the lowest of the low in India, being

poor and socially at the bottom of the pyramid. No,

said Gandhi, it was not this villager who epitomised the lowliest

of the low in India, but the villager's wife....

The other example concerns the name of a popular telenovella in

India, which translates as "Because the mother-in-law was

also once a daughter-in-law", which epitomises the conflict

between the oppressor and the oppressed in India's

very patriarchal society; in this case, this is done by drawing

attention to the fact that the oppressor was also once the

oppressed,

that in a sense the worst oppressors are often those who have

themselves

been oppressed. Scientific analogues are easy to find: some of

the worst misogynists in what is often thought of as the scientific

fraternity are to be found in developing countries, where the

combination

of somewhat macho traditions in many cases, and the experience

of racial discrimination from colleagues in the developed world,

make for a lethal cocktail of insecurity and prejudice, leading

to statements that are at the same time absurd and

shocking.

One such example

concerned a conference organised in my country, where

I was appalled to hear the chairman

say as part of his welcome address, that his work with a certain

female student was incomplete because, I quote, 'it had been a mistake to

take

her on'. We should all realise, he'd said, nodding sagely and with

a rather comical insouciance, that female students would always

up and marry at the first available opportunity, and

give up scientific research as soon as this happened; they were

thus, in his view,

a deeply

unprofitable bet when it came to conducting scientific research.

This disrespect for diversity, in the gender sense, came from

a man who, as I was later to find out, regularly attributed his

lack

of a good publication record, to racial discrimination in Western

journals, to their alleged lack of respect for HIS cultural diversity.

The role of traditional attitudes and traditional

knowledge is important to discuss in this context. While,

especially

in the biosciences, there is an increasing regard for traditional

knowledge in what is now the developing world, the same logic does

not

necessarily hold for the physical sciences. Herbal remedies which

are part of traditional folklore in eastern societies are now being

patented in the west (an excellent example being the patenting

of turmeric, long known for its medicinal properties in India,

by an Indian-American company in the US), so that traditional

knowledge

in this area is a great asset to many pharmaceutical companies. On

the other hand, apart from the much touted invention of zero, and

some knowlege of astronomy, the ancients in the eastern world have

not

been a particularly fruitful source for ideas in the physical

sciences. It is

unfortunate, given this,

that some of the (less successful) scientists in the

developing world hold forth in print as well as orally, on how all

of modern science was predicted by ancient eastern scriptures - the

more erudite among them

find support in the last chapter of Schrodinger's essay 'What is

Life',

which argues in favour of a connection between quantum mechanics

and eastern philosophies, without realising that even great

scientists

ought to be allowed their speculative moments in peace, without

the need to have their every word weighed and taken as gospel

truth.

The less erudite jump on every conceivable populist bandwagon

without the need even for this minimal justification; once again

two examples in my country come to mind. The first concerns

a serious campaign some years ago by a number of 'scientists'

to support the occurrence of

a so-called miracle, when statues of the Hindu god

Ganesha allegedly drank milk

for the period of two days (rather coincidentally, this happened

just after

a `miracle' in Italy when a Madonna allegedly spouted blood for two

days - this coincidence has been attributed by sceptics

in both countries

to the speed of the internet);

happily there was a counter-campaign by more rational scientists

in India who countered these stories by introducing the ideas

of capillarity to the general public, whereby porous materials

such as clay can absorb quantities of liquid. The second, which

is much more recent, is the deeply regrettable instance of the

University

Grants Commission in India seeking to introduce courses in

astrology

and palmistry as part of the educational brief of the basic

sciences,

when research funding in the more conventional sciences

is being cut across the board from all scientific institutions. In

both instances, it is scientists (of whatever pedigree) who have

proposed

these unscientific projects, on the basis that traditional

knowledge

in older societies can still provide the forefront of scientific

knowledge;

in both cases, apart from the individuals' unfortunate beliefs,

there

is a cynical calculation that such proposals will find favour with

the unsophisticated majority, and hence will please the politicians

who rule us all. Another deeply regrettable consequence of such

actions is that the idiocy of a few will taint the reputations

of their compatriots, that developing countries will continue

to be viewed as unscientific societies where voodoo and snakecharmers

masquerading as `traditional knowledge' guide the thinking of

practising

scientists.

While therefore not discounting

traditional knowledge per se, I would appeal to rational

people across national and gender barriers

not to give traditional knowledge more than its rational due,

and equally, not to judge entire nations by the arrant lunacy with

which their senior functionaries, in some cases,

trumpet the role of traditional

knowledge in their societies.

Much of the same reasoning holds for traditional attitudes:

despite the rather interesting trend in many developing countries

of women forming a substantial fraction of science students, and

even of college lecturers, there are relatively few senior women

researchers

in these societies. This trend of very few

women in senior scientific positions is also common in many western

European countries, and it is only gradually being combated

in the United States through, alas, affirmative action. It

indicates that social traditions in patriarchal societies

(which are least present in some sense, in the US, because of

an aggressive free-spiritedness and litiginousness in that part of

the world) can run

counter,

even in the elite and supposedly objective world of the sciences,

to the interests of women and minorities, and impede the free

development of such talents as they might possess. Even where

women or racial minorities are allowed to rise, they are

often required

to be 'docile',

to be suitably `grateful' to their male mentors; an unwillingness

to behave in these ways

has caused more than one

among my women colleagues in different societies to be accused

of being 'too independent', an interesting turn of phrase which I

have

never heard applied to a man. Also, questions during scientific seminars

which would be regarded as incisive and intelligent by men,

are, across national barriers, regarded as aggressive

(for that, also read unfeminine), in a woman. Once again,

it has to be admitted that

societies which are referred to, somewhat disparagingly,

as `having no traditions or cultures', or being `new societies',

are precisely the ones which are the least guilty of afflicting

their minorities with prejudicial baggage. This is not to disregard

the importance of traditions or traditional attitudes in scientific

or social matters in any society: but simply to say that the

unthinking

application of many traditional proclivities can lead even in

the abstruse practice of the sciences, to anachronisms that are

unworthy

of the scientific spirit.

The scientific spirit is, and should always remain, characterised

by an openness of outlook, a freedom of inquiry, a curiosity which

goes beyond conditioning and prejudice. This after all is how

nature is probed in all her complexity, since prejudice would

reduce

our research to the level of superstition; mythology is based

on preferred views of how life originated, while cosmology takes

a more objective stance. When transferred to the realms of human

interaction, this attitude demands the absence of prior

expectations

based on the racial or sexual origins of a colleague; this is why

the prevalence of discrimination, however subtle, is far more

glaring or painful in our field than it would be in one where

subjectivity is allowed to play a legitimate role, such as where

market forces are involved. Part of the scientific attitude,

again by contrast to industry or market-related endeavours,

should also involve a freedom of research, where research

directions

can lead to arbitrary results. This is where, ironically enough,

developing countries still allow for 'basic research' in a way

that is getting increasingly difficult to do in more developed and

product-oriented societies; I find for example that I am less

harrassed by my superiors to get grants from industry than my

colleagues

are in Britain and the United States (France has always been

a bit special in having the CNRS system, and long may it retain

this!), when they typically have to appeal, however falsely,

to a technological product, in order to explore certain basic

research directions. Of course the reason for this is not

a greater open-mindedness on the part of Indian bureaucrats, but

the rather sadder fact that industry is not as developed in the

developing

world by definition, and that industrialists in the developing

world

are in general rather less open to having scientific research as a part of

their sponsored

activities. However, a relatively fortunate consequence of

this sorry state of affairs, is that in general there IS freedom

of research in developing countries, even if the requisite

facilities (such as libraries or computers)

are often locally unavailable.

These facilities, can, however, be shared across unequally balanced

societies, thanks to the Internet - this advance in technology

has probably been the largest single factor in recent

years which has contributed to the levelling of the playing

field of scientific research. With the access to information

that is freely available there, with the advent of scientific