Women in Science Class Draws Few

Last spring’s groundswell of student interest in female scientists didn’t necessarily translate into the classroom yesterday, as the sociology department’s new undergraduate course on women in science attracted exactly 10 shoppers—all of them female.

The department has avoided casting the course, Sociology 163, “Women and Science: Sociological Aspects,” as a direct response to University President Lawrence H. Summers’ remarks on gender differences and “intrinsic aptitude.” But both the course head and the department head acknowledged yesterday that the debate sparked by that speech, which Summers gave at an economics conference in January, makes the course more timely.

“There was a huge upsurge of interest in the topic, of course, because of that debate, but the course is only in some respects related to it,” said Lecturer on Sociology Gerhard Sonnert, who teaches the course. “The main elements are more theoretical and empirical on the topic on a wider scale.”

Sonnert, who is also a research associate in the Physics Department, has been looking into the fate of promising female scientists since the late 1980s. He helped lead a large-scale study 15 years ago that examined the “career outcomes” of men and women pursuing two of the nation’s most prestigious post-doctoral fellowships.

The survey found that while the genders were almost equally successful in biology, women still performed significantly worse than men in other disciplines, “even among that select group.”

The course—the first one Sonnert has ever led—“kind of bubbled up based on the debates on campus and also the notion that it’s an issue intellectually anyway that has long been looked at in sociology,” said the sociology department’s new chair, Ford Professor of the Social Sciences Robert J. Sampson.

Sonnert said that former Sociology Department Chair Mary C. Waters asked him last year what courses he could teach.

“Women in science was one of the courses that I mentioned, and that was the one they felt they wanted me to do,” Sonnert said.

The syllabus itself recalls the campus events that influenced the new course: the third assignment, worth 20 percent of the final grade, is a “10-page Memorandum to a fictitious university president about what, in the student’s opinion, the main problem in the area of women and science is and how it might be remedied.”

At least one student at yesterday’s lecture, Amanda L. Shapiro ’08, said she was attending “probably because of the Larry Summers debate.”

But another, Brianne C. Janacek ’07, said her goal was to find a course that “fits my schedule and my interests in the women and gender studies areas.”

And what about the lack of Y chromosomes in the room?

“This is kind of typical of a course that has to do with sex and gender,” Janacek said.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.