Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man [Science and Title IX]

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.

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.

Most of the hard science WORKERS will be foreign imported to do the jobs Americans will be unable, untrained, but affirmatively degreed to do.

And with this PC stuff, the forign scientists will also have to be female. Forget about an H1B if you are male.

Feminist Quantum Mechanics may explain why feminists are able to whine and demand government handouts while simultaneously proclaiming their independence and strength. Like some subatomic particles, they can occupy two states at the same time.

The Feminist Uncertainty Principle? If you put a feminist in a box.....

You did know the last 5,000 Calculus equalities were developed by Jain and Hindu mystics and devotees of a variety of Buddha's disciples, or gods.

Nothing "racist" in that ~ all those guys are white folk anyway ~ and most modern advanced math courses in the United States have been taught by guys with brogues for the last 40 years.

Srinivāsa Rāmānujan Iyengar FRS (Tamil: ஸ்ரீநிவாச ராமானுஜன்)is someone you should look up. A truly impressive mathematician.

Or, maybe you didn't know that.

It's far more important to know that the powerhouse minds in math have been coming from South Asia than it is to know that geographical or cultural information about them might violate the rules of politically correct (PC) speech.

The only way to get over racism is to meet it on the road and kill it.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to identify the problem with American mathematical programs ~ that is that the American people are too stupid to be deserving of brilliant math teachers.

Otherwise no one would consider using Title IX to destroy the teachers, destroy the programs and reduce America to little more than an "Idiocracy".

Calculus I has only one difficulty ~ the questions ~ they are all hard but that's usually because the instructors failed to get across to the students how simple they were.

The "it is intuitively obvious" statement does not work at this level as a substitute for "discussion" in the classroom.

If one has difficulty in algebra and does not understand its applications in the real world, then, calculus is inherently that much more difficult.

I always was taught 1/2 of the 3 courses I had in calculus from a statistical view point, which I loathed...I had to poke around in higher level engineering (structural and soil mechanics) books in the library to get a good handle on it and appreciate its applications.

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