Stop sexism in science! (someone better tell the chromosomes there’s no difference)
Posted by: Neocon in Academia, tags: bachelors degrees, educational system, female students, feminists, gender bias, gender differences, harvard, humanities social sciences, legislators, masters degrees, math class, michelle malkin(via Michelle Malkin) There is an unsettling article over at the American that details the efforts of feminists and legislators to artificially inject more women into educational slots studying sciences by changing the requirements, and not for the better. I’m all for more women in sciences or more women in any other setting, but I don’t think we should cripple the future of our scientific research by adjusting standards to the perceived preferences of any one group.
I’ll highlight a few elements of the article, but you really should give the whole thing a read.
The article details the difficulties of a high-level Math class at Harvard. Needless to say, it’s about as tough as you get.
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… The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”
So should we make these less Jewish/Asian friendly in some way to balance out the educational system? Do we need to make the classes more Christian WASP friendly? Does that make any sense? Of course not! It doesn’t make any more sense to twist a science away from cold, objective fact-based learning methods toward something else less effective in order to attract or retain female students. In the long run the only people we would hurt are ourselves. Even if women felt more empowered by having things slanted in their favor, our country would feel the heat because we wouldn’t have the best scientific minds we could possibly have (which currently DO include women), we would have the scientific community that feminists feel more comfortable looking at.
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.
So if women are now earning higher than 50 percent of these degrees, shouldn’t we be doing something to hamper their advancement according to the feminist logic? Why, if we don’t have 50 percent of each gender, we must be doing something wrong. Someone must be at a disadvantage here. Don’t we need to deny about 7-9 percent of women admission to both bachelors and masters degree programs to make it fair?
Obviously not, but who are the people preaching this double standard? Meet Debra Rolison:
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.”
Equality doesn’t come from shifting one bias to another, it comes from negating both biases and finding the level playing field. Lectures with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” are about as helpful to this goal as it is for a dieter to switch from cheesecake to chocolate cake.
But people like Rolison are immune to the irony of advocating more bias as a means to end bias. Nancy Hopkins writes this of the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT:
“It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as Shalala, Rolison, and Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering. Indeed, the charter for the October 17 congressional hearing placed primary emphasis on academic culture: “The list of cultural norms that appear to disadvantage women…includes the favoring of disciplinary over interdisciplinary research and publications, and the only token attention given to teaching and other service during the tenure review process. Thus it seems that it is not necessarily conscious bias against women but an ingrained idea of how the academic enterprise ‘should be’ that presents the greatest challenge to women seeking academic S&E [science and engineering] careers.”
First of all, it is asinine to proclaim that you are for the abolishment of prevalent gender roles and then selectively pluck stereotypes of women being less aggressive than men when it paints your position in a favorable light.
Even accepting the basic premise of this on face value, there are still many problems with it. God forbid we want the people researching scientific fact to deal in absolutes, rewarding substantive advancement of the field above all else. This isn’t to deny the importance of teaching at all, it is imperative to the education system, but we shouldn’t equate expression of knowledge with those who have shown real results in the endeavor to discover and add to those textbooks.
Despite criticisms, the current academic enterprise seems to have created quite a few amazing advancements and many brilliant female researchers. Is there really a problem?
So why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty attitudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female professors in math, science, and engineering. Just 1 percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24 percent to sexist discrimination, and 74 percent to differences in what characteristically interests men and women.
Perhaps I am just an ignorant example of the male-dominated war-loving phallic society, but I think the time and efforts of these gender equality affirmative action academics and legislators would be much better spent developing scholarship funds for those young women who actually want to take part in sciences, as opposed to their current quest to dismantle the current system of higher learning.
