How the sex bias prevails
SHANKAR VEDANTAM
May 15, 2010

http://www.watoday.com.au/national/how-the-sex-bias-prevails-20100514-v4mv.html

What would be remarkably instructive in real life would be if women in various professions could experience life as men, and vice versa. If the same person got treated differently, we would be sure sexism was at work, because the only thing that changed was the sex of the individual and not his or her skills, talent, knowledge, experience, or interests.

Joan Roughgarden and Ben Barres are biologists at Stanford University. Both are researchers at one of the premier academic institutions in the country; both are tenured professors. Both are transgendered people. Stanford has been a welcoming home for these scientists; if you are going to be a transgendered person anywhere in the United States, it would be difficult to imagine a place more tolerant than Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area.

if you are going to be a transgendered person anywhere in the United States, it would be difficult to imagine a place more tolerant than Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pretty much this.

Experiences of Transgendered Profs a Case Study in Sexism
by C.L. Minou May 31, 2010 07:00 AM (PT)

http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/experiences_of_transgendered_profs_a_case_study_in_sexism

In an excerpt published in the Australian newspaper The Age, The Hidden Brain author Shankar Vedantam discusses the different post-transition experiences of transgendered Stanford professors Ben Barres and Joan Roughgarden. Unsurprisingly, they paint a depressing picture of the prevalence of sexism even in the supposedly egalitarian world of university research.

Barres, who attracted national notice for his spirited attack on Larry Summers' contention that the lack of women in science is due to innate differences between men and women, relates stories of the sexism he was subject to while still living as a woman: a professor who insisted that his solution (the only correct one in the class) to a difficult exam question was because he had "asked his boyfriend"; asking for professional advice on his career from a professor at medical school only to be referred to the professor's wife; fighting for the chance to practice medical procedures as an intern because male residents would always pick male interns to perform the technique. Things are different for him today: "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man," he wryly notes.