On History, STEM, and Exclusion

Richard Mehlinger
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

A few days ago, Sarah Jeong published an excellent post on gender and racial inequality in the technology industry, titled “Science Doesn’t Explain Tech’s Diversity Problem — History Does”. Her analysis is, as usual, incisive and brilliant.

If you haven’t read it, do. Right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Done? Good. I agree pretty much entirely with the substance of her argument. What I want to do is riff on the point she raises in her title. I want to dive into the reasons why men like DaMore insist on reaching for science to explain inequality, when history offers all the explanation needed. The reason is two-fold, and curiously self-reinforcing. DaMore and his ilk reach for “science” not to explain inequality but to justify it, whereas an analysis of the history, as Jeong shows, reveals the utter injustice of the present state of affairs.

There’s a strong current of scientism among certain elements of STEM/nerd culture, which leads to contempt for non-scientific epistemologies. And, pace Marx and Asimov, history will never be a scientific discipline. To do history well is to remain rooted in the particularities of moments, events, cultures, and to resist the urge to universalize. More than that, even among scientific epistemologies, deductive, a priori reasoning seems to be prized far above inductive reasoning.

The “hardest” and most highly valued fields are theoretical physics, mathematics, and computer science — fields almost completely built on deductive, axiomatic reasoning. Biology, on the other hand, which is a highly particularistic field, one very dependent on lab and field work, is considered “soft”. Ironic, considering how much more likely one is to lose fingers in a chemistry lab or a biology field expedition than at the blackboard.

What is interesting about this epistemological arrogance is that it is itself gendered. For “hard” or “soft”, read “masculine” or “feminine”. Not coincidentally, the “softness” of a field tracks pretty strongly with how female representation within that field. And, naturally, the hard sciences are taken more seriously and more highly valued, as being both more rigorous and more difficult.

These are the fields that most exemplify the stereotypical lone male genius like Newton, Leibniz, or Einstein, and that have the heaviest gender imbalances. That the occasional outlier such as Emmy Noether, George Washington Carver, or Alan Turing is occasionally admitted to the pantheon — after facing and overcoming terrible discrimination — becomes a justification for inaction within these fields. “See! Anyone can make it, no matter the challenges!” cry straight white men like James DaMore, who to my knowledge has never been faced discrimination for his race or gender, let alone chemical castration.

Interestingly, the field which gender essentialists like DaMore reach for most frequently is evolutionary psychology, a subfield of biology and thus what one might expect to be termed a “soft” science. However, much of “evolutionary” science follows the pattern of the “hard” sciences — odd, considering that it is arguably a subfield of biology, and that historical methods of reasoning seem distinctly better suited than a priori reasoning.

But evolutionary psychology hews more closely to the pattern of the hard sciences. It’s luminaries are “great men” like Dawkins and Pinker, who, though undoubtedly brilliant within their fields, show that same tendency toward deductive hypothesizing, especially when they pontificate about fields other than their own. A great deal of work in this field seems to be a kind of bias laundering, in which scientific explanations are used to argue that present day inequalities are “natural” and thus, justified or at the very least incorrigible.

So if even biology is considered “soft”, how seriously will fields like history and anthropology be taken? Not very — especially considering . Indeed, they are frequently rejected not merely as soft, but as “subjective” — as opposed to the supposedly objective, “neutral” deductive reasoning whose advocates almost always seem to be white men.

These faux-rationalists are, of course, right to be afraid of history and the humanities. One of the great projects of the humanities in the past fifty years has been the decentering of the straight white man, and the systematic demolition of “objective” narratives of history. This is not, as the DaMorites would have it, an attack on the idea of truth, but rather an attack on the idea that the straight white man is the norm against which all other individuals are to be compared, and the idea that the norms of our society (or any society) are in any way natural.

Which is why it’s so much easier — and safer — to reach for dime store evolutionary psychology and gussied up, rebranded eugenics than to do the work of serious critical inquiry into the history of our industry. This is especially true when you’ve coded a priori, axiomatic reasoning as masculine, men’s work, and field work like archive diving as women’s work.

So we have a toxic feedback loop: the epistemologies that explain gender and racial disparities in tech and point the way toward how we might correct them are rejected precisely because they are coded as feminine.

How very convenient.

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