September 2008
At a recent House hearing on “Women in
Academic Science and Engineering” Congressman Brian Baird, a Democrat
from Washington State, asked a room full of activist women how best to
bring American scientists into line: “What kind of hammer should we
use?” The weapon of choice is the well-known federal anti-discrimination
law “Title IX,” which prohibits sex discrimination in “any education
program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX
has never been rigorously applied to academic science. That is now about
to change. In the past few months both the Department of Education and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have begun looking
at candidates for Title IX-enforcement positions.
The feminist reformers acknowledge that few science departments are
guilty of overt discrimination. They claim, however, that subtle,
invisible “unconscious bias” is discouraging talented aspiring women.
Therefore, the major focus of the equity movement is to transform the
academic culture itself — to make it more attractive to women by
rendering science less stressful, less competitive, and less time
consuming. Debra Rolison, a senior research chemist at the Pentagon’s
Naval Research Laboratory and a leader of the equity campaign, describes
the typical university chemistry department as “brutal to people who
want to do something besides chemistry around-the-clock.”
MIT biologist and equity-activist Nancy
Hopkins says that contemporary science “is a system where winning is
everything, and women find it repulsive.” Kathie Olsen, deputy director
of the National Science Foundation, draws the revolutionary conclusion,
“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.” To this end, the National Science Foundation
has launched a multi-million dollar grant program, called ADVANCE,
devoted to “institutional transformation” through gender-sensitivity
workshops, interactive theater and the like. ADVANCE is well named: it
is the advance guard, softening up the hard sciences for the coming of
Title IX enforcement.
Although Title IX has contributed to the progress of women’s athletics,
it has done serious harm to men’s sports. Over the years, judges,
federal officials, and college administrators have interpreted it 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 proportions of women as
men. So, to avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits,
educational institutions have eliminated men’s teams — in effect,
reducing men’s participation to the level of women’s interest. That kind
of regulatory calibration — call it reductio ad feminem — would
wreak havoc in fields that drive the economy such as math, physics, and
computer science.
It is important to keep in mind that today’s academy is hardly
inhospitable to women. Harvard, Princeton, Brown, MIT, and other top
schools have women presidents. Women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s
degrees, 59 percent of master’s degrees, and half the doctorates. If men
were as gender-organized as women, they might lobby for Title IX reviews
of the many departments — such as psychology, education, sociology,
literature, art history, and the life sciences — where they are woefully
“underrepresented.” And women now represent 77 percent of students in
veterinary schools, so they can obviously manage hard technical science
where it interests them.
The lower proportions of women in physics, mathematics, and engineering
may be due in part to subtle factors of culture and “unconscious bias,”
but facts point to simpler explanation. In a recent study by Neil Gross
of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, 1,417
professors were asked to explain the relative scarcity of female
professors in these fields. Nearly three out of four respondents, 74
percent, attributed it to differences in the subjects that
characteristically interest women, while 24 percent put it down to
sexist discrimination and 1 percent to women’s lack of ability.
National Review Online, April 24, 2008.
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