82 Scientific American, October 2020 Illustration by Matt Collins
ANTI GRAVITY
THE ONGOING SEARCH FOR
FUNDAMENTAL FARCES
Steve Mirsky has been writing the Anti Gravity column since
a typical tectonic plate was about 36 inches from its current location.
He also hosts the Scientific American podcast Science Talk.Now is the summer of our really, really big discontent. As I write
in early August, our offices are still closed as the pandemic rages
on. And some people who stop their vehicles at red lights chaff, fig-
uratively, at wearing masks in public, because freedom. It is under
these conditions I want to share some recent items I chanced on.
As the saying goes, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a
woman’s work will probably not be compensated to the same
extent as a man’s, and her salary as a percentage of the average in
her field will likely go down should her field undergo a transition
to majority female.” Hey, if it wasn’t catchy, it wouldn’t have
become an axiom.
For examples of this phenowomenon, see an article entitled
“When a Specialty Becomes ‘Women’s Work’: Trends in and Impli-
cations of Specialty Gender Segregation in Medicine,” published
in Academic Medicine. The authors are Elaine Pelley and Molly
Carnes of the School of Medicine and Public Health of the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin–Madison. Such an elite affiliation is instant
grounds for nonpayment of attention among many of my fellow
Americans these days, as it speaks to a certain level of knowledge
and experience that they increasingly find, ya know, annoying.
Despite their credentials, let’s hear these au thors
out. They note that “pediatrics earned 93% of the
average physician salary in 1975 when it was 22%
female, but earned only 71% of the median physician
salary in 2017 when it was 63% female.”
Another case: “The salaries in obstetrics and gyne-
cology were 20%–25% higher than the mean physi-
cian salary in the mid-1970s and 1980s when the
female share was 8% and 18%, respectively. Howev-
er, by 2017 with a female share of 57%, an obstetri-
cian/gynecologist became an average physician earn-
er.” (An extreme version of this trend can be easily
found with a Google search using the terms “women
doctors Russia status.” The results could make you
seek out a gastroenterologist of any sex.)
While wondering about the ethical implications
of these financial disparities, I stumbled onto a 2016
paper by philosophers Eric Schwitz gebel and Josh-
ua Rust entitled “The Behavior of Ethicists.” They
basically attempt to determine if professional ethi-
cists behave more ethically in their personal lives
than other people (for ease of access to study sub-
jects, the other people were nonethicist philoso-
phers and professors in other disciplines). And they
found that the ethicists don’t bring work home: “On
average, professional ethicists’ behavior is indistin-
guishable from the behavior of comparison groups
of professors in other fields.”
That finding makes sense to me. Because a while back, I attend-
ed a medical ethics symposium and had an insight—a jumping
jack flash, if you will: Satan would make a terrific ethicist. To estab-
lish the most evil course of action in a given situation, he’d have to
perform a comprehensive evaluation that would also reveal the
best policy choice. Knowing right from wrong is thus a necessary
but insufficient condition for goodness, and Old Nick could write
excellent ethical white papers before setting them on fire.
Speaking of hell, a study in the August 3 issue of the journal
Current Biology revealed that the vast majority of members of a
species of beetle, Regimbartia attenuata, perform a literally death-
defying feat after being swallowed by various species of frogs. The
beetle apparently swims its little heart out till it pops out of the
frog’s derriere. Because, as another axiom has it, “If you’re going
through hell, keep going.”
To find out whether the insect’s passage was active or passive,
researchers immobilized some beetles by coating them with wax
before going into the mouth of hell, or rather, frog. None of these
beetles survived. To paraphrase science-fiction legend Harlan Elli-
son (who definitely would have come up with this experimental
protocol if he’d lived long enough): they really don’t want to open
their mouths, and they must scream.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
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Salary exposés, unethical ethicists
and frog butts
By Steve Mirsky
© 2020 Scientific American