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... Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit...

In 2018, an unprecedented number of individuals across the country with science and technical backgrounds made a run for Congress. Many of them were energized by the perceived anti-science rhetoric of President Donald Trump and his administration concerning the environment and health, and by a desire to bring more evidence-based decision making into politics. Although a handful of candidates have advanced to next month’s midterm election, many didn’t make it through the primaries. Of nearly 50 individuals with a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) background—all of them Democrats—who sought a House seat this year and were tracked by Science,...

With Labor Day on the horizon, many Americans are worried that automation will soon monopolize the job market. And who could blame them considering that recent Labor Days have been haunted by headlines about human workers becoming obsolete? Here is just a small sample:“Robots Could Steal 40% of U.S. Jobs by 2030.”“Artificial Intelligence Will Take Your Job.”“Jeff Bezos believes people shouldn’t do jobs software can do.”“Robots won’t just take our jobs – they’ll make the rich even richer.”So, is this dystopian nightmare inevitable? Will the vast majority of Americans in the workforce be replaced by robots and cold, mechanical automata?Wrong...

Melinda Gates says she will preference women and non-whites over men and white people, specifically for these immutable characteristics that have nothing inherently to do with business success. Melinda Gates has decided to enter the venture capital world by sending her money to people based at least partly on their sex and skin color, she said in a recent Fortune interview. Disparate Outcomes Can Signal Broader Possibilities In the Fortune interview, Gates says “I think real change can occur when the VC community starts to demand that the people it invests in have diversity, the right values, and the right...

Four Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades. After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we...

A Canadian high school switched to “Africentric Math” to attract black students to go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math(STEM) fields, according to Canadian Broadcasting’s(CBC) Wednesday report. Nova Scotia’s Auburn Drive High School math teachers are skipping their previous eurocentric approach to teaching mathematics so black students will gain more interest in the subject, the CBC reported. Teachers are adopting an Afrocentric lens to teach mathematics, based on incorporating African history and culture to make math classes resonate with their students. Auburn High School is working with the Imphop’s Legacy Academy, a program encouraging black students to get interested in...

Save PHOENIX — An Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) used for public safety flew above the capitol grounds in Phoenix on Wednesday, Jan. 17, during the 13th annual Aerospace Days at the Capitol. Hosted by the Aerospace States Association and Aerospace Arizona, the goal of the event was to educate legislators on the commercial uses of UAS, including agriculture, ranching, mining operations, inspecting large aircraft, and real estate. Demonstrations and displays regarding UAS uses, legislation, regulation, safety and technical issues, adorned the capitol lawn as legislators and citizens learned about the uses and economic impact of the aerospace industry, specifically as...

Researchers recently discovered certain drugs, including one developed to treat Alzheimer’s, stimulate innate self-repair mechanismsFor dentists, a cavity is a conundrum—in order to save the tooth they must further damage it. Currently, the primary way to treat a cavity is to excavate the decay and the surrounding area before filling the resulting crater with a durable surrogate material such as metal, plastic or glass cement. But what if instead of drilling holes into teeth and patching them up with synthetic fillers, dentists could coax our pearly whites to regrow themselves? Recently, Paul Sharpe, a bioengineer at King’s College London, and...

An engineer who was fired by Google for circulating an anti-diversity memo sued the company this week, alleging that the tech giant discriminates against white, conservative men. He’s likely not alone in that belief. There are other white men working in tech who believe their gender and race are making it difficult for them to get ahead, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center about diversity in the science and technology fields. Pew asked a nationally representative sample of white men with jobs in science, technology, math and engineering (or STEM) fields whether they thought their gender made...

"The U.S. is about to spend a small fortune on teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM....That’s a good investment in theory, but the American education system is in no position to make the most of it." "...Students should reach college prepared to take serious science and engineering courses, yet many don’t. Our math teaching is half a century out of date, and without math there is no STEM. Computer science builds on electronics and “discrete mathematics,” as opposed to the classical type leading to calculus."

Georgia College STEM course lets entitled students choose grades, opt-out of homework, and leave student groups with new stress policy. University of Georgia campus descends further into emotionally-immature amateur hour with participation trophy policy to reduce college students’ stress, reducing a STEM course to little more than an “adulting” version of Kindergarten Nap-Time In a stunning but not-to-surprising example of the deteriorating quality of education and discipline in America’s universities, A UoG STEM college course in data management has adopted what they call a “Stress Reduction Policy”. This stress policy, in all its extravagant methods of stroking students’ over-inflated egos,...

Over the weekend, a memo written by a Google engineer suggesting women are less “biologically” fit to work in tech became another reminder of just how far Silicon Valley companies have to go when it comes to eradicating sexism. The memo was the latest in a series of scandals that have made abundantly clear how toxic tech jobs can be for women, and highlighted the immediate need for companies to come up with a concrete plan to counter sex discrimination. But Anita Hill, whose own claims of sexual harassment made headlines back in the ‘90s, has no faith in the...

A software engineer’s 10-page screed against Google’s diversity initiatives is going viral inside the company, being shared on an internal meme network and Google+. The document’s existence was first reported by Motherboard, and Gizmodo has obtained it in full. In the memo, which is the personal opinion of a male Google employee and is titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he writes,...

DOWNINGTOWN >> He decided he’s done. Downingtown STEM Academy administrator Zachary Ruff, who became involved in a heated exchange during an anti-abortion protest last month conducted by two teens outside the nationally ranked school, has resigned. Ruff, dean of student life and academics, resigned to the Downingtown Area School Board members on Thursday afternoon, according to district officials. “Dr. Ruff, the school board, administration and all members of the Downingtown Area School District would like to put this terribly unfortunate incident in the past to enable everyone to move forward,” the statement from the district reads in part.

President Donald Trump signed into law two bills on Tuesday aimed at encouraging women to pursue careers in science and business fields. “Today I’m signing two bills that promote women entering and leading the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and math. Currently, only one in four women who gets a STEM degree is working in a STEM job – which is not fair, and it’s not even smart for the people that aren’t taking advantage of it,” Trump said. “It’s unacceptable that we have so many American women who have these degrees but yet are not being employed in...

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French school children have seriously under performed in an international maths and science testing, according to a new report. […] The study, carried out by education research group TIMSS, revealed that French 10-year-olds were bottom of the class in Europe when it comes to maths, and second last to Cyprus in science. In math, the French students finished the test with an average score of 488, below the EU average of 527 (the international average was weighted at 500). Some 13 percent of these French children didn’t reach the score of 400, a fact the Education Minister said showed that...

In 1990, the Navajo students of Window Rock High School in Fort Defiance, Arizona, asked the author of their calculus book, John Saxon, to be their graduation speaker. The class sponsor had suggested the governor as their speaker, but the students wanted Saxon. A story in The Arizona Republic explained, “At this high school, as at thousands of other schools around the country, Saxon’s name is spoken with reverence by pupils who credit him with changing completely their views about math.” Arnell Yazzie, president of the senior class, said he and others taking calculus had lobbied for Saxon’s selection. “He...

(Editors’ note: This column is co-authored by Chris MacFarland)New, robust partnerships between the public and private sectors are needed today to attract and educate the young scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians for tomorrow.A stem is the main trunk of a plant, and STEM — short for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — is the main trunk of our economy.A plant that gets too little water will fail to grow. Unfortunately, that’s also what’s happening to STEM education in our country today.We’re simply failing to attract and educate a sufficient number of young scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. Demand for these...