It was her calmness that provoked the uproar, and this time the chairman intervened firmly – he was an old hand at this game – to remind the committee that time was limited and guide its attention towards item two on the agenda. The brief was to convene twelve times in thirteen months and then make recommendations. Now was the time to pencil in some provisional dates.
Later that afternoon, the committee arranged itself behind a long table in a room at the Royal Society for the press launch of what had been named by a government public-relations department as Physics UK. It had its own logo displayed on an easel, a flighty monogram of the letters E, M and C squared impaled upon an 'equals' sign, to resemble an asymmetric garden shrub. Beard introduced his colleagues, made some opening remarks and invited questions from the journalists, who, slumped over their recorders and notebooks, seemed depressed by the seriousness of their assignment, its scandalous lack of controversy. Who was going to take a brave stand against more physicists? The questions were dull, the answers diligent. The whole project was lamentably worthy. Why do the government the favour of writing it up at length?
Then a woman from a mid-market tabloid asked a question, also routine, something of an old chestnut, and Beard replied, as he thought, blandly. It was true, women were under-represented in physics and always had been. The problem had often been discussed, and (he was mindful of Professor Temple as he said it) certainly his committee would be looking at it again to see if there were new ways of encouraging more girls into the subject. He believed there were no longer any institutional barriers or prejudices. There were other branches of science where women were well represented, and some where they predominated. And then, because he was boring himself, he added that it might have to be accepted one day that a ceiling had been reached. Although there were many gifted women physicists, it was at least conceivable that they would always remain in a minority, albeit a substantial one, in this particular field. There might always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics. There was a consensus in cognitive psychology, based on a wide range of experimental work, that in statistical terms the brains of men and women were significantly different. This was emphatically not a question of gender superiority, nor was it a matter of social conditioning, though of course it played a reinforcing role. These were widely observed innate differences in cognitive ability. In studies and metastudies, women were shown to have, on average, greater language skills, better visual memory, clearer emotional judgement and superior mathematical calculation. Men scored higher in mathematical problem-solving and abstract reasoning, and in visual-spatial awareness. Men and women had different priorities in life, different attitudes to risk, to status, to hierarchies. Above all, and this was the really striking difference, amounting to roughly one standard deviation, and the one to have been studied repeatedly: from early in life, girls tended to be more interested in people, boys more in things and abstract rules. And this difference showed in the fields of science they tended to choose: more women in the life sciences and the social sciences, more men in engineering and physics.
Beard noticed that he was losing the room's attention. Phrases like 'standard deviation' generally had this effect on journalists. A few people at the back were talking among themselves. In the front row, a gentlemanly reporter of a certain age had closed his eyes. Beard pressed on towards his conclusion. There was surely much to be done to get more women into physics and to make them feel welcome there. But in one possible future, it might be a waste of effort to strive for parity when there were other branches of study that women preferred.
The journalist who had asked the question was nodding numbly. Behind her, someone else was starting to ask an unrelated question. The morning would have passed into oblivion like any other had not at that moment the professor of science studies suddenly stood, blushing pink, squared her papers against the table with a loud rap and announced to the room, 'Before I go outside to be sick, and I mean violently sick because of what I've just heard, I wish to announce my resignation from Professor Beard's committee.'
She strode away towards the door, amid a din of voices and of chairs pushed back across the parquet as the journalists leaped to their feet. Professionally engaged at last, delighted, desperate, competitive, they hurried after her.
As the room emptied, Professor Jack Pollard, the quantum-gravity specialist from Newcastle, who had given the Reith Lectures not so long ago and seemed to know everything, said in Beard's ear, 'You've put your foot in it now. She's postmodern, you see, a blank-slater, a strong social constructivist. They all are, you know. Shall we have a coffee?'
At the time, these terms meant little to Beard. He had one thought. This was not the way to tender a resignation. Then an even simpler second thought. He should leave as quickly as possible, even though he knew that Pollard wanted to gossip. In different circumstances, Beard would happily have sat with him in a cafA© for an hour. There was a community, a shifting international group who knew each other jealously, affectionately, possessively, and had, with notable defections and deaths, travelled together since the heroic old days of classical string theory in pursuit of its grail, the unification of the fundamental forces with gravity. They had eventually seen the limitations of strings and embraced superstrings and heterotic string theory to arrive by these threads in the cavernous maternal shelter of M-theory. Each breakthrough had generated a new set of problems, inconsistencies, physical implausibilities. Ten dimensions, then, with a backward glance at the super-gravity men, eleven! Dimensions tightly wrapped on six circles, the rediscovery of Kaluza and Klein from the nineteen twenties, the delightful intricacies of Calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds! And the singular drama of the universe in its first one hundreth of a second! Beard had played no creative part, and did not quite have the mathematical reach, but he knew the gossip. And the jokes – the string theorist caught in bed with another woman who exclaimed to his wife, 'Darling, I can explain everything!' What a long hard road it had been, and so it remained – the outer edge of human intellectual grasp interwoven with all-too-human stories. The theorist who neglected his dying wife, and still failed to restate the problem. The obscure post-doc who resolved a set of contradictions in a liberating insight that wrecked his health. The famous convention that shamefully neglected an old eminence. The brown-nosing mediocrity who got the super-grant. The bust-up between two giants who once shared a lab.
Yes, he would have loved a chat, but he sensed a contraction around him, something like gathering darkness or its emotional equivalent. He was in trouble, and he should fade away before he made things worse. He apologised quickly to Pollard and the rest, took his briefcase and walked from the room, across the hall and left by the main entrance. Outside, sunlight and the city's background hum appeared to shrink his concerns. A mountain range might have had the same effect. Perhaps this was a fuss about nothing. As he passed he caught snatches of Nancy Temple's pavement press conference, delivered with lilting reasonableness: '…resurgent eugenics…sinister claims about human nature…neo-liberal attack on collectivity…' Nice punchy lines for the tabloids. Some of the journalists crowding around her were using the roof of a parked car as a writing desk, others were already phoning the story in. Perhaps she did not know that the excitement was in part about the government. One of its committees was in trouble. Another Blair failure.
Beard ignored the voices calling out his first name as he crossed the road. Never help feed a press story about yourself. But the next day he wondered if he should have turned back when he read of himself 'scuttling away in shame' under the headline 'Nobel Prof Says No To Lab Chicks'.
At first it seemed that this particular story had no staying power, no legs. After a minor eruption of morning headlines, there was silence for two days. He thought he had come through. But during that time one tabloid was busy with its research. On Saturday, Beard's 'love life' was revealed and artfully braided with the 'no to girls in white coats' story. On Sunday the other papers picked it up and piled in and he was reinvented as 'the bonking boffin', a 'Nobel love-rat', and a kind of learned satyr – 'the prof-goat'. There were references to the Aldous murder case, but Beard's earlier incarnation as the harmless, dreamy cuckold, the innocent fool, the dupe of a flighty wife, was conveniently forgotten. Now he was a loathed figure, seducing women even as he drove them out of science. In the more serious press, he was described as a physicist turned 'genetic determinist', a fanatical sociobiologist whose ideas about gender difference were shown to be indirectly derived from social Darwinism, which in turn had spawned Third Reich race theories. Then, daringly building on this, a journalist, more in the spirit of playful diary-page spite than genuine conviction, suggested that Beard was a neo-Nazi. No one took the charge seriously for a moment, but it became possible for other papers to take up the term even as they dismissed it, carefully bracketing and legalising the insult with quotation marks. Beard became the 'neo-Nazi' Professor.
An article in one left-of-centre paper argued that most important differences between men and women were cultural constructs. In response, Beard wrote a feebly sarcastic letter, a mere six lines, four hours and a score of drafts in the making, protesting that these days men could not get pregnant and that it was all society's fault. It was published, but no one seemed to notice.
