Title IX “Target”: Science

22 thoughts on Title IX “Target”: Science

1. Why only science? Surely the liberal arts are as important and should move towards a gender ratio matching the demographics of the college-age population. Vet schools come to mind as well.

2. supposed obstacles like ‘unconscious bias’

   Excuse me, John, your privilege is showing.

3. Not to be a flame-thrower or start a huge debate, but what is the feminist theory for why men dominate the upper-echelons of mathematics/science? From what little empirical data I’ve looked at, I recall that girls on average may actually be better than boys in mathematics, but that the spread is greater for boys on mathematical IQ, and they dominate both the lower and higher end. More geniuses, but also more with learning disabilities. Assuming we start with the premise that boys and girls are intellecually equal statistically in mathematics, the fact that girls on average are better, but men dominate the upper end, does not admit of an easy feminist explanation of bias/role models etc., because if women were systematically encouraged to under-perform on mathematics testing one would not expect their average to be higher. (unless your theory is that girls have better role models for the most part, but once they are high-achieving their teachers keep them down???). I’m just curious to hear thoughts on this, not start an argument.
   Personally I don’t have an answer. We are just beginning to fully understand the influence of sex on brain development. We know that boys on average are stronger and larger than girls (though not always by any means); it’s certainly possible that, statistically, they are not equal in other areas. Should we be scared of this if it is true?

4. I don’t think we should be scared of differences. Equality to me would mean giving everyone equal status and opportunities while celebrating our differences, not using those differences against one another…

5. When I saw this article earlier today, I had high hopes for it. Especially at this point: “The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.”
   I was really hoping it would become a discussion of WHY that interest isn’t the same, but then it started talking about Pinker’s book, and how it’s a bad thing to encourage young women to pursue “male” subjects, and I gave up hope.

   I do think though, that more exposure to the gender ratio in science is useful, even as poorly done as this was.

6. Publius, IIRC during childhood girls are better at calculating, which may be the result of better handwriting, or of maturing faster, or teacher and curriculum bias, or spending more time studying and practicing, or greater native ability.

   The thing that most disturbs me about gender and education is that disparities that favor boys or men are a priori the results of discrimination and pathologies that have to be corrected. While a disparities that favor women or girls are considered, if not natural, at least not indicative of bias or institutional discrimination.

   I’m sure some people remember the court case a couple years back where a boy sued his high school. He claimed that boys were underrepresented in AP classes, disciplined for infractions that girls were not, and had on average lower GPAs. The suit claimed that teachers and policies were, in various cases, intentionally biased or implemented policies and requirements that resulted in disparate impact that negatively affected boys.

   On average, the response in the feminist blogosphere was not supportive of the boy. Though if genders had been switched, a great many feminists would consider the uneven outcomes to be either proof or strong strong evidence of discrimination.

7. “Supposed” lack of mentors and role models, eh? Oh, right, we’ve got Marie Curie!

   Even as a sixth grader I knew something was wrong when the _only_ female scientist I was given as a potential role model died as a result of doing her research.

   Publius – I think the reason men dominate the upper-echelons of mathematics/science for the same reason the dominate upper-echelons in most career lines. Unconscious bias (studies have shown that when reviewing papers, people tend to give higher reviews to authors whose names indicate they share the reviewer’s gender, and that men reward men to a greater degree than women reward women), lack of role models and mentors, the fact that it just takes time for a male-dominated field to become reasonably integrated, some women losing a shot at tenure because women take more time off to have kids than men do, and sometimes, just plain old outright sexism.

   Then there’s issues like networking, which is essential for an academic career. I went to a conference for my discipline, and most everyone in my area was male, tenured, and over the age of sixty. I’m under thirty and still in grad school – it’s not easy to socialize or even talk shop with people who are my seniors in so many ways.

   There’s also the two-body problem that, for a whole host of reasons, tends to be resolved for heterosexual couples in ways that women make more sacrifices than men.

8. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.

   And might not that interest be due to gender socialization patterns? (The article kind of just pushes that aside.) Publius, that might help answer your question. It’s one thing to be good at mathematical thinking; it’s another thing to DO science, especially say, joining a group of all men that has been all men for years. There’s a huge social barrier.

   Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors…

   I’m echoing you here, Habladora. Supposed??? That’s real stuff! Can’t find the original article I was looking for, but here’s another one about the scientist Ben Barnes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201883.html An excellent case study of a man who is treated completely differently compared to when he was a woman. What a great source of first-hand knowledge of the bias that women experience.

   Honestly, a real solution would be “men should not be douchebags to their female colleagues.” But that’s not so easy to change, right? Plus, it’s not always so obvious. In one research experience, no one ever directly questioned my abilities, and they did praise the work I did. But there were still comments made towards me that specifically pointed out my womanhood, and it still made me uncomfortable. I didn’t really need to be constantly asked how great it was to work with “such handsome men.” (No thanks, not interested.)

   So, because of that, I don’t know if the quota idea will work. You might just replicate the problem mentioned in the posted article: recruit women, they aren’t treated well, said women decide to leave because of it and say “Science just isn’t for us women, let us be.” It may only serve to reinforce the problem.

9. Both conscious and unconscious bias is very much alive in the sciences. I would have liked to have seen an article that clearly discusses both part of this topic. Yes, there are different interests, and these different interests influence future careers. But “supposed” biases? There’s very clear evidence showing biases at all levels of education, from school-kids up to high levels of academia. As a PhD scientist, I’ve seen first-hand the horrible sexism that develops in a macho ultra-nerd culture.

   But seriously, is this an OpEd piece? Is this supposed to be real journalism? This is one of the most biased, one-sided pieces I’ve read on the subject.

   And @Publius, there are many social influences that can reduce the “width” of the distribution you are talking about and for both the smartest and slowest of girls to gravitate more towards the mean. There are a million pet sociological pseudo-evolutionary theories made by lay-people that aren’t based in much evidence. In the end, these theories are generally just poorly substantiated excuses because the person doesn’t understand the extent of the bias.

   “What is the feminist theory for why men dominate the upper-echelons of mathematics/science?” Well, at my school, many of the theorist professors tended to be the most arrogant, brash and sexist, and hence didn’t want to “waste time” on female students. Simply asking this question shows an extreme level of ignorance. Do you not think that sexism plays a role here?

10. I blogged about this from a legal perspective (see my link above). I wrote:

    Title IX has no quota requirements whatsoever. Per the Women’s Sports Foundation (from my own experience, below is an entirely correct statement of Title IX law):

    12. Does Title IX require institutions to meet “quotas”?

    No. Every institution has three options to meet the participation standard of Title IX, only one of which is to provide athletic participation opportunities in substantial proportion to each gender enrollment. They only need to meet one of the following:

    * Option 1: Compare the ratio of male and female athletes to male and female undergraduates; if the resulting ratios are close, the school is probably in compliance with the participation standard.

    * Option 2: Demonstrate that the institution has a history and continuing practice of program expansion for the underrepresented gender.

    * Option 3: Demonstrate that the institution has already effectively accommodated the interests and abilities of the underrepresented gender.

    Coaching that quota misrepresentation in “some critics fear” language doesn’t absolve the NYTimes of blame, since they don’t immediately correct it. In fact, they repeat it twice later in the article.

    If, as “critics” say, there’s limited female interest in the sciences, then Title IX only requires the school accommodate that interest to the same extent it accommodates male interest.

    Nothing more, nothing less.

    Shame on the NYTimes. A simple phone call to a gender rights / Title IX attorney or the Office of Civil Rights would have corrected the mistake.

11. “Supposed” lack of mentors and role models, eh? Oh, right, we’ve got Marie Curie!

    You know, rather than schools trying to search through archives and point to any female scientist they can find as an example of a role model, it would be much more useful if they just pointed out to the class that the reason why there are only, for instance, only male mathematicians on the wall is because for millennia, women didn’t have access to education.

    If you don’t address the fact that the reason there are only men up there is because of deep rooted sexism, then kids start forming sexist pseudo-scientific (@Publius) theories in their mind to explain why the world is the way it is.

12. There’s also the two-body problem that, for a whole host of reasons, tends to be resolved for heterosexual couples in ways that women make more sacrifices than men.

    This is my theory as well. It’s not considered odd for a male scientist to have a wife who keeps the house and primarily raises the children; but if a female scientist’s husband took on a “housewife” role so she could spend all day in the laboratory thinking and testing, it would be considered odd if not downright laughable. Not that it should be, of course…

    Moreover, even if there are men willing to step into that role for a female scientist, I don’t think a lot of girls or women would expect to find them – there’s not the social expectation that “hey, the man you marry might do all this stuff for you” – so they may not even be looking, and may be calibrating their career accordingly in expectation that THEY will one day have to give up career for family.

    As for Marie Curie – it’s worth nothing that she is the only *person*, of either gender, to win the Nobel Prize in two separate scientific fields (Physics and Chemistry). w00t.

13. @ M:

    I wasn’t formulating any “pseudo scientific” explanation for anything. I was soliciting an explanation, yes. But I did not offer one, or even suggest one; the most I said was, as far as my belief is concerned, it is not outside the realm of possibility that men and women might have different statistical spreads, since they do so in other areas. I was merely citing (as far as I can recall) the ***observation*** that has been made about the distribution of mathematical ability among school-aged cihldren.

14. ROFL… what a horrible typo I made in #12. “It’s worth nothing” should be “It’s worth noting.” I type good.

15. I had *just* finally read Moon Duchin’s essay on the gender politics of genius last night! It was an interesting read, though I thought it could have spent a little more time on the main thesis (the setup was pretty long).

16. M – Yes, exactly. (IMO it would also help to give an example of a female scientist/mathematician who suffered clear barriers because of her sex, such as Sophie Germain or Lise Meitner, so kids can see that it’s still a battle worth fighting.)

    Unfortunately, this bit of context was missing when we did our unit on scientists and inventors. We had long line of male scientists/inventors and their accomplishments but no particular mention of how they died, and then Marie Curie, who they made sure to tell us died of cancer because she did research with radioactive materials. Oh, and there was the woman who invented the teddy bear.

17. I’m a woman who just graduated college with a math major and is about to start grad school. FWIW, here are my anecdotes/impressions. I’m not sure how specific they are to math or to my school.

    By and large, I haven’t seen conscious sexism (which is not the same as saying it doesn’t exist). At the undergraduate level, I think a big chunk of the problem is social. First of all, anyone who claims that math is not a social field is absolutely full of shit. Even apart from the fact that people are social animals, much of the best mathematics comes from collaboration and informal conversations. But the female undergrads were somewhat isolated from the math major social group. I don’t think this was deliberate, on anyone’s part. Contrary to legend and stereotype, the male math majors were very well socialized – they were friendly and generally not crude (or no more so than college students generally are, whether male or female) or sexist (one of the male majors did tell me “you can’t have a beer with a girl”, but he’s an outlier in many, many ways). But most people find it easier to socialize casually with people they perceive as “like themselves”, and that affects both the male students’ comfort levels hanging out with female students, and vice versa. If it were just me who had been kind of isolated, I wouldn’t think anything of it – I’m kind of socially awkward. But the year ahead of me, there was a clique of top male math majors, and the top female math major was pretty clearly not in it. The other female math majors in my year were also kind of isolated.

    One example of how this played out is the undergraduate math society, which gets together to listen to math talks aimed at undergrads. It’s organized by undergrads, and the organizers generally ask their friends to give talks, unsurprisingly. More precisely, the people they think to ask tend to be their friends, since grad students and faculty only have so much time (N.B. I was one of the organizers this past year, although the club is so informal and haphazard that “organizer” might be a misnomer). So I was invited to give talks starting my junior year, while the male math majors comparable to me in ability tended to start giving talks their sophomore years. The other female students in my year didn’t start giving talks until their senior years. Now obviously talks to undergraduate math clubs are not the sort of things that make or break careers. But I’m virtually certain that the phenomenon of “who you think to ask” plays out on the professional level as well (although I should note that the grad students are better at socializing across gender lines, maybe because they’re older, maybe because there are fewer of them, maybe because the incoming grad student class two years ago was half female – critical mass matters).

    You could argue that I and the other female students should have been more aggressive in asking to speak. But I didn’t know I was expected to give talks. I didn’t know the status of the speakers, and I didn’t know how my classmates arranged to give talks, or who you had to ask. Information and expectations get transmitted along informal networks, and people outside the cliques don’t pick up on them. For example, something no director of undergraduate studies will tell you is that if you want to go to the very top grad schools, you have to finish your undergraduate coursework quickly and start graduate coursework by your junior year. That’s the sort of thing you find out by getting to know the older math majors, which I was lucky enough to do.

    Practical consequence aside, how many people really want to go into a profession where they know they’re going to be socially isolated? Practically no one, male or female, can do something like that. Eventually I stopped noticing that I was usually the only woman in the room, but why should that be a prerequisite to doing what I love? It’s really not fair that women in math need to be more determined to succeed.

    I do think lack of pushiness on the part of female math students is a problem, though. I was recently at a conference for female mathematicians, and I was shocked by how quiet they were in lectures and talks. Normally, people ask the speaker questions, but there were barely any questions at this conference. Whether they were used to being shouted down by male colleagues/classmates (I never was, I don’t know if that’s common or not), were afraid of looking stupid, were socialized throughout their childhood to be quiet and passive, or some combination, I don’t know. But doing math well (or doing anything well, I imagine) requires you to be bold and aggressive and requires you to run the risk of looking wrong and stupid. Among the graduate students, it seemed to me that the students most likely to be standing around a chalkboard doing math were male, although that was just a general impression. The female Chinese students seemed more likely to be doing math publicly like that (it’s hard for me to tell because there was a sharp social divide between the Chinese students and everyone else, and I couldn’t tell much about interactions where the conversation is conducted entirely in Chinese).

    Confidence is another major factor. I was a student at a math program for high school students, and I later worked there as a counselor, and one of the biggest differences is that the girls just don’t think they can do it. The boys struggle just as much, but either they don’t take it personally, or they convey their struggles by being loudly confident about their own prowess. The girls just get depressed. It doesn’t help that the male:female ratio is about 3:1 to start with. One of the grad students I know made the remark that 90% of the time you’re doing math, you’re on a totally wrong track, and it takes enormous self-confidence to push through. Women seem to take failure more personally, and that’s crippling. It’s doubly crippling because we as a society expect mathematicians to start on their paths in high school, which is an especially rough age for girls from a self-esteem perspective.

    There are certainly plenty of people who will assume that a woman in math is stupid (http://xkcd.com/385 says it well). When I was a TA working in the math help room, there were a fair number of students who would come in, aggressively ask me questions, and treat my answers like nonsense, and then turn around and be perfectly polite to the male TA on duty at the same time. I don’t think that was conscious, and other people in this thread have brought up the implicit bias studies.

    Math is also a fairly culturally conservative field, because people start in their twenties and keep producing into their sixties or seventies. The establishment is slow to change, and so on top of not being terribly friendly to women, the field is not terribly queer-friendly. I’ve had this chat with the one out faculty member at my school, and he agreed with my impression that there just aren’t many openly gay mathematicians, although he had not personally experienced homophobia (CS departments seem much more queer-friendly, probably because it’s a newer field). Once you have cultural inertia like that, it’s hard to change.

    This comment is long enough and meandery enough already, but as a side note, I don’t know what sort of interventions would work. When I was a (probably oversensitive) high school student, I always felt kind of embarrassed by the “encourage girls in careers/science/math” people. It always seemed to me that they were saying “we don’t really think you’re good enough, but we’ll pretend you are”. Again, that was my impression as an adolescent. I know better now, but I don’t know how typical that sort of thinking is among high school girls. I certainly knew a few other girls from math camp who also felt patronized.

18. That article is not very comprehensive or balanced. It quotes certain studies that seem to suggest that there is no gender problem in science and the author seems to have that bias/agenda going in. A more comprehensive and balanced look at several different aspects of this issue would have been more informative. The whole Title IX/quotas/”attack” motif is very misleading as well and sets up an adversarial tone to the text. Title IX has been blamed for a lot of things that have happened in college sports that had nothing to do with Title IX (which has no quota requirements) but urban legends/anecdotal stories keep that alive. One of the people quoted in this article is Christina Hoff Summers, who is about as objective about gender issues as Jerry Falwell was about love-thy-neighbors-the-homosexuals.

    There are lots of facts and data about both Title IX and the gender problem in science, available easily from reputable and Google-able sources, but that side of the issue seems to be of little issue to Mr. Tierney…regretable but common. It’s a pretty complicated issue with a lot of social/cultural/generational/personal/political/financial threads woven through it so there’s no nice cut and dried, black and white cause or solution. But then people don’t want to or don’t like to think that hard about complex problems, and pitting the genders against each other is a much easier and lucrative sell.

    In general, jobs in academic science/pure research are are harder for ANY young scientist to get a tenure-track job/tenure these days for another whole host of systemic reasons, but it has been shown that there are not enough women in these fields to be truly representative, which is changing slowly with generations, just like with the obstacles to gays/gay marriage. It varies greatly by discipline (the articles quote a lot about biology and social science jobs which are more open to women and attract more women but physics is another story), by university, and by individual department. In addition to all the surveys and studies (peer-reviewed), I personally know two female researchers who have run up against the science bias (one where the administration basically overruled the tenure committee’s decision b/c it was biased to the point of inviting a lawsuit), and then I have my own experience with how I have been mentored/encouraged/valued/ or the opposite compared to my close male friends/colleagues who were doing/did the same things as I did.

    Of all my friends and acquaintances that I started grad school with, at first about 85% of them were shooting for a tenure-track position at an R1 university. Now, when we’re all getting to the point where we have to make decisions, it’s down to about 20%. After seeing our junior professors and new faculty of both genders go through the process and how hard it has been on them (for reasons that have little to do with their intelligence, capabilities, or dedication), most of us have decided that it’s just not worth it. Even the guys don’t want to have to sacrifice having a personal life/family/spouse for some elusive and often chancy definition of “success” 20 years out. I think the women, who have less cultural pressure on them to define themselves as successful providers or to tough it out (and show that they can outcompete the next guy even if they make themselves miserable in the process) ARE more likely to say “fuck this, I’m going to do something else” even if that something else is almost always pegged as “staying home to bake cookies and have babies.”

19. My girlfriend is a scientist, and over the last seventeen years, I have moved around to different colleges and different parts of the country with her while she finished her degree. From her experience, I can definitely say that there is, still, a practically open bias against women pursuing science. If there are less women in the top levels of the field, I would guess that it’s because a lot of smart women looked at their options and decided that fighting and working twice as hard for half the recognition simply wasn’t worth it. It’s not like the financial rewards of being a graduate student, post-doc, or P.I. are all that high.

    Perhaps, not surprisingly, the sexism seemed a lot worse in the so-called “hard sciences” (math and physics) than in the “softer” ones (biology) (the nomenclature for which just goes to show how ingrained the sexism is). When my girlfriend started out, she was studying astrophysics. There were only about eight people in the whole program, and she was one of only two women. Nevertheless, in the two years she spent there, the head of the department was able to learn the names of the men, but continuously referred to her and the other woman as “the blond one” and “the brunette one”. None of the men were required to TA classes, but it was assumed that the women would.

    At the halfway point of the program, there was some big test to determine who got to continue. Again, not surprisingly, all the men passed, but both of the women were told that they hadn’t. They weren’t allowed to know their scores, or get the tests back to see what they may have gotten wrong. Now, I’m not saying that it’s impossible for either my girlfriend or her friend to have failed, but I knew most of the people in the program, and most of the guys were more concerned with drinking and hitting on women than with studying or working. My girlfriend simply gave up on the program and switched fields. She went on to get a phd in biochemistry/molecular biology from Yale, so it’s not like I have any reason to doubt her intelligence or abilities. The other woman went through some sort of appeals process to take the test again and was told she had failed a second time. I think she left the program, too, though I don’t know what she did after that. Anyway, the whole time she was in astrophysics, it was no secret that the people in the program and the people in charge of the program thought that women didn’t belong in it. Several of the professors were on their third wives and, judging by the stories, seemed to regard the female students as little more than a potential dating pool. It was pretty common to hear that they had married their TAs after leaving their former wives.

20. Okay, question, Jenga. “Pinker’s book?” Which one? I got like halfway through The Blank Slate before getting distracted and putting it down, but I don’t remember anything resembling sexism or racism. In fact, I quite liked what I saw. Aw, man. 🙁

21. The female Chinese students seemed more likely to be doing math publicly like that (it’s hard for me to tell because there was a sharp social divide between the Chinese students and everyone else, and I couldn’t tell much about interactions where the conversation is conducted entirely in Chinese).

    From my experiences as a Chinese-American with near-native Mandarin fluency and interacting with hundreds of Chinese undergrad and grad students, a large part of that is due both to the differing cultural/social conditionings along with the extremely cutthroat nature of education…especially college admissions in China and other East Asian countries.

    In China and other East Asian countries, your admission not only to a particular college, but in many cases, a particular major with, infinitesimally few exceptions, is determined solely by the score on the national college entrance exam given by the nation’s education ministry.*

    Considering the sheer numbers of college applicants in relation to the available spots within a given university and majors……the students who pass this national test and gain admittance, especially the topflight universities like Beida or Tsinghua and prestigious majors like econ or many mathematically intensive natural/technical scientific fields are considered the meritorious elect and are highly respected by their peers. This great deal of respect conferred to Chinese students who managed to overcome such a grueling admissions process is such that it tends to enhance their self-confidence….sometimes to extremes. This, I believe is one factor in why your female Chinese grad classmates had far less issues with confidence in the math field than their American female counterparts. If they were able to get into a Chinese undergraduate institution….especially a topflight one in the field of math…their national college entrance exam scores were likely, at the very least, to be within the top 30 percentile of all admitted students in their undergraduate institution. With few exceptions, most Chinese and other East Asian grad students who went through such a grueling admissions process and graduated from their nation’s undergrad institutions have a great deal of self-confidence in their academic abilities.**

    This is especially in fields like math and other mathematically intensive natural and technical sciences as they know the mathematical education they received in their home countries tends to be far more rigorous and demanding than the American equivalent. In fact, my parents and several Chinese grad students were incredulous when I told them that most American high school students didn’t take any calculus until their first year in college….and that was only if the institution mandated it for all majors. Back in their home countries, calculus was a topic that was supposed to have been covered during the intermediate/high school years for all students on the college prep track.

    * That is not to say that an extreme handful of students do not wiggle their way in due to political or celebrity considerations. The nation’s educational ministries, however, attempt to keep this to the absolute minimum to avoid rousing the ire of academics and more importantly….the citizenry who are prone to launching massive protests if there is any hint a group of applicants are circumventing the standard admissions process due to some sort of non-meritorious favoritism. For this reason, most East Asian classmates have a hard time understanding why the concept of legacy admissions at many American universities, especially the Ivy-level ones are allowed as they see it as a form of corrupt nepotism for academically marginal students who were fortunate to be born to wealthy and/or well-connected families.

    ** This extremely grueling process is also one reason why some Chinese grad students I’ve met who did their undergrad in China have exhibited disdain and even contempt for fellow Chinese students who come to the states as undergraduate students as American undergrad admissions…even at the Ivy-level schools were considered far less grueling and thus, “far easier” than gaining admission to Chinese institutions of comparable prestige. As far as they were concerned, it was only by virtue of their parents’ wealth and/or political connections that they were able to attend topflight American universities/colleges when their marginal performance on the national exam would have likely prevented them from gaining admission to a third tier Chinese university. Though I can relate to their bitterness at wealthy marginal students taking a backdoor route solely due to their socio-economic privileged status……I am also relieved to have never gone through such a grueling process as that would have resulted in my being denied a college education altogether.

22. I’ve heard some research suggesting that men are more systematizers and women emphatizers, basically that means that men generally find inanimate sciences more interesting and women prefer social and human sciences. You can look outside of the education system in general to see this. In fact you can look at a baby boy and baby girl and see that the boy is more likely to stare at his surroundings and the girl and the faces of people in the room.

    That said, evidently women make up a majority of these sciences such as psychology and biology while men make up engineering and physics in a majority. In medicine, it seems to be both a human and inanimate career (think of surgery and talking with patients) and guess what? We have a roughly even split between the genders here (slightly more girls actually).

    Personally I don’t think bias is the main issue here. It may be there, but if women went from being the underrepresentative gender in Biology to the larger representented without outside help then why hasn’t that happened in other sciences?

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