Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
variation runs to bell-type curves. There's an average value of any
quality, and smaller numbers of people running off in both
extremes.
Some stereotyping is the result of not controlling the variables,
of forgetting what other factors might be in play. For example, it
used to be that there were almost no women in science. Many
male scientists were vehement: this proved that women lacked the
ability to do science. Temperamentally, it didn't fit them, it was
too difficult, it required a kind of intelligence that women don't
have, they're too emotional to be objective, can you think of any
great women theoretical physicists? . . . and so on. Since then the
barriers have come tumbling down. Today women populate most
of the subdisciplines of science. In my own fields of astronomy and
planetary studies, women have recently burst upon the scene,
making discovery after discovery, and providing a desperately
needed breath of fresh air.
So what data were they missing, all those famous male scientists
of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier who had pronounced so
authoritatively on the intellectual deficiencies of women? Plainly,
society was preventing women from entering science, and then
criticizing them for it, confusing cause and effect:
You want to be an astronomer, young woman? Sorry.
Why can't you? Because you're unsuited.
How do we know you're unsuited? Because women have never
been astronomers.
Put so baldly, the case sounds absurd. But the contrivances of
bias can be subtle. The despised group is rejected by spurious
arguments, sometimes done with such confidence and contempt
that many of us, including some of the victims themselves, fail to
recognize it as self-serving sleight of hand.
Casual observers of meetings of sceptics, and those who glance
at the list of CSICOP Fellows, have noted a great preponderance
of men. Others claim disproportionate numbers of women among
believers in astrology (horoscopes in most 'women's' but few
'men's' magazines), crystals, ESP and the like. Some commentators
suggest that there is something peculiarly male about scepticism.
It's hard-driving, competitive, confrontational, toughminded
- whereas women, they say, are more accepting,
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