Even Science Has Blind Spots

Having blown off taking my science Gen Ed all throughout college, I thought it might be refreshing to attend a lecture on HIV with my friend for her class. As a Social Studies concentrator, I was surprised that, during a 30-minute introduction on the history of HIV, the disproportionate impact the HIV epidemic has on gay men and the immoral inaction of world leaders like Ronald and Nancy Reagan were not mentioned once.

My friend became visibly angry when the lecturer described her research in South Africa and attributed the HIV epidemic there to the mistakes of 14-year-old girls. For some reason, she told us, these girls were incapable of asking their partners to wear condoms. A violent culture against women was never discussed as a contributing factor to the crisis despite the fact that, in a study conducted by South Africa’s Medical Research Council, over 25% of South African men reported that they have committed rape at least once, and the current president Jacob Zuma was acquitted from a rape trial after telling the court that his accuser had dressed provocatively.

The lecturer capped off her presentation by demonstrating to us that people in the United States still get HIV, showing us a picture of Charlie Sheen. Forget the 1.2 million people in the United States, disproportionately people of color and gay men, that currently live with the disease: Once the straight, white star of "Two and a Half Men" has HIV, it is time to start paying attention.

My friend tells me that the blatant social unawareness exhibited in the HIV lecture was not an isolated instance within the Harvard science community. In another course that dealt with HIV, she was taught about the risks of HIV transmission via male-male and male-female sex. Transmission for female-female sex was completely ignored, erasing the experiences of women who have sex with women. In her Harvard-affiliated lab in Boston, a co-worker expressed her puzzlement that all the men in the lab had kids, but none of the women did. The possibility that the burden generally put on women to care for children might derail the women’s careers apparently did not occur to her.

Of course, scientists are susceptible to overlooking social realities outside of Harvard, too. But Harvard’s occasional contribution to such neglect is noteworthy because of Harvard’s self-identification as a world leader in both academic and social progress.

This aloofness from social realities—which is by no means ubiquitous but still frequent—can prevent science from doing its job. From the huge disparities in HIV rates across demographics to the striking gender gap in scientific disciplines, society is less safe and equitable when scientists do not engage with history, sociology, and politics. The “objectivity” that scientists defend in their work can sometimes serve as an illegitimate excuse for not engaging with their own blind spots.

For example, the debate on the gender gap in science is dominated by questions about cognitive and behavioral genetics (see former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summer’s speech or “the Google memo”), even though scholarly works like Myths of Gender have long ago exposed the faultiness of much of the literature alleging inherent intellectual differences between men and women. More focus on gender-based barriers in the workplace—such as the lack of adequate family leave which disproportionately affects women—could help provide a more accurate explanation for such gender gaps.

Instead of relying too much on “objective” scientific studies to base their conclusions, some scientists—and people writ large—also need to become more cognizant of their biases. A 2013 Yale study showed that—when shown two identical applications—physicists, biologists, and chemists were more likely to hire a man and pay them $4,000 more on average. At Harvard, the Mathematics Department has come under fire for its extreme gender disparity and its unwelcoming environment for female students that has discouraged many women from taking its courses.

While math and science can certainly give us a better understanding of objective reality and advance social progress, the ways that people instrumentalize math and science cannot be divorced from their own biased purposes. It is this fact—that humans are animals of prejudice—that must always be kept in mind if science and its implementation are to become more effective and inclusive.

My hope is that, in an increasingly “post-truth” world, we work to avoid wielding a fallacious “objectivity” stripped of valuable insights from the social sciences.

Reed T. Shafer-Ray ’18 is a Social Studies concentrator in Quincy House.