Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman who Mapped the Ocean Floor

Booklist: Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman who Mapped the Ocean Floor
Hali Felt, Henry Holt and Company, 2012

Description
Her maps of the ocean floor have been called "one of the most remarkable achievements in modern cartography" yet no one knows her name.

Soundings is the story of the enigmatic Marie Tharp, geologist, gifted draftsperson, and the inknown woman behind one of the greatest accomplishments of the twentieth century.

For years most people, including those in the scientific community, thought the ocean floor was a vast expanse of nothingness. In 1948, at age 28, Marie Tharp walked into the newsly formed geophysical lab at Columbia University and practically demanded a job.

The scientists at the lab were all male, the women who worked there were relegated to secretary or assistant. Thruogh sheer willpower and obstinacy, Marie was given the job of interpreting the soundings (records of sonar pings measuring the ocean's depths) brought back from the oceangoing expeditions of her male colleagues.

The marriage of artistry and science behind her analysis of these dry data gave birth to a major work: the first comprehensive map of the ocean floor, which laid the groundwork for proving the then controversial theory of continental drift.

When combined. Marie's scientific knowledge, her eye for detail, and her skill as an artist revealed not a vast empty plane but an entire world of mountains and volcanoes, ridges and rifts, and a gateway to the past that allowed scientists the means to imnagine how the continents and the oceans had been created over time.

Just as Marie dedicated more than twenty years of her professional life to what became the Lamont Geological Observatory, engaged in the task of mapping every ocean on Earth, she dedicated her personal life to her great friendship with her coworker Bruce Herzen. Partners in work and, in many ways, partners in life, Marie and Bruce were devoted to each other as they rose to greater and greater prominence in the scientific community, only to be envied and finally dismissed by the head of their beolved institute.

They went on together, refining and perfecting their work and contributing not only to humanity's vision of the ocean floor but to the way subsequent generations would view the earth as a whole.

With an imagination as intuitive as Marie's. brilliant young writer Hali Felt brings to vivid life the story of the pioneering woman whose work will continue to inspire fellow scientists for generations to come. 

Discriminination - not overt, but there all the same

In the United States of America, girls can be anything they want to be - in the sense that there are no laws that say - "If you enroll in school, we will kill you" which is the case for women in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabi, for example.

Yet there are gender gaps of girls in the sciences. Is it because girls lack math sense, or is it because girls - and boys - have been trained since day one that girls exist as eye candy for boys, girls are worthless unless they have a boyfriend, and girls can't keep a boyfriend if they're too smart.

Which is what girls - and boys - are taught in cartoons during their formative years all the time.

From Sequential Tart: Mad Science for Girls (and Boys),

Part 1:Traditionally, mad scientists are usually male. This has been the case ever since the Frankensteinian dawn of meddling with things man was never meant to know -- although, ironically, the pioneering mad doctor and his patched-together reanimated namesake were both created by a woman, nineteenth century novelist Mary Godwin Shelley.

Despite Mary Shelley's seminal (ovarian?) role in creating the concept of the mad scientist as occasionally unwitting Faustian anti-hero / supervillain, trailblazing female computer visionaries like Ada Lovelace and proto-nuclear chemists like Marie Curie continued to be widely regarded as the exception that proves the rule in real-life STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a corollary of this, the more exotic and problematical realms of fictional super-science have remained an almost exclusively male domain well into the more recent era of archetypal comic book geniuses such as Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom (mad, bad and dangerous to know) and literal "science hero" types such as Marvel's Reed (Mr. Fantastic) Richards and Hank (Ant-Man / Yellowjacket) Pym (who are sometimes none too stable or morally reliable themselves).



Up until the last decade, this tradition of male predominance has also been reflected in the portrayal of kids as mad scientists. Perhaps the best known example of this is Dexter, the elementary school-aged title character of Dexter's Laboratory, which initially aired on Cartoon Network from 1996-1999, with an additional two seasons' worth of new episodes released from 2001-2003. The irritable, antiheroic prepubescent protagonist of this series is a bespectacled, lab-coated junior version of the stereotypical mad scientist, right down to his quasi-Slavic foreign accent.

Since the rest of Dexter's family all act and sound like ordinary suburban Americans, this accent makes little sense within the context of the show except as a deliberate affectation on the boy genius' part. As series creator Genndy Tartakovsky told the New York Times Magazine in a 2001 interview, "[Dexter] considers himself a very serious scientist, and all well-known scientists have accents." However, as the interviewer prodded him to acknowledge, the fact that Tartakovsky's own family immigrated to the U.S. from Russia when he was nine years old suggests that to some extent, the mysteriously Slavic-accented Dexter is "an upgraded fantasy version of your boyhood self."

Dexter operates out of an elaborate Batcave-like, high-tech lab he has somehow managed to construct beneath his family's otherwise ordinary suburban home. This lab features a helpful interactive A.I. of his own invention in the form of the Quadraplex T-3000 Computer. However, neither the soothingly female-voiced A.I. nor any of Dexter's elaborate security measures seem capable of preventing his ditzy older sister Dee Dee from repeatedly gaining access to the supposedly secret lab, frequently swiping and misusing untested new devices or wrecking her brother's experiments by playing around randomly pushing buttons.

Dexter's purely mechanical inventions run the gamut from a flying saucer with pincer-tipped mechanical arms, prominently featured in the show's title sequence, to a variety of robots. These range from a flattery-spouting mechanical parrot, to a "Mom-droid" designed to fill in for Dexter's sick mother, to Dynomutt X-9. The latter is a four-legged android Dexter created to replace his favorite superhero Blue Falcon's fallen canine sidekick. Unfortunately, the robot dog proved to have an excessively severe and ultra-violent Judge Dredd / Punisher-type interpretation of how to enforce the law, so Dexter and its superhero master were eventually forced to destroy it.

Dexter also makes frequent use of various self-created robotic battle suits such as the Dexo-Transformer. This is an imposing pilot-operated mecha that is closer in basic size and function to the towering Transformer-sized Gundams in the anime Gundam Wing than it is to Iron Man's form-fitting high-tech armor, although it is capable of dramatically increasing or decreasing in size. The Dexo-Transformer grants its pilot sufficient artificial super-strength to whale on his similarly battle-suited archrival Mandark, a somewhat more actively evil boy mad scientist who attends the same school, more or less in person. The suit's other offensive capabilities include cannon missiles, dodgeball launchers, and electrical shocks.


The Multi-Forming Megabot, which the Dexter's Laboratory Wiki describes as the pint-sized scientist's greatest invention, is also a giant fighting robot. In this case, the final robot is formed by merging several normally separate piloted vehicles together, in what the Dexter's Lab Wiki refers to as "a parody of the Super Sentai Robots in the East, Power Rangers Zords / Megazords and...other Disney / Hasbro Mecha." With superior balletically-agile maneuverability (perhaps due in part to one of the subordinate pilots being the unintellectual but graceful ballerina-wannabe Dee Dee) and an arsenal that includes twin swords and an energy-ball attack, this immense conglomerated mecha eventually enables Dexter to successfully defeat the giant mutated monster Badaxtra in Japan in the episode "Last But Not Beast."

The boy scientist has also come up with an assortment of much more improbable allegedly scientific discoveries that are virtually indistinguishable from magic. These include a so-called life potion, which Dee Dee appropriates to bring her stuffed animals -- and, eventually, even small appliances and pieces of furniture -- to life, and a hypnosis pen, designed for writing notes that will compel anyone who reads them to follow the writer's instructions (to go do all his household chores for him so he can complete his experiments in peace and quiet, in Dexter's case). Naturally, this, too, falls into the wrong hands. Like a slightly more benign variation on the deadly cursed notebook in the manga Death Note, the pen winds up being thoroughly misused by Dee Dee, by Dexter's secretly sentient pet monkey, and by Mandark, who gleefully scribbles instructions for Dexter to destroy his own lab and for Dee Dee, the object of Mandark's decidedly unrequited crush, to reluctantly kiss him.

As the author of the Dexter's Laboratory Wikipedia article points out, "Despite her hyperactive personality, Dee Dee sometimes makes more logical decisions than Dexter, or even gives him helpful advice." However, Dee Dee's standard "destruction in a pink tutu" M.O., coupled with the fact that she appears to be the only human female member of the regular cast -- with the exception of the siblings' mom, a woman so cheerfully clueless that she wears her trademark apron and rubber gloves even to Dexter's chess matches -- have an inevitably undermining subliminal effect on the show's presentation of gender. With the polar opposites Dee Dee and Dexter as the essential yin and yang of the show, a feminist viewer would be hard pressed not to conclude that the series' underlying philosophy is that boys are -- or at least potentially can be -- intellectual world conquerors, while girls are more apt to be birdbrained fluffballs who routinely ruin Important Stuff with their silly pirouetting nonsense.

In the course of researching this article, I did discover one Dexter's Laboratory episode that at least initially appeared to strikingly contradict this impression -- "School Girl Crushed," storyboarded and written by Charlie Bean. In this 2003 fourth-season episode, Dexter and Mandark's Dr. Doom / Reed Richards-esque archrivalry is unexpectedly disrupted when a new girl student named Soyen Chen beats out both of them for first prize at the school science fair with her Unified Theory of World Domination and Destruction -- "It's just a simple equation, really" -- displayed on posterboard. "She's beyond technology!" Mandark breathes reverently. "Dealing only in numbers!" Dexter agrees. "A much higher intelligence!" the two of them conclude. "She must be destroyed!"


The admiring and envious boys agree to team up to eliminate this new threat. But every time they get together to set up an ambush for their unwelcome girl-rival, they wind up spending the next seven or eight hours attacking each other with giant tanks, mecha, satellite-based laser cannons and other high-tech weapons instead. Meanwhile, Soyen saunters by on her way to and from Huber Elementary School, making comments like "I thought you guys liked school!" and blithely noting that they've missed an entire day of classes, including a math test on which she got an A+.

After several days of this, Soyen nonchalantly shorts out the electric-powered giant robots Dexter and Mandark are currently facing off in by turning on the sprinkler system on her lawn. Both scorched and singed boys collapse in defeat on the grass, despairingly acknowledging that she has them outclassed at science. Soyen responds, "Science? I'm not even into that stuff any more!" When Mandark uncomprehendingly exclaims, "What else is there?", Soyen flirtatiously replies, "Boys!" This prompts both Dexter and Mandark to make a panicky high-speed exit, pursued by Soyen making kissing noises.

The events of this episode do establish that, contrary to what the airheaded example of Dee Dee might suggest, mad science is not a male-dominated field in Dexter's world due to some sort of inherent intellectual inferiority on the part of the female half of the population. Unfortunately, Soyen's abrupt loss of interest in science once she has discovered boys tends to reinforce the sexist assumption that, I.Q. equality or not, girls are seldom found in the exacting, concentration-intensive STEM fields because they are too prone to distraction over frivolous preoccupations such as chasing boys.

Asked Why There Are So Few Female Physicists, Male Scientists Often Cite Lack of Math Skills. Oh, Really?

From the Mary Sue:  Asked Why There Are So Few Female Physicists, Male Scientists Often Cite Lack of Math Skills. Oh, Really?

Why are their fewer females in physics than biology? Turns out the answer changes depending on whether you ask men or women. A team led by sociologist Elaine Ecklund polled 3,455 scientists on why they think the gender gap in physics is so much larger than in biology, and while women were more likely to cite discrimination, men’s explanation tended more toward “women just suck at math.”
Sigh.

Said one male respondent, a physics graduate student, ”Physics is more difficult for girls and you need a lot of thinking, and the calculation, and the logic. So that’s maybe hard for girls.”
Yes. We ladies just aren’t good with the logic! We’re always so unreasonable, with our tendency to behave irrationally and turn into raving she-beasts, especially around that time of the month, ifyouknowwhatI’msaying. Pass me my Midol!
And compare a male biology professor’s explanation that “On balance [women are] just less interested in math” to the response of a female physics grad student, who noted how a friend of hers ”was always told, ‘Oh, you’re not good at math,’ until she found herself getting As in a multivariable calculus class. You know, she was scared of math all through high school.”
The division was by no means clear-cut between the sexes; some men did cite discrimination as a factor, and some females pointed to innate factors as part of the reason why more females go into biology, though the “innate factor” in question is a desire to connect emotionally to their work, not a lack of mad math skillz. Said one female postdoctoral fellow in biology, “I think women … want to have more of a sense that what they are doing is helping somebody. … Maybe there are more women in … biology [because] you can be like ‘Oh, I am going to go cure cancer.’”
According to Ecklund, the fact “that few men in either discipline emphasized the present discrimination that women in science may face (and that men in physics hold a much larger share of senior faculty positions) suggests that discrimination is not being adequately addressed in physics departments at top research universities.” Hopefully this study will serve as the wake up call that physics departments need to acknowledge that they have in fact been ignoring what is a very real problem.
Though the fact that so many men apparently still think the puny female mind (note the sarcasm, please) just isn’t equipped to handle higher math is pretty discouraging. Can it be required that every K-12 math classroom have a sign in it saying “DISCLAIMER: Women Don’t Inherently Suck at Math! Just So You Know.” so we can clear this up once and for all? Seriously. There’s no excuse.

 

 

Malayali girl top US scientist

From Deccan Chronicle:   Malayali girl top US scientist

Deepika Kurup, the US based Malayali girl whose scientific project impressed many including President Obama, has been named America’s Top Young Scientist and awarded $25,000 and an adventure trip.
She is the eldest daughter of Dr Pradeep Kurup who teaches in a university at Nashua in New Hampshire and Meena. Deepika developed a sustainable and cost effective water purification system to win the 2012 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge.
‘It feels awesome,’ Deepika told DC over phone from her home. “I put a lot of time and effort into this project and I am happy it got a recognition like this.“
A ninth grader at Nashua High School in New Hampshire, 14-year-old Deepika and nine other finalists worked with leading scientists for the last three months. The idea was to take up a theoretical concept and convert it into an a prototype that would solve a problem in everyday life.
Deepika’s system harnessed solar energy to disinfect contaminated water.
On October 16, the finalists shared their innovations with a panel of judges and also competed in two other challenges. They were evaluated on their knowledge and creativity.
It has been noted that her innovation “can help improve the lives of the 1.1 billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water.” Dr Pradeep, whose parents are settled in Chennai, went to the US in 1983 for higher studies and Meena joined him there in 1994.
On August 18, after Deepika was listed among the 10 finalists for the science contest, the family was called in by President Obama for a chat. The President said he had read a newspaper report about Deepika’s project. Deepika says she would try to refine her prototype further. However it is neurology that interests her more.
“I think brain is the most complex organ and I would like to learn more about it,” says the Harry Potter fan who likes Korean pop songs and plays the clarinet and saxophone. “
Malayali girl top US scientist

 

Celebrating girls for their intelligence and courage

From St. Albert Gazette:  Celebrating girls for their intelligence and courage

October 11, 2012 was the first UN International Day of the Girl. It was a worldwide commemoration of girls’ leadership, potential and capacity in recognition of challenges they face, including violence, oppression and poverty. While I perused the images of celebration, however, I was sadly reminded of other tragic, disturbing and disappointing pictures of girls.
Last June, the European Commission attempted to attract girls to study science by releasing an atrocious video called Science: It's a Girl Thing! Three young girls wearing short skirts and stilettos strut forward on the screen, stopping to pose for an adult male scientist, who looks up from his microscope, removes his glasses and stares intently. The next 40 seconds are flashes of makeup, steam, sunglasses, bubbling water and his even gaze, interrupted with shots of the girls laughing and smiling provocatively. The video was removed quickly after overwhelming negative response to its blatantly sexist nature.
In a different image, Amanda Todd spent years trying to escape a bad decision she made to lift her shirt while on a webcam. An online predator took a photo and widely distributed that picture. The hateful bullying that ensued by youth at school culminated in her choice to hang herself last week. Her despair is exacerbated by the malicious attacks that continued after her death, made by people who wouldn’t stop hurting when there was nothing left to be harmed.
Meanwhile, pictures of Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old Pakistani and advocate for girls’ education, are gripping. I wonder how someone with such youthful innocence and clarity of purpose could be deemed a threat, but the Taliban sees her this way. They shot her in the head and she is now recovering in the U.K. The Taliban deems this dark-eyed child a “spy of the West,” declaring that “Sharia says that even a child can be killed if he is propagating against Islam.”
But one of the most heart-wrenching pictures I have seen of a girl is that of a nameless Sudanese child taken by Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Carter in 1993. The child is alone, collapsed while on her walk to a feeding camp, bent forward in pain and exhaustion, with her face in the dirt and her hands by her head. In the background, a vulture waits patiently. It appears to be only a matter of time before it will have a carcass to devour. While the picture effectively brought the famine to the eyes of the world, the photographer was criticized for not helping the girl after taking the picture. Her fate is unknown.
Regardless of these extremely varied situations, these girls are all presented as objects of ridicule, of desire, of contempt, of attack or of news. Their courage, intelligence, vulnerability or voice is lost when their attackers or recorders reduce them to an image on the screen, without heart, feelings, intellect or merit. This is deeply tragic.
Girls grow in settings around the world where their quest for dignity is thwarted by confusing messages all around them. They are told they are too outspoken, too fat, too smart, too emotional or too independent. They are told to expose themselves or cover themselves; told to be beautiful but to remain silent and submissive. Their success begins from a deficit.
The girl is the representation of humanity, and can embrace compassion, brilliance, courage, wisdom and honour. Let us celebrate her enduring potential by giving her life, respect, support, opportunity, safety and equality. And let us be careful to not limit her to an image on a screen, for any reason.
Dee-Ann Schwanke is a St. Albert resident with five daughters.

 

Lab scientist, marathoner to raise money for MDI girl with rare illness

From Bangor Daily News:  Lab scientist, marathoner to raise money for MDI girl with rare illness

BAR HARBOR, Maine — There are many motivations for people who are planning to run in the 11th annual Mount Desert Island Marathon this weekend.
For most of them, their main motivation likely will not be a 6-year-old girl and a mouse. For several people running in the 26-mile foot race this Sunday, however, it is an opportunity to raise money for research aimed at benefitting a girl with Rett syndrome who lives in Mount Desert.
Eliza Sprague has a distinct mutation of Rett syndrome — the only known documented occurrence of the mutation in the whole world — and scientists at the biomedical research lab are breeding a specific mouse model that will be used to study her condition.
Last year, Eliza’s mother, Meghann Harris, ran the marathon with a goal of raising $25,000 to fund the creation of the mouse model. Harris completed the course and ended up raising $39,000 for the ongoing project and research effort.
“That was the first time I had ever run a race,” Harris said this week. “With [helping] Eliza on my mind, it was easy.”
This year, however, it is employees at the lab who will be running to raise money for Eliza’s cause. The marathon is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 14, on Main Street in Bar Harbor. The race course winds through the villages of Otter Creek, Seal Harbor, Northeast Harbor and Somesville and finishes in Southwest Harbor.
In typical Rett syndrome cases, symptoms manifest at 18 months of age and cause toddlers to regress, losing abilities such as making eye contact, crawling and walking, that they’ve established over the first year and a half of life. Rett patients can live into their 40s but spend much of their lives incommunicative and in a wheelchair.
According to Harris, Eliza was diagnosed with Rett syndrome at 12 months of age, after her family noticed that her daughter wasn’t reaching these normal developmental milestones. But to the surprise of her family and doctors, Eliza did develop these abilities, only at a slower rate than children without Rett syndrome.
Rett syndrome is an autistic spectrum disorder, Harris said, and so presents Eliza with both cognitive and physical challenges. Erratic breathing is one symptom of Rett syndrome, Harris said, which can affect speech and physical coordination. Eliza can walk and talk, though not as well as most children her age.
Harris said Friday that Eliza has responded well to physical therapies, however, and that she and her husband Shawn Sprague have pushed their daughter to pursue them because of the benefits they provide. Harris said her daughter’s ability to stay upbeat and committed to her therapy sessions — for an hour at a time, six times a week — has been an inspiration to her.
“She’s just so strong,” Harris said. “She fights through the difficulties. When I see what she does every day, it only seems right that I match that.”
Harris, who was a soccer player in college, acknowledges that she does have some limits. She is not running the marathon this year but in her place is Cathleen Lutz. Lutz, who has become friends with Harris and Eliza, leads the research team at Jackson Lab that is spearheading the effort to develop a mouse model for mild Rett syndrome cases.
“It’s a very rare case,” Lutz said Wednesday about Eliza’s mutation. “It’s never been reported before.”
Lutz, whose research focuses on neurodegenerative diseases such as Rett syndrome and spinal muscular atrophy, said she first heard about Eliza from her husband, who works at a local bank with the girl’s grandfather.
Through that connection, she said, an appointment was set up for Lutz to meet Eliza and her family.
So when she first met with Eliza and Harris at the local YMCA a year or so ago, she was surprised to see that Eliza could walk, talk and be sociable.
“The first thing I said to Meghann is ‘Are you sure [she has Rett syndrome]?’” she said. “Eliza is very engaged. She’s very active. She’s very strong.”
Lutz was not only struck by Eliza’s particular condition, but she was impressed with Harris’ determination to do something to help her daughter.
When they met, Harris asked Lutz about what kind of research was being done about mild Rett cases such as Eliza’s. According to Lutz, the only mouse models out there are for more severe Rett cases, which would be ineffective for studying more subtle versions of the disease. And the National Institutes of Health, which provides the lab with millions of dollars in research funds, places restrictions on how that funding can be used, she said.
“NIH doesn’t just hand you money to make a new model because you are interested in it,” Lutz said.
So Lutz told Harris that, to begin work on creating a mouse model with the same mutation that causes Eliza’s more mild form of Rett syndrome the lab likely would need $25,000. She was surprised, she said, when Harris said she would raise the money by running in the marathon.
Lutz said she has run marathons before and knows how difficult it is to train effectively and then to run the race. Harris’ determination to do it, without any prior experience, has stayed with the scientist.
“I was very impressed with the fact that she pulled this off,” Lutz said. “She’s really pushing this effort in ways that many parents don’t have the energy to do.”
Lutz said her decision to run this year is out of admiration for Harris’ commitment. Lutz said she will have some company along the way. Other lab employees will be running in the race and have offered to help raise funds for the cause, she said.
Lutz said she and her team have made substantial headway in the past year toward developing the model but still face some technical challenges in bringing it to fruition in the form of a living, breathing mouse. How much time, and how much money, it might take to bring the mild Rett mouse model to life, she does not know.
“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” Lutz said. “We have to back up a step or two [and try again].”
The goal, once researchers have a biologically engineered mouse they can study, is to examine how the syndrome manifests in the mouse — what symptoms it has (if any), how those symptoms might change over time, and what biological factors might affect those symptoms, Lutz said. If enough about the affected mice can be understood, researchers then could begin to test various drugs to see what effect they might have and what kind of effective treatments might be developed.
“It’s probably not going to be a cure,” Lutz said. “It probably will be a treatment of symptoms.”
If developing the mouse model has not been easy, running the marathon on Sunday won’t be any easier, Lutz added. She has competed in marathons over flat terrain before, she said, which she considers “a piece of cake” compared to the MDI Marathon’s hilly course.
Lutz said it has been a few years since she ran a marathon and admitted she is a little scared. But she said she is not too concerned about what her finish time might be.
“It’s more about the camaraderie than it is about the competition,” the scientist said. “And a lot of it is about raising awareness [about Eliza’s condition].”
For information, or to donate money to the project, visit the Facebook page for Run for Eliza and Rett Syndrome.

 

Women in science, you have nothing to fear but your own subconscious

From the Guardian: Women in science, you have nothing to fear but your own subconscious

A few days ago I received an invitation to an afternoon of scientific lectures taking place at my university. The notice was issued by the head of the school, who would host, and consisted of four speakers. The event was to be chaired by a fifth person, and followed by a panel discussion with four additional professors. Ten people in total were taking part – and all of them were men.
I have always been fascinated by the skewed gender ratios at higher levels in the academic life sciences. Unlike disciplines such as physics, chemistry or engineering, where female students are thin on the ground, biology can claim no such shortage of raw professorial material. It is, in fact, positively burgeoning with young women. When I started my PhD in Seattle in 1990, our department was fifty-fifty for both PhD students and post-docs. In the UK, the number of women and men earning undergraduate degrees in the life sciences is also balanced, a trend that carries on into the PhD phase. When you go to international scientific conferences, the audiences are teeming with women – even if the podia usually are not. It is only later that the jaw-dropping attrition begins: the pool of women biologists is whittled away relentlessly until, by the end, only 15% of professors are female¹. Numbers of PhDs awarded in the biological sciences have been largely gender balanced for many years now (over 40% from 1993, according to governmental figures from the United States²), so it is unlikely merely to be a lag at this point. In short, old men are being replaced with younger models.
It's difficult to understand exactly why this happens: there are many possible explanations, and combinations of factors may also come into play. But decades of research in the social sciences, along with the numbers, suggest where not to look for answers. Are men simply better at science, and therefore outcompete women on a level playing field? The equal number of PhD students in biology (and the excellent grades girls achieve in high school) belie this idea, and the notion of female inferiority is rarely voiced these days (except by anonymous commenters in certain online venues).
Is it more personal? Biologists work long hours, and the desire to have a decent work/life balance may drive many women out of the profession of their own accord. The life sciences career path is rife with short-term contracts, which also don't help those wanting to start a family. Meanwhile, a study published in 2010 showed that women scientists shoulder on average approximately twice as many household chores as their male partners, and also bore more childcare responsibilities. This might seem trivial, but it wouldn't help women to compete, either³.
What about sexism? In these more enlightened times – and given the deterrent of university employment tribunals – overt discrimination is probably not the major culprit any more. But in her wonderful book, Why So Slow? Advancement of Women, Virginia Valian painstakingly documents many studies showing the inherent, subconscious bias that both men and women have against female scientists, who unlike men, do not conform to the "schemata" ("capable", "independent", "can-do") that we tend to think of when we envision scientists⁴. Picture a scientist in your head: the image is likely to be male. We're just wired that way. The same wiring causes internal dissonance when we are faced with a female scientist. Schemata are the same pesky things that prompt someone to say "What did he say?" when you mention you've been to see your doctor – even though about 40% of doctors in the UK are women, and are set to outnumber their male counterparts in only a few years.
So it was with great interest that I heard about a new study from Moss-Racusin and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences⁵. The experiment was a variation on the classic name-swapping CV studies (see Valian's book for more on these) which have been used to show that, given an identical bogus CV, people are more likely to prefer candidates if a male name is printed on the top. This randomised, double-blind experiment was performed on 127 scientific faculty from "research-intensive universities" in the US, who agreed to evaluate a potential student-cum-laboratory manager.
The results were eyebrow-raising – though perhaps, given the many studies performed before, not terribly surprising:

"Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent."

The authors go on to suggest that subconscious bias might be overcome, and female participation in science increased, by pre-emptively coaching people on recruitment panels to be aware of their inbuilt biases.
It's an interesting idea, and one that could be used beyond recruiting. Whenever people get together to make scientific decisions involving the evaluation of candidates, like choosing speakers for a lecture series, training might help stop them from naming the first people (i.e. men) who pop into their heads. Instead, they might sit back, take a few deep breaths and have a serious think about who else out there might be truly qualified. It might also help for scientists, of both genders, not to shy away from complaining about committees who apparently lack the originality or persistence to give science the fairness and diversity it deserves.

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References:1. Kirkup, G., Zalevski, A., Maruyama, T. and Batool, I. (2010). Women and men in science, engineering and technology: the UK statistics guide 2010 (pdf). Bradford: the UKRC.
2. National Science Foundation, official statistics. TABLE 28. Biological sciences degrees awarded, by degree level and sex of recipient: 1966–2006 (pdf)
3. V. Valian, Why So Slow?: Advancement of Women (MIT Press, 1999)
4. L. Schiebinger and S.K. Gilmartin. Housework Is an Academic Issue: How to keep talented women scientists in the lab, where they belong. Academe Online, January-February 2010 issue.
5. C. A. Moss-Racusin et al. Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 2012 ; published ahead of print September 17, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1211286109