Susan the celebrity makes it tricky for Susan the scientist

'Is Susan Greenfield too famous to be a Fellow?" demanded The Times last Friday. The question was a welcome change from "Where are the WMD?", but just as mysterious.

The life and times of Baroness Greenfield CBE, 53, are familiar to many but not quite all of us. The large colour photograph on the newspaper's front page showed an attractive middle-aged woman with long blonde tresses and an engaging smile.

Not a beauty queen or a Russian tennis player, Susan Greenfield is a professor of synaptic pharmacology, a scientific field that focuses on the communicators between cells in the nervous system.

This is smart territory, the landscape of the brain where researchers hope the answers to such remorseless afflictions as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and motor neurone disease may be found.

The achievements and honours of Lady Greenfield are numerous and include 21 honorary degrees from British universities as well as her Oxford D.Phil, her Oxford chair in pharmacology and the Royal Society's Michael Faraday medal. She is director of the Royal Institution in Albermarle Street, writes books and newspaper columns and turns up regularly on the BBC. And then there is Susan Greenfield – femme fatal if not fatale.

Lady Greenfield was in last week's newspapers because her nomination to be a Fellow of the Royal Society is creating some hurt feelings in its Carlton House Terrace home. Joining the 1,300-plus Fellows (including 65 Nobel laureates) in the world's oldest continuous scientific academy is a singular honour and, as a matter of form, nominations are both confidential and automatic.

But not this time. Malcontents have let it be known that if Lady Greenfield's miniskirts and platform boots turn up there, they will exit. Citing her scientific work as third-rate, her (anonymous) detractors in the Royal Society claim: "To give her an FRS [Fellow of the Royal Society] would be an insult to the world-class scientists on the waiting list." To Lady Greenfield, this was yet another example of the gender stereotyping she has fought all her life.

What makes this story interesting is the difficulty in telling whether it is the quality of her work or her public persona that upsets some of her peers. Not being a scientist, I can't judge her work. But, her public posture is another matter. Greenfield revels in an épater la bourgeoisie approach to personal affairs. Which is neither a virtue nor a vice, unless you happen to be her spouse.

Last year, Oxford professor Peter Atkins, 63, an eminent scientist in his own right, found his belongings in bags in the foyer of the Royal Institution where the couple shared a flat. Husband Atkins had not shaped up: the marriage was over and Susan was off to America for speaking engagements. It is not clear why he – rather than she – had to move out, but the intricacies of feminism take curious paths.

Greenfield told one interviewer: "My credo is to do what makes you happy and brings out your whole potential. It makes me happy that I am now leading a less structured life, that I can watch The Full Monty and get up and bop to Hot Chocolate if I want to."

Prof Greenfield is a Cherie Blair sort of a woman, the kind who never bumps into any ceiling that isn't glass. She was perfectly suited to do a New Labour study on women in science, engineering and technology (SET) that contained all the requisite clichés and dubious syntax. The Greenfield "SET Fair" report condemned the low numbers and treatment of women in scientific jobs and blamed them on problems of "gendered power", "gender bias", "perceived low commitment" and "lack of respect for work-life balance".

In fact, there isn't a lack of women in science. There is only a statistical disparity. Lots of women do well in science but it's a fast-moving field with new discoveries all the time. Women who take several years off to have children can't expect science to halt so they can return at the same level.

All you can say is that if women are roughly 50 per cent of the population, they are significantly less than 50 per cent of scientists. But there is no rule of equity or of common sense, except in the political agenda of feminism, that necessitates an equal distribution of sexes in every occupation. It's perfectly true that women do not constitute 50 per cent of scientists, nor do they constitute 50 per cent of dustmen or dentists, just as heterosexual men do not constitute 50 per cent of the top dress designers or 50 per cent of primary school teachers.

What, further, can one say about the Susan Greenfield view of life in which being a mother and scientist are incompatible; who in 2003 can, with a straight face, say she has begun to question marriage as a necessary institution; and who lives in fear of one day having to say, "If only I'd been brave enough to live my life the way I wanted instead of trying to please my partner"?

Greenfield seems to be locked in a time machine. These are lines that can't have been used by any serious woman since the days of Haight-Ashbury and its hippy mantra of "doing your own thing". To spout them now would be ludicrous coming from a supermarket cashier, let alone a serious scientist.

Does this mean she is not qualified for membership of the Royal Society? Of course not. But such a simple-minded view of life is, at the very least, inconsistent with real intelligence. There have been examples of people who combine brilliance in one area with true inadequacies in other areas - rather like the Mozart that Peter Shaffer depicted in his great play Amadeus, but they are oddities.

I suppose, too, that great popularisers - and Susan Greenfield popularises science wonderfully - do generate suspicion among their peers. I'd say this suspicion is neither unfounded nor well-founded. It is possible to be a thinker and have an urge for publicity. That personality type can either coincide with serious working ability or make a turn in the limelight a substitute for serious work.

If you set out, like Greenfield, deliberately to exhibit unorthodox behaviour, to be the enfant terrible of your milieu, it is hardly surprising if your peers offer you a mixed reaction. Greenfield has never bothered to stifle her feelings. It seems a shade hypocritical of her to expect everyone else to stifle theirs. Meanwhile, those of us in the non-scientific community can only guess at her merits and look to her words. In a recent interview, for example, Greenfield mentioned that many women suffered from "the impostor syndrome". I wonder, she asked, if men suffer from it?

I can answer that question. The feeling of being a fraud and impostor when one is successful is quite common among both men and women. Two kinds of people feel it: those who are modest - and those who are impostors.