I use my own arrogance to criticize J. Murray Gibson’s Opinion on arrogance. Gibson misses one important point: Never ascribe to arrogance what is more properly described as stupidity.Gibson quotes otherwise “rational and intelligent scientists” as saying, “Just show me a well qualified XXX [woman or minority] and I will hire him or her on the spot—I have no bias.” He calls such a statement classical arrogance. I use my arrogance to claim that anyone who says such a thing cannot be a good scientist. A good scientist does not dismiss a question by claiming to know the answer; he answers the question by asking another question. Science progresses when people find the right questions.The right question with regard to groups underrepresented in physics is, Why are there no qualified XXXes available?I started asking questions about women in physics after being annoyed by Steven Goldberg’s article, “Numbers Don’t Lie: Men Do Better Than Women,” in the 5 July 1989 New York Times. The author noted that men do better than women on the mathematics portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and jumped to conclusions about a possible physiological basis.I recalled an arrogant old saying, “Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure,” and I started asking relevant questions.Why are so very many of the successful American women scientists and mathematicians born outside the US? Why is it hard to find American-born women in nuclear and particle physics of comparable stature to the enormous number of successful American women in those fields who were born outside the US?I noted Maria Goeppert-Mayer, C. S. Wu, Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, Noemie Koller, Sulamith Goldhaber, Juliet Lee-Franzini, Sau Lan Wu, Inga Karliner, and so on. There are exceptions: Nina Byers and Glennys Farrar are American-born. I may have missed some others, but the asymmetry is still striking. I thought that I had finally found a top American-born woman particle theorist in Helen Quinn, until I learned that she was Australian.Why is the ratio of women to men in physics much higher in France, Italy, and Poland than in the US? Do European women do better in primarily Roman Catholic countries than in Protestant ones? Is the greater success of European women because they had Marie Curie as a role model, or because the Virgin Mary is so important in Roman Catholic culture?Why is there apparently such a large number of women mathematicians and engineers among the Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel and the US? Why was one of those the only woman with a tenure position in a large leading American university mathematics department?Perhaps one must look back much earlier than university or graduate school to understand the problem. Are subtle prejudices and sociological factors in American culture crucial at high-school and perhaps even at elementary school levels?These are the questions to ask; they will lead us to serious thinking and perhaps to finding some answers. It is a copout and a deflection to say, “Just show me a well qualified XXX and I will hire him or her on the spot.” Bias is not the problem.Some of my women physicist friends who were born outside the US confirm that the problem begins quite early. One who immigrated from Europe to America when she was in high school said that she was considered peculiar in the US, because “girls were not supposed to be smart.” Another said that the best road to success for a woman physicist would be to start her education in Europe and move to the US at a later point in her career. Girls who wanted to be physicists had a much easier time in Europe until they hit a point on the academic ladder where there was real discrimination. At that point, they could do much better in the US.The moral: Be arrogant. But ask the right questions. If you are sure you know the right answer, you are probably stupid, not arrogant.© 2003 American Institute of Physics.