Sommers rightly points out that as of 2002, the proportion of women earning bachelor’s degrees in “humanities, social sciences, life sciences and education” was 60 percent, and that women also earned “at least half of the PhDs” in those fields, while men outnumbered women in “physics, computer science and engineering.” Part of this may simply have to do with the greater numbers of women in college compared to men.

What she fails to mention is the fact that at each rung of the academic ladder from undergrad to professorship, more women leave science and engineering fields, leading to a dearth of female representation in the upper echelons. According to a National Academies report, “at the top research institutions, only 15.4% of the full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8% in the life sciences are women.” These are the circles where gender parity is a significant question.

Sommers then touches on the merits of “sexist bias” or “considered preference” as explanations for the imbalances. But if we’re going to focus on the top of the scientific profession, where the representational differences are real, then consider the results of a survey from last year of tenured investigators at the National Institutes of Health: “only 29 percent of the tenure-track principal investigators (PI) and 19 percent of tenured PIs—the NIH equivalent of assistant and full professors, respectively—are women.”

The major factors behind those numbers, according to respondents? A lack of childcare and flexible working hours for those women who wanted to raise a family. “Overt discrimination does not seem to be the issue,” Elisabeth Martinez, lead author of the survey, told Science. You can see the impact of family decisions on those who want to be principal investigators here:

In her conclusion, Sommers writes that the “fields that will be most affected — math, engineering, physics and computer science — are vital to the economy and national defense.” Which I read as an implication that because these areas are important, we shouldn’t tamper with the current level of diversity within them. But research indicates that more diversity can lead to better ideas. According to Scott Page, an SP Advisory Board member, more diverse groups have more problem-solving tools at their disposal, and therefore more power to design solutions to difficult problems. Put another way, diversity itself is vital to the economy and national defense.

So to suggest that gender parity is not a good idea because things are fine the way they are seems, well, inequitable.

Image: flickr.com/gregclarkephotography

At a hearing before the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held after the release of the report, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala called for an intercollegiate organization like the NCAA to hold institutions accountable and eradicate barriers preventing women from reaching the top of their fields.

But what if cultural bias and institutional barriers don’t fully account for the disparities in the number of women and men in advanced research—particularly in the hard sciences? What if it was instead the case that women have the opportunity to pursue advanced careers in a full range of technical fields, but simply don’t want to in the same numbers as their male counter parts? That’s what John Tierney’s reporting suggests in his article today in the The New York Times‘s Science Times. He quotes clinical psychologist Susan Pinker:

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers…The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

The discussion isn’t a general one over a lack of women in science. Indeed, the the ranks of women on scientific career paths have swelled:

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering.

Women represent approximately 45 percent of the postdocs in biomedical research at U.S. universities and research institutions, but a far smaller percentage of women hold the top level positions of professor or principal investigator, according to a National Institutes of Health Survey released last year. The survey found that “only 29 percent of the tenure-track principal investigators (PI) and 19 percent of tenured PIs—the NIH equivalent of assistant and full professors, respectively—are women.” Science went on to point out that in that decade that included the doubling of the NIH research budget, “the share of women among its 900 tenured investigators has barely budged,” inching upwards “from 18 percent to 19 percent.”

The new research featured in Tierney’s piece indicates that personality is a stronger indicator than gender of an individual’s career path into “inorganic” or physical sciences, which have a smaller proportion of women, or “organic” life sciences, which draw more women.

But experts who testified at the hearing last fall on the “Beyond Bias and Barriers” report did not confine their discussion to advancing women in scientific careers. As National Science Foundation Deptuty Director Kathie Olsen pointed out, fostering better environments for advancing women improves possibilities for other minorities and for men as well.

Women and minority researchers who are underrepresented at the top of scientific fields should, as Pinker points out, be there because they want to work in that field. Her research indicates that young women sometimes feel pressured to go into technical fields when they display aptitude in science and math at a young age. But the intense competition for PI and professor positions weeds out the uncommitted early. Barriers like a lack of access to childcare or family leave time should obviously come down. But it’s also worth remembering that there is evidence that diverse groups of workers have powers beyond the sum of their individual abilities.

According to Scott Page, Science Progress adviser and professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan, argues that diverse groups composed of people with different backgrounds have a larger collective pool of problem-solving skills. Less diverse groups, or presumably university departments and laboratories, may include many smart individuals with the same problems-solving methods, or heuristics. Page argues that investing in research alone will not unleash the full capabilities of the U.S. science and technology workforce. As he told the Times in an interview earlier this year, “Breakthroughs in science increasingly come from teams of bright, diverse people. That’s why interdisciplinary work is the biggest trend in scientific research.”

The conclusion begs the question: would a greater ratio of women to men in fields where they are underrepresented not just represent a victory for gender equity, but could it also unleash more bright ideas?

Each individual in a group brings his or her own problem solving perspectives, termed heuristics, to their work. One group of well-educated individuals from similar backgrounds, each with a similar set of heuristics, may posses fewer total problem solving perspectives than another more diverse group where individuals bring heuristics from different backgrounds and life experiences. As Page explained in a column for the Center for American Progress, the more diverse group has more problem-solving tools at its disposal, and therefore more power to design solutions. Moreover, those diverse perspectives can be super-adative. “What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems,” he explains in today’s interview, “The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.”

Page argued in an October Science Progress column that investing in research alone will not unleash the full capabilities of the U.S. science and technology workforce. Rather, he suggested, the government can encourage more effective innovation through interdisciplinary research programs; with support for scholars from underrepresented groups; by funding more high-risk research projects, even if some of them fail; and by financing multiple solutions to big problems. As he told the NYT, “Breakthroughs in science increasingly come from teams of bright, diverse people. That’s why interdisciplinary work is the biggest trend in scientific research.”

This faith in government funding of basic research rests (first of all) on the proven shortcomings of profit-driven science. The demands of the marketplace obviously create incentives to explore many scientific pursuits, most often practical problems such as how to build faster computer chips, safer allergy medications, and more fuel-efficient cars.

One fact should be obvious, businesses won’t set out to make the world a better place unless they can make money at it.

That leaves many fundamental questions related to the causes of disease, the forces that create an affluent society, and the maintenance of the earth’s ecosystems in need of funding from governments. Finding solutions to existing problems is reason enough to support science research, yet government investment in basic science also encourages unguided exploration, which can result in solutions in search of problems, such as the laser. As odd as this sounds, science often finds answers to problems we didn’t even know we had.

So why would I argue that the current science funding model is clearly inadequate to the needs of scientific inquiry? Why is this model antiquated? Because the sources and causes of innovation remain mysterious (and will always be so), which in turn requires new thinking about how best to finance innovation.

Innovation, in economic terms, resides inside the heads of people. People possess different ways of seeing problems and solutions—oftentimes different perspectives depending on the kinds of people viewing particular problems and solutions. People’s perspectives are accompanied by ways of searching for solutions to problems, something scientists call heuristics. When confronted with a problem, people encode their (often quite different) perspectives and then apply their particular heuristics to locate new, possibly better, solutions.

Individuals who perform best obviously possess good perspectives and heuristics (think Thomas Edison and his multiplicity of inventions), yet 30 copies of Edison working as a team may be no better than one. In contrast, a diverse team of individual innovators may on average know fewer heuristics each but collectively know more. When a diverse team applies those diverse heuristics, the effects can be superadditive. Watson plus Crick were far more impressive than either working alone.

On a far larger scale, one reason for Silicon Valley’s success is surely its abundance of bright engineers from different academic disciplines and from almost every corner of the globe. Collectively, they out-innovate other technology hotspots with equal brainpower but less diversity.

Government funding of science must take this diversity calculation into account when allocating budgets. Government spending on science today is in effect a giant hedge fund. Despite the huge potential payoffs, this hedge fund won’t emerge from the private sector because too often the payoffs aren’t appropriable. The Naismith family made little from the invention of basketball, for example, but the world gained immeasurably.

As with any hedge fund, effective government funding of science requires that lots of money gets tossed around. Some investments will yield little, while others will produce enormous dividends. This “portfolio” metaphor for scientific funding leads to an intuition that diversity has value—that basic scientific research should be allocated to diverse research projects.

That intuition is correct—diversity does provide portfolio insurance—yet the value of diversity goes far beyond mere portfolio effects. Diversity can produce superadditive effects.

A breakthrough in one domain can be combined with a breakthrough in another to produce even deeper knowledge. Research on disease transmission by epidemiologists helps us understand the spread of disease. Research by computational social scientists on how to construct large-scale simulations of societies helps us understand how markets work and how economies collapse. When we combine just these two breakthroughs, we’re able to construct a third, in the form of high fidelity computational models of disease spread that enable us to learn when and how to intervene.

In short, the mathematics of innovation shows that one plus one often equals three.

The government can encourage scientific diversity in four ways. First, they can encourage interdisciplinary research through programs such as the National Science Foundation’s Integrated Graduate Education Research Traineeship initiative, or IGERT, which funds Ph.D. students in novel, interdisciplinary programs. The diversity of study the IGERT program breaks through the current incentive structures of the modern academy, which reward progress within disciplines. Well-placed (and sufficiently large) IGERT carrots can provide incentives for scholars to step out of the comfort of their home departments to work with interdisciplinary teams.

Second, the government can continue to support scholars from underrepresented groups. Fewer than two in 100 Ph.D.’s in physics are African American and fewer than two in 10 are women. Yet, we know from biology, psychology, and economics that the inclusion of women and minorities not only changes the questions being asked within a discipline but also changes how those questions are answered.

Third, funding must loosen up, and not just the purse strings. Government grants, be they from the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, often require perfect scores from multiple referees. This tends to bias awards in favor of safer, more conservative grants. Fear of failure, which is unavoidable given that future prospects depend on past successes, exacerbates the tendency toward more mainstream research. Innovation won’t be produced by tinkering on the margins of existing approaches.

Aiming big implies failure. That’s okay. In its golden era of innovation, Bell Labs demanded a certain failure rate. Too much success signified a lack of experimentation. Breakthroughs in science come from someone seeing a problem in a new way, government needs to fund the space, resources, and opportunity for scientists to step outside of their usual boxes and fail. That’s impossible if grant renewals require success at every step.

Fourth, the government can make commitments to big problems—finding a clean source of energy, colonizing Mars, curing cancer, eradicating poverty and disease. Big problems create diversity by shifting attention away from techniques and toward solutions. Thus, they spawn multiple approaches. Big problems almost always unpack into lots of smaller problems, each of which requires diverse ways of thinking. And big problems, such as the space program, make science focal and fun, encouraging more people, and more diverse people, to choose science as a career.

Many of the problems we face today are complex. They consist of diverse, dynamically interconnected parts. Certainly climate change, epidemics, terrorism, and poverty fit into that category.

Other problems are just plain difficult. Finding a workable form of fusion, understanding protein folding, and curing diseases. We won’t solve these problems, the difficult or the complex ones, with current modest levels of funding for well-established routes of inquiry. We need more funding and more ways of thinking.

The aim of governmental scientific funding is the production of innovation that improves the lives of everyone, and the seeds of innovation lie in seeing problems new ways. The funding of science should reflect that by rewarding diverse thinkers, funding interdisciplinary research, broadening the pool of scholars, and focusing attention on big problems.

Scott E. Page is Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Teams, Schools, and Societies.