Anything you can do, I can do better
Some feminists claim that women are underrepresented in university mathematics, engineering, and hard science departments. This is (of course) evidence of bias. And they have a solution.
The idea of “title-nining” academic science was proposed by Debra Rolison in 2000. She has promoted Title IX as an “implacable hammer” guaranteed to get the attention of recalcitrant faculty. Prompted by Rolison and a growing chorus of activists, the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space held a 2002 hearing on “Title IX and Science.” Later, in 2005, former subcommittee chairmen Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Senator George Allen (R-VA) held a joint press conference with feminist leaders. Wyden declared, “Title IX in math and science is the right way to start.” Allen seconded, “We cannot afford to cut out half our population—the female population.” The Title IX reviews have already begun.
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Shalala and other speakers called for rigorous application of Title IX and other punitive measures. Witness Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, stressed the need to threaten obstinate faculties with loss of funding: “People listen to money…. Make the people listen to the money talk!”
People who live in glass houses ought to consider carefully whether to start throwing stones. Men are underrepresented in humanities and social sciences departments, and most especially in women’s studies departments. Some organization such as FIRE might decide to start a few Title IX lawsuits of their own. It could get pretty ugly. And at the end of the day, the economy actually needs science and engineering. Less so gender studies. Money does talk, or at least people with money do. Title IX feminists want to think carefully about what the money might actually say.
But focusing on the money loses sight of the best part of this argument. We begin with the fact that fewer women than men are studying or teaching advanced mathematics, science, and engineering. Why is that? It is an axiom that this cannot be due to gender differences in ability. Stipulating that this axiom is true, how do we explain the stubborn facts?
MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to 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.”
To defend the axiom that women are indistinguishable from men with respect to ability, one simply trots out the axiom that women cannot withstand competition. Women find competition repulsive, men do not.
There are no gender differences in ability, so do not oppress women by subjecting them to circumstances only men are able to endure.
Posted on March 12th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: politics
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I, for one am all for Title IXing. I’d like to get in some of them classes a nd teach them broads a thing or two. “Hey baby, shave them legs and loose them birkenstocks, maybe show a little cleavage and ol’ Doc Dooley will start gradin’on a looser curve. Catch my drift? Howz’ ’bout you and me doin a little extra credit work after class?”
I got my gender studies curriculum down. A visiting professorship would be nice.
I guess I’m not as much of a man as I thought I was. I’m not competitive, and frankly, don’t handle it very well.
Further, I find the notion that women are adverse to competition absurd. I’ve been crushed under the boot heels of competitive women throughout my quarter century stroll through the legal and behavioral science professions. I’d estimate that about 80% of the female lawyers I’ve met were very competitive, and competently so.
In academia, women don’t need Title IX to get ahead. As Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin put it, “The sisters, are doin’ it for themselves.” Title IX is about providing opportunities where they don’t exist. Until someone shows me something more than raw data about female success rates in science and engineering training programs, I maintain that no problem covered by Title IX exists.
A far more urgent problem is fixing our broken math education system for grades 1 -12.