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Stanford's Ben Barres, PhD

article source: nature medicine
Nature Medicine
Published online: 31 August 2005; | doi:10.1038/nm0905-916
Profile: Ben Barres
Neurobiologist Ben Barres may have a successful career, but he knows exactly what discrimination looks like. And over the years, he has learned to fight back.

Kris Novak

Ask Ben Barres whether women in science are treated fairly. But first make sure you have plenty of time to hear his answer.

Barres is a successful and busy neuroscientist at Stanford University, but this is a topic close to his heart. Despite his many responsibilities, he tirelessly champions women and minority scientists, speaking out against injustice wherever he sees it—and he sees plenty.

Most recently, Barres wrote letters criticizing comments made by Harvard University President Larry Summers (Nature 434, 697; 2005) and helped revise a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) award scheme that unfairly favored male scientists. "I think as I have gotten older I have realized that I don't have to sit back passively and take it any more, that people have a responsibility to speak out against discrimination," he says.

The most recent data say that most male scientists don't notice the hostility their female colleagues face (Science, 309, 1190#8722;1191; 2004). But Barres has first-hand knowledge of what it means to be a member of an underserved group.

You see, until 1996, he used to be a woman.

Having experienced discrimination first as a woman, then as a transgendered individual, Barres says he is acutely aware of people's prejudices. In high school, Barbara, as he was called then, was the math team captain and planned to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But the guidance counselor said Barres could never get in and should aim lower. "Fortunately I had sense enough to ignore him and applied only to MIT, where I was accepted early decision," Barres recalls.

I think as I have gotten older I have realized that I don't have to sit back passively and take it anymore.

Things weren't much easier at MIT. Barres was one of few women in math classes and once again faced blatant bias. "I was once told by a mathematics professor that the reason I was the only one in the class to successfully complete an exceptionally complex homework problem was because my boyfriend probably helped me," he says.

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Transgender Prof Defends Female Scientists
By Lisa Leff
Associated Press
posted: 12 July 2006
03:00 pm ET


SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- As someone who studies brain development and regeneration, Stanford University neurobiologist Ben Barres feels qualified to comment on whether nature or nurture explains the shortage of women working in the sciences.

But it wasn't just his medical degree from Dartmouth, his Ph.D from Harvard and his research that inspired him to write an article blaming the persistent gender gap on institutional bias.

Rather, it was that for most of his academic life, the 50-year-old professor who now wears a beard was once known as Dr. Barbara Barres, a woman who excelled in math and science.

"I have this perspective," said Barres, who switched sexes when he started taking hormones in 1997. "I've lived in the shoes of a woman and I've lived in the shoes of a man. It's caused me to reflect on the barriers women face."

Barres' opinion piece, published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, was a response to the debate former Harvard president Lawrence Summers reignited last year when he said innate sexual differences might explain why comparatively few women excelled in scientific careers.

Summers' clashes with faculty -- including over women in science -- led to his resignation, though not before he committed $50 million on childcare and other initiatives to help advance the careers of women and minority employees.

Even so, Barres thinks a meaningful discussion of what he calls the "Larry Summers Hypothesis" ended too soon, leaving missed opportunities and a bad message for young female scientists.

"I feel like I have a responsibility to speak out," he said. "Anyone who has changed sex has done probably the hardest thing they can do. It's freeing, in a way, because it makes me more fearless about other things."

In his article, Barres offers several personal anecdotes from both sides of the gender divide to prove his own hypothesis that prejudice plays a much bigger role than genes in preventing women from reaching their potential on university campuses and in government laboratories.

The one that rankles him most dates from his undergraduate days at MIT, where as a young woman in a class dominated by men he was the only student to solve a complicated math problem. The professor responded that a boyfriend must have done the work for her, according to Barres.

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