http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/why-can2019t-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

By Christina Hoff Sommers From the March/April 2008 Issue

Filed under: Culture
Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s, but they lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem.’

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

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. As one former student told The Harvard Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

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. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities.

But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track profes­sors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engi­neering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the phys­ical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

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.”

While Title IX has been effective in promot­ing women’s participation in sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX 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 proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of fund­ing, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of cal­ibration could devastate academic science.

But unfortunately, in her enthusiasm for Title IX, Rolison is not alone.

On October 17, 2007, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology convened to learn why women are “underrepresented” in academic professorships of science and engineering and to consider what the federal government should do about it.

As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biol­ogy, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Why this is so is an interesting question—and the subject of a sub­stantial empirical literature. The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer.

There were, however, no disagreements at the congressional hearing. All five expert wit­nesses, and all five congressmen, Democrat and Republican, were in complete accord. They attributed the dearth of women in university science to a single cause: sexism. And there was no dispute about the solution. All agreed on the need for a revolutionary transformation of American science itself. “Ultimately,” said Kathie Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation, “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.”
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*****the article is too long to be posted, by a must read if interested in the topic****

I'm going to have to read this when I have more time, this looks pretty interesting.

Well, this person is obviously writing from an unbiased viewpoint

Humm...just a little observation of mine, usually girls are raised in a way they are taught to complain, to "give lip", to avoid intense struggle. But you cant charm or give lip to math, you cant expect to adapt math to your needs as you can make a man wear better clothes. Math is pure logic, has zero social appeal.

Im not saying girls are like that, but they are raised as such.

wow that is real sexist stereotype bullshit!
men do just as much human manipulation as women...proof: there's far more men politicians and lawyers than woman!

to be honest, I just think that woman are generally less interested in Maths and Science than men. Not necessarily less good originally, just less interested...why, I have no idea since I do like science.
I was in an ..not sure what you call it in the US, kind of undergraduate, but more practical, in Electronics and I was 1 of 5 women in a 200+ promotion.

Would they also demand parity in Liberal Arts?

I think it would take some doing to politicize mathematics.

This is always a problem somewhere. Quotas like this only cause problems, it excludes people that WANT to participate in something because the institution doesn't have enough people of another group INTERESTED in participating. Very annoying.


I'm just guessing here, but I don't think it's prejudice to say that male and female brains operate differently. We're all hard-wired to look for different social and physical cues in finding a mate, women have a stronger sense of smell, etc. I don't see how it could be entirely impossible for women to just be 'better' at subjects that require more abstract thought or comprehension, and men to be 'better' at subjects that are more numbers oriented. *shrugs*. I don't really see the problem. It's not as though women are showing up and being told that they can't take the class. They're just not interested. Why is that wrong? Why is it so terrible to aknowlege differences?

I think that the majority being asian and jewish men, both cultures with a very unique approach towards struggle,sacrifice and work, supports my opinion.

actually, it appears not so regarding the law profession, where it seems to be split roughly evenly.

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/careercenter ... 1229385613

by lawyers I meant attorneys/barristers/prosecutors, the ones pleading, the public faces, not law in general (it's a non-english language thing, sorry..there's no such word as lawyers, that covers all law professions, in French)

Truckloads of fail. Bias is far from responsible for graduate enrollment of women in math programs. Women simply don't apply as much as men. It's not sexist; it's a fact. There's no difference in capability of women and men in enrollees, either; for some reason that can only be politically ascertained right now, men apply much more than women, thus, women are underrepresented. It's not like the recruiting boards are like "oh, woman, OUT!" That's a fat fucking lie. Fuck this article, and fuck everyone that thinks it "proves" something sexist.

Obviously you didn't read the article, then

OH SNAP.

Who said this?

I'm not quite sure if I'm being trolled here or not.

This is a goddamned fucking catastrophe.



PS - I agree with the slant of the article. This kind of thinking needs to stop. The last thing we need is more affirmative action. Jesus help us.

This article was on the same side of your viewpoint. Just stating the obvious.

And who said this?



Noam Chomsky

Its a well known fact that the field of physics is part of the international zionist conspiracy. Things fall downwards because of sin. Gravity is a ficticious force.