Posted on 03/11/2008 6:25:36 AM PDT by doc30
Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem.’
difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is legendary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester freshman course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.
Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”
Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences?
Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.
Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex...be denied the benefits of...any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of calibration could devastate academic science.
But unfortunately, in her enthusiasm for Title IX, Rolison is not alone.
On October 17, 2007, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology convened to learn why women are “underrepresented” in academic professorships of science and engineering and to consider what the federal government should do about it.
As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biology, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Why this is so is an interesting question—and the subject of a substantial empirical literature. The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer.
There were, however, no disagreements at the congressional hearing. All five expert witnesses, and all five congressmen, Democrat and Republican, were in complete accord. They attributed the dearth of women in university science to a single cause: sexism. And there was no dispute about the solution. All agreed on the need for a revolutionary transformation of American science itself. “Ultimately,” said Kathie Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation, “our goal is to transform, institution by institution, the entire culture of science and engineering in America, and to be inclusive of all—for the good of all.”
Representative Brian Baird, the Washington-state Democrat who chairs the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, looked at the witnesses and the crowd of more than 100 highly appreciative activists from groups like the American Association of University Women and the National Women’s Law Center and asked, “What kind of hammer should we use?”
For the five male, gray-haired congressmen, the hearing was a happy occasion—an opportunity to be chivalrous and witty before an audience of concerned women, and to demonstrate their goodwill and eagerness to set things right. It was also a historic occasion—more than the congressmen realized. During the past 30 years, the humanities have been politicized and transformed beyond recognition. The sciences, however, have been spared. There seems to have been a tacit agreement, especially at the large research universities; radical activists and deconstructionists were left relatively free to experiment with fields like comparative literature, cultural anthropology, communications, and, of course, women’s studies, while the hard sciences—vital to our economy, health, and security, and to university funding from the federal government, corporations, and the wealthy entrepreneurs among their alumni—were to be left alone.
Departments of physics, math, chemistry, engineering, and computer science have remained traditional, rigorous, competitive, relatively meritocratic, and under the control of no-nonsense professors dedicated to objective standards. All that may be about to change. Following years of meticulous planning by the activists gathered for the hearing, the era of academic détente is coming to an end.
The first witness was Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami and secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration. She had chaired the “Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” organized by several leading scientific organizations including the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. In 2006 the committee released a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” that claimed to find “pervasive unexamined gender bias.” It received lavish media attention and has become the standard reference work for the “STEM” gender-equity movement (the acronym stands for science, technology, engineering, and math).
At the hearing, Shalala warned that strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate” women face in the academy. This “crisis,” as she called it, “clearly calls for a transformation of academic institutions….Our nation’s future depends on it.”
Shalala and other speakers called for rigorous application of Title IX and other punitive measures. Witness Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, stressed the need to threaten obstinate faculties with loss of funding: “People listen to money…. Make the people listen to the money talk!”
The idea of “title-nining” academic science was proposed by Debra Rolison in 2000. She has promoted Title IX as an “implacable hammer” guaranteed to get the attention of recalcitrant faculty. Prompted by Rolison and a growing chorus of activists, the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space held a 2002 hearing on “Title IX and Science.” Later, in 2005, former subcommittee chairmen Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Senator George Allen (R-VA) held a joint press conference with feminist leaders. Wyden declared, “Title IX in math and science is the right way to start.” Allen seconded, “We cannot afford to cut out half our population—the female population.” The Title IX reviews have already begun.
[more at link]
My daughter is an honor student in 9th grade at her high school. She hates math, yet she gets straight A’s in it. Her class is doing trigonometry ...whatever the hell that is.
At last I will be able to get a degree in Feminist Quantum Mechanics.
Title IX has destroyed many men's programs. Also decreased the quality of women's programs. Many of the players are foreign imported to make numbers work. I'm sure it will do the same to science.
Where’s “Not this sh** again” guy?
God made Men and Women different and Thank God for that. It was his plan to do so, and that may seem foolish to some mortal being's but it is wisdom of the ages beyond all of our understanding.
Look at this humorous but yet very true way of looking at the differences in Men and Woman's Brains.
http://marriageresourcecenter.org/videogallery/4/med/VideoWidget8.htm
They already have MORE that parity in female graduation rates. Women earn more than half the degrees. It goes much further than that and in an idiotic direction. The only solution is to not allow women to drop out of classes that they enroll in, and simultaneously not allow professors to give a woman a grade lower than "A", thus ensuring that women can finally excel in the fields where they have been historically underrepresented. Who cares if the credit for that class becomes worthless!
Such a question deserves no response or even any effort in trying to respond.
Might even reduce the number of women in college if we put those requirements in the first two years ~ 'cause when you're young and fresh you have your best chance of passing Calculus!
Bwahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can see our best in the world engineering and science education going down the crapper just like the rest of the educational system now. Bright geeks will be denied educations (and jobs) just because they are white (Asians included) males.
I wonder how relatively conservative schools like A&M will react to this. I bet the liberal arts weenies at UT are salivating at this opportunity to stick it to the engineering and sciences departments. They wanted to do this 30 years ago when I was working on my BSME there.
There was one woman in the class ~ young lady with an incredible figure and bright red hair. Absolutely striking. Oh, yes.
She got an A.
Her dad was a math professor too.
She didn't go on to Experimental Calculus II. Something like 3 or 4 people did, I didn't either. Instead, everybody who dropped out went to the regular Calculus the next semester, learned an entirely new nomenclature, and generally found it to be a pud course with only 10 to 15 hours homework needed.
I think the redhead was the only woman in Calculus II!
This was a huge university with 30,000 students on the main campus too.
Back in those days it was typically the case that women did not take Calculus.
I wonder how relatively conservative schools like A&M will react to this. I bet the liberal arts weenies at UT are salivating at this opportunity to stick it to the engineering and sciences departments. They wanted to do this 30 years ago when I was working on my BSME there.
Mrs_Victor is a Bioengineer. Women don't go into the math intensive fields because they don't like it, not because the field discriminates.
The liberal arts community at A&M (small as it was) was always trying to get the Engineering school to add more liberal arts requirements. Never mind that the ME degree I received required 148 credit hours to graduate. They insisted that engineers were "trained" not educated.
Fortunately ABET accreditation will not allow engineering educations to get watered down, so I suspect it's all just blowing smoke.
Stoopid beyond belief.
The only problem I had was with my female 'ethics' professor who seemed to push a vague, liberal, pro-whistleblower attitude. I used to argue with her on a daily basis and have the grades to prove it. I learned to love the hard sciences, because the grades are not subjective.
Before these busybodies fix what ain't broken, perhaps they need to work on the very real problem of liberal professors biased treatment towards conservative students.
Liberals FEEL that if two disparate groups have different outcomes under the same set of rules, there must be something wrong with the rules, or that the successful exploited the unsuccessful,
instead of inherent differences in the groups.
“Such a question deserves no response or even any effort in trying to respond.”
Well, except to say, thank God they aren’t more like men. I TOTALLY prefer that they be different. It’s a good thing.
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But,,,I fully agree. If all students were required to take and pass, Calculus, and physics, chemistry, and biology for science and math majors, the number of women on campus would drop like a rock! We would also get rid of all the weeny, metrosexual girly-boys as well!
I have often joked that all government teachers should be required to take Calculus I for math and science majors, and pass the course with a “B”. It would guarantee that they were at least smart enough for the paycheck and pension the government would give them.
By the way, I graduated with a science degree from Villanova University shortly after it had gone co-ed. I was often the only woman in the class. For the most part, the professors and my classmates were very supportive. I **choose** to earn a doctorate in a health profession for all the reasons that women **choose** not to go into engineering. Family life!
If there is a problem to be fixed, it is that too many soft programs do not have enough math and physics. Solution: make Calc III a requirement for all undergraduate degrees (including teaching and education) and statistics, linear algebra and differential equations graduate requirements for all but humanities. That should balance the numbers nicely.
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