Amongst BSc grads and non-graduates? Yes, there can be. Mathematics and physics vie for the top spot – maths is actually the top science, but they’re often off in their own wee multiverse, leaving the physicists to do most of the vying, with engineers trying to shout over the top of them while everybody ignores them. The chemist would come next, but they’re usually off LARPing with the computer scientists and philosophers. Then biologists, who are often regarded as “soft” scientists by the physicists and chemists, which really infuriates them. After that come the actual “soft” sciences – psychology, sociology, geography and so on. Economics tries to elbow in as a “hard” science because of its use of mathematics, but you could say the same about astrology.
At postgraduate level, especially if you stay in the research world – either academic or commercial – there’s a lot less of this one-upmanship. You do find the occasional snotbag, but many postgrads and post-docs have at least some knowledge or experience of interdisciplinary research, and thereby of scientists in other disciplines, which tends to break down a lot of the snobbery. One starts to realise that there’s “hard” and “soft” in most sciences, and that “soft” can be just as valuable as “hard”. I have a PhD in psychology, which I earned in a team in a psychology department including graduates in mathematics, medicine, physiology, philosophy, physics, computer science, and electrical engineering, where I was the only psychology grad. I was probably the go-to for research methodology and statistics, the computer scientist was the go-to for computational modelling, the electrical engineer and mathematician for mathematical modelling, the physician and physiologist for neuroanatomy, and the philosopher – not even a scientist! – was the best all-rounder: he could see the larger theoretical structure of what we were all doing, and had the most amazing ability to pick up a better-than-working knowledge of all other areas on the fly.
Battle Pedant 