Tomáš Hudlický’s opinions are abhorrent but disturbingly familiar
I can’t help wondering if the furore surrounding the publication of Tomáš Hudlický’s incendiary comments on diversity in the journal Angewandte Chemie (see page xx) would have been quite as explosive had it not come just at this moment, with the United States racked by protests after the killing of George Floyd by policemen, and massive shows of support for the Black Lives Matter movement across the world. That’s not to paint Hudlický, a synthetic organic chemist at Brock University in Canada, as some kind of unfortunate victim of circumstance. Quite the opposite; his comments may have enraged chemists and others committed to promoting equality and parity in science, but if you were surprised by them then you haven’t been paying attention. They are wearisomely familiar, and had it not been for the wide sense right now that enough is enough, they might have simply supplied another face-palm moment for those committed to opposing such retrograde views.
I can’t help wondering if the furore surrounding the publication of Tomáš Hudlický’s incendiary comments on diversity in the journal Angewandte Chemie would have been quite as explosive had it not come just at this moment, with the United States racked by protests after the killing of George Floyd by policemen, and massive shows of support for the Black Lives Matter movement across the world. That’s not to paint Hudlický as some kind of unfortunate victim of circumstance. Quite the opposite; his comments may have enraged chemists and others committed to promoting equality and parity in science, but if you were surprised by them then you haven’t been paying attention. They are wearisomely familiar, and had it not been for the wide sense right now that enough is enough, they might have simply supplied another face-palm moment for those committed to opposing such retrograde views.
Hudlický, a synthetic organic chemist at Brock University in Canada, published his remarks in an essay commemorating the 30th anniversary of an article by Dieter Seebach on the future of organic chemistry. It included a diagram depicting ‘diversity of work force’ as a negative influence on the field, and suggested that ‘hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.’
It also implied that fraud and unethical practices are contributing to the increasing presence of Chinese publications in the field, drawing a response from the Chinese Chemical Society that ‘The words have severely hurt the feelings of, and caused widespread attention and strong indignation from the Chinese chemists who are committed to advancing the chemical sciences.’
Plenty of scientists are resentful of demands to recognise the need for diversity in science
While Angewandte Chemie has difficult questions to answer about how such remarks passed editorial oversight, it is less than astonishing that they were not challenged in peer review. For the truth is that plenty of scientists – in my anecdotal experience, mostly older, male and white – still hold them, and are resentful of demands to recognise the need for diversity in science. In many ways, Hudlický’s comments echo those made by physicist Alessandro Strumia at Cern in Geneva, who asserted last year that women are being preferentially promoted in fundamental physics over men with better academic credentials. Here too was the familiar assertion that science should be strictly meritocratic: reward should come to the best, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or any other ‘irrelevant’ feature.
Although advocates of that position are often indignant at this suggestion, the fact is that it embodies precisely the kind of prejudice that Black Lives Matter is now calling out. For the implication is that methods of advancement, recruitment and reward in science are just fine as they are, and we shouldn’t mess with them on account of some politically correct, ‘ideological’ agenda. But to believe that, you will need to believe that the current disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities, especially black people, and women is simply part of the natural order: it just so happens that white men are better suited to Stem subjects.
That was the point argued by Strumia, who has amassed graphs and statistics to support his claim that men just happen to perform better in physics. It’s partly the greater-male-variability effect, he says: the controversial claim that there are more men than women at both the high- and low-IQ extremes of the spectrum. As a team of authors (of which I am one) have pointed out in a response to a forthcoming paper by Strumia in Quantitative Science Studies, the argument rests on a host of dubious assertions, not least a careful cherry-picking of the data on gender issues in science and a casual conflation of correlation with causation.
Hudlický’s remarks reflect a corrosive current that still permeates science
The same arguments are made by Charles Murray, an author of The Bell Curve, the notorious 1994 book on human intelligence, in his new work Human Diversity. Murray says that evidence suggesting men have better spatial skills (while women excel at social skills) makes them naturally superior in Stem. For Murray, feminism and civil rights have long since eradicated the barriers to progress for women and minorities, so that any remaining differentials (in science and in society) are biological, not social, in nature – and we just have to live with them. The barriers and discriminatory practices that remain in place for these groups, although clearly attested by the evidence, are invisible to the likes of Murray.
These views are on the rise, supported by well-funded institutes and robust social networks, generally leaning to the far right. This is why Hudlický’s remarks should elicit more than eye-rolling: they reflect a corrosive current that still permeates science as much as it does society more broadly.
Part of the problem is that science has for so long told itself that it is exceptional, internationalist and universal, apolitical and driven only by merit, that to challenge this idea can be interpreted as challenging the integrity of science itself. But diversity is not just about fairness, even though that makes a compelling case on its own. It is about acknowledging the lessons of science itself. As Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes persuasively argues in her new book Why Trust Science?, critics who think that ‘calls for diversity are merely political [and] that there is no intellectual value in building diverse communities’ are ignorant of what history shows us: ‘that diversity can result in a more rigorous intellectual outcome by fostering critical interrogations that reveal embedded social prejudice.’ A diverse scientific community will do better science.
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