follow-up on Lawrence

Re yesterday’s post:

It’s an interesting essay. I think Science were right to reject it on the basis that it presented no positive suggestions for action. One could be left with only the message that the status quo is acceptable in some situations, if we accept that men and women bring different plates to the table.

The way I see it, there are a number of issues here.

1. The degree to which men and women are different at different things. I have no problem with this. Men and women ARE different. Different bits, different brains, different developmental experiences.
2. Where those differences come from and how they develop. I’m unable to discern what sort of take the author has here and to what degree he thinks in terms of nature/nurture and biology = unchangeable.
3. The culture of academia and how it favours certain traits–something which has a history in itself. With respect to the question of why all the women disappear as one moves into more senior positions, I think this is actually vastly more relevant than any on-average “suitability”.
4. “Is” and “Ought”. Just because women may be on-average more (for example) nurturing, doesn’t mean we ought to be happy with a predominance of women psychologists. The whole concept of “on-average abilities” should surely fly out the window when we are talking about highly skilled/intelligent/trained individuals, because we’re dealing with those people in the upper tail end of their respective curve, not the average 68%. What we should be happy with is an absence of the commercial model in academic culture, one that allows a diversity of people to be thoroughly considered on a number of qualities for any given position.

I was more interested in the mention of creativity and originality in science. It’s a tired old truism that it’s hard to be creative and viable in many areas of science, but I’d like to know what creativity actually means. How could I foster “creative” approaches to my own work? Answers, plz.

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