September 2009
Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated.
Meanwhile, men are becoming the second sex in American higher education.
In
2006 the National Academy of Sciences released
Beyond Bias And Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science
and Engineering, which found “pervasive unexamined gender bias”
against women in academic science. Donna Shalala, a former Clinton
administration cabinet secretary, chaired the committee that wrote the report.
When she spoke at a congressional hearing in October 2007, she warned that
strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate” women face in
university science. This “crisis,” as she called it, “clearly calls for a
transformation of academic institutions. Our nation’s future depends on it.”
The study was controversial from the beginning.
John Tierney of the New York Times
interviewed several researchers who dismissed it as politically driven
propaganda—the “triumph of politics over science.” Linda Gottfredson of the
University of Delaware said, “I am embarrassed that this female-dominated panel
of scientists would ignore decades of scientific evidence to justify an already
disproved conclusion, namely, that the sexes do not differ in career-relevant
interests and abilities.”
This past Tuesday the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) released a non-political, objective study of women in academic science
entitled Gender Difference at Critical
Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty.
The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and mandated by
Congress. It contradicts key findings of Beyond Bias and Barriers.
According to its executive summary:
Our survey findings do indicate that, at many
critical transition points in their academic careers (e.g., hiring for
tenure-track and tenure positions and promotions) women appear to have fared as
well as or better than men… These findings are in contrast to the COSEPUP
[Shalala] committee’s general conclusions, that “women who are interested in
science and engineering careers are lost at every educational transition” and
the “evaluation criterion contain arbitrary and subjective components that
disadvantage women.”
To give one typical finding, in the years studied,
2004 and 2005, women accounted for approximately 20 percent of applicants for
positions in mathematics, but were 28 percent of those interviewed and 32
percent of those who received job offers. Furthermore, once women attained jobs
in math or science programs, their teaching loads and research resources were
comparable to men’s. Female full professors were paid, on average, 8 percent
less than males. But the committee attributed this to the fact that the senior
male professors had more years of experience. There were no differences in
salaries for male and female assistant and associate professors. “I don’t think
we would have anticipated that in so many areas that there would have been such
a balance in opportunities for men and women,” said Dr. Sally Shaywitz, Yale
University research scientist and co-chair of the committee that wrote the
report.
The new study does not claim that women have
achieved parity with men. It found, for example, that women with Ph.D.s in math
and science are far less likely than men to pursue a career at a
research-intensive university. Why should that be? The report does not say, but
suggests it would be an important question to pursue. In fact, there is now a
lively and growing literature on gender and vocation. While some scholars
contend that “unconscious bias” and persistent stereotypes are primary reasons
for the paucity of women in the high echelons of math and science, others,
perhaps a majority, suggest that men and women, on average, have different
career interests and propensities. (AEI Press will soon be publishing The
Science on Women and Science, a collection of articles by scholars who argue
different sides of this issue.)
The unfortunate news is that this temperate,
well-reasoned, and objective new NAS study has come after the Shalala/Bias
and Barriers report has already accomplished its purpose. Many members of
Congress from both parties (especially Republican Congressman Vernon Ehlers and
Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Barbara Boxer) were electrified by the Bias
and Barriers report—as well as by the volumes of highly tendentious advocacy
research that preceded it (see my “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like a Man?”).
Congress has already authorized NSF to spend
millions of dollars on anti-bias programs, and instructed federal agencies such
as NASA and the Department of Education to
begin stringent Title IX gender equity
reviews of science programs in the nation’s universities. These expensive and
aggressive policies and programs were put in place without any genuine evidence
that sexist bias against women in academic science is actually a problem.
Members of Congress who are concerned about gender
equity should take a look at what is happening in the academy as a whole.
University of Michigan economist Mark Perry, using Department of Education data,
has prepared this useful chart:
Perry shows that men are now on the wrong side of
the degree gap at every stage of education. Here are his figures for the
class of 2009:
Education Department projections though 2017
show a worsening picture for men with every passing year. If there is a crisis
in the academy that merits a congressional investigation, it is not that women
Ph.D.s are being shortchanged in math and science hiring and tenure committees,
for that is not true. It is that men are quickly becoming the second sex in
American education.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
The American, June 10, 2009.
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