<p>Coming soon to your universities.</p>
<p>Title</a> IX Takes On Science - The Paper Trail (usnews.com)</p>
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The members of Congress and womens 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, womens interest in some fields isnt the same as mens.
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<p>I have to disagree with those critics. One of the reasons women do not come in droves to certain scientific fields (chemistry used to be one of them) is that their interest is heavily discouraged by males. I've been told many, many times that women do not make good chemists because they care more about procreation and their families than the pursuit of scientific excellence. :rolleyes: Although I doubt that in this day and age a pregnant graduate student would be openly told that her big belly was a disgrace for the entire department, such attitudes still exist, although they are not so openly expressed.</p>
<p>However, I'm not sure if a Title IX-like law is a good solution.</p>
<p>YOU will major in chemistry young lady!!</p>
<p>"The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, theyre less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics."</p>
<p>I have no idea whether discrimination or expectations that are not family-friendly play a role in the lack of females in the field, but I have watched the earlier decisions that girls make to turn away from the fields. Science and math are the courses that come easiest to D, but she doesn't like them. She took the high school AP's (one of only 3 girls in her AP Physics class) in part to get college distribution requirements in them out of the way. Out of 7 close female friends, all of whom are Honors-track students, only one other took AP Physics/AP Chem/AP Calculus. 4 didn't take physics at all. I really don't think the girls were being subtly discouraged--2 of D's science teachers and her AP Calculus teacher have been among D's favorites--but I wonder why the subjects don't resonate more with these girls.</p>
<p>Well, do the guys plan to ask for a Title IX-type investigation for those departments such as English and social studies where there are generally more girls than guys? </p>
<p>In my son's HS, most of the college-bound kids will study liberal arts, because they were inspired by two or three outstanding teachers in those fields. Generally, the kids do not want to do something math/science related because they are not particularly well-rounded in those areas. Do you blame the liberal arts teachers for that? No. You start with the curriculum that tends to focus more on the liberal arts than the sciences. Often elementary school teachers have only taken a handful of courses in those areas, so their knowledge base is limited. Maybe we need to develop curriculum where math/science teachers are in the elementary buildings. The younger a child sees the wonder in these disciplines, the more he will continue to follow them.</p>
<p>I am still waiting for a study that compares the college majors of students with the toys they played with at a very young age. (Preferably young enough so that the parents made the decision which toys to buy, and not the kids.) </p>
<p>I really enjoyed studying classical mechanics in high school, largely because I could relate everything I learned to observations I made when playing with toy cars as a child. My parents refused to buy me a single toy doll and instead gave me a microscope, a telescope and toys that had to be assembled from a kit. I'm not surprised that I am a science major today.</p>
<p>I am convinced that there is a strong correlation between the way that kids spend their time and their preferences as they grow older. What I am really curious about is the cause-effect relationship: are girls hardwired for different interests and therefore choose to play with/end up getting more 'girl toys', or are we very subtly discouraging them from developing an interest in sciences by raising them the way we do from a very early age on?</p>
<p>As a scientist, I don't think there should be gender quotas in science, and I don't agree with the idea of "title nine-ing".</p>
<p>Still, I think there is still discrimination against women in science -- studies have shown, for example, that women applying for research grants must be 2.5 times more productive than men applying for the same grants in order to win them. Papers with clearly female first-author names are rejected at higher rates from journals, while the same papers with the first-author names replaced with male names or initials are accepted.</p>
<p>Ben Barres, a neurobiology professor at Stanford, has a long-standing interest in the issue of discrimination against women in science, because he used to be a woman in science and is now a man in science. Somewhat amusingly, he relates having overheard someone leaving a seminar he gave soon after his sex change saying that "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is so much better than his sister's." He had a really interesting [url=<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16848004%5Darticle%5B/url">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16848004]article[/url</a>] about gender discrimination in science in the journal Nature a few years ago, which I am happy to send via email to anyone who'd like to read it.</p>
<p>Barium, you are so right.
My son had the Construx toys (no longer made, Fisher Price was taken over by Mattel and they were discontinued). they are somewhat like Legos, only far superior.<br>
The new Zome toys (I think <a href="http://www.zome.com%5B/url%5D">www.zome.com</a> (or just google the word zome is how to find) are similar to Construx.</p>
<p>The girls in the family did play with them, but not that much. I recall the day the girls made a baby stroller out of the Construx--pretty clever. My kids were in daycare, so I only know what went on during the weekends, and this was just one Saturday afternoon. I didn't encourage their play at all, which was probably a mistake, although today one of the girls is naturally good at math and wants to be an actuary.</p>
<p>But I agree with you, I would bet girls with parents who encourage science play no doubt wind up at least considering a scientific career. You are attracted certainly to what is familiar to you.</p>
<p>This is obliquely related from Newsweek (nerdettes).</p>
<p>Geek</a> Girls: Revenge of the Nerdettes | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com</p>
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I really don't think the girls were being subtly discouraged--2 of D's science teachers and her AP Calculus teacher have been among D's favorites--but I wonder why the subjects don't resonate more with these girls.
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<p>It doesn't necessarily take teachers. Girls who are into math and science are often treated like crap by their peers, even more than your average kid that age is. Peers expect you to conform, and science is not conforming if you're a girl. People will assume that you're a lesbian (not that this is a bad thing, but a lot of the people doing the assuming think it is, and will treat the girls in question as though it is). Society still has negative images of women in science...on this very forum (CC, not the Parents' Forum), I see gobs and gobs of posts from high school and college students about how ugly women at tech schools are. What sort of message does that send girls, especially in a society where being attractive is so heavily emphasized for women?</p>
<p>Also, girls and women in science are under a lot of pressure to perform. Eventually, they get sick of it. I could go on about that, but the xkcd webcomic summed it up more effectively than I could :):</p>
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My parents refused to buy me a single toy doll...
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This is so sad. Both my son & daughter loved to cuddle a doll as small children. They were modeling the nurtuting behavior that they observed in their dad & me.</p>
<p>their interest is heavily discouraged by males. </p>
<p>Never heard of that.
In my D's HS, top few students from year to year are consistently girls with Standardized test scores are also higher than boys'. Perseption is that girls are just more studious. Comparing my S and D, S never cared about his grades and cared to do what he liked (art). D very much cared about her grades even in subjects that were very hard for her (surprise - History, not science). However, D never needed to spend much time doing math and science - both being easy for her, spending much more time with History just to get a comparable grade. D is pre-med (easiest freshman class - Chemistry) , got hired by her college after freshman year to be Supplemental Instructor (fancy name for paid tutor) in Chemistry class. </p>
<p>It looks like it depends on individual more than gender.</p>
<p>One thing to consider is that many of the people who go on to puruse PhDs in science and engineering are foreign born from places like China and India. Both of those cultures greatly favor males and discourage females from pursuing education. China is going to have a population crisis because there are going to be far more males than females in the country (even if it's 55% vs 45%, thats a difference of 100 million people). Could these population dynamics have a role in gender representation for future researchers?</p>
<p>I've also found that the majority of girls interested in science are premeds. Would the draw of a medical degree (higher pay, more intereaction with people) be pulling top female science students away from research too?</p>
<p>It's not just the tech schools, jessiehl: I've seen plenty of inquiries about whether all the girls are "ugly"--since we ALL know that most smart girls are ugly, right?--in various Ivy forums.</p>
<p>Leaving aside the cruelty involved in deciding that someone is "ugly" and therefore worthless, these pathetic adolescent males don't seem to understand that what they are reacting to is usually not any innate set of physical characteristics, but the amount of time and effort the girl puts into looking a certain way. </p>
<p>When I was an undergrad at Wellesley--and you want to see nasty comments, see threads devoted to "women's colleges"--there was an easily observable difference between the way the female students at BU, for example, dressed for classes, and the way we did. As you might expect, they dressed up and wore makeup, we didn't.</p>
<p>Venkat, I think that you have a point about medical studies vs bench scientists these days.</p>
<p>I would not think that high school girls, when choosing their future major, would be aware of gender bias at the grad school or professional level in those fields. I don't think it would impact their decisions.</p>
<p>However, when I think back to my experience, I wonder if there is something subtle there. I loved science and all things medical. I volunteered as a candy striper at the hospital since I thought I wanted to be a nurse. That was a good idea, as I found that I didn't want to be a nurse at all. I loved it when I was given samples to take to the lab because I wanted to know what was going on in there.</p>
<p>I talked to my biology teacher about it, and he encouraged me to major in medical technology (hospital lab work), which is what I did. I liked it fine (though I left work 20 years ago to raise the kids), but I wonder what I would have done if he had encouraged me to major in a pure science. Did he not encourage me to do that because I was a girl?</p>
<p>Population dynamics mght have a role in gender representation for future researchers in China and India. However, these cultures do NOT "discourage females from pursuing education" at all.</p>
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...there was an easily observable difference between the way the female students at BU, for example, dressed for classes, and the way [Wellesley students] did. As you might expect, they dressed up and wore makeup, we didn't.
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<p>Fascinating. For a lot of us MIT women, this was our perception of <em>Wellesley</em>. Maybe the fashions have changed. :)</p>
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I've also found that the majority of girls interested in science are premeds. Would the draw of a medical degree (higher pay, more intereaction with people) be pulling top female science students away from research too?
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<p>Perhaps (though there's no reason that the draw of higher pay should disproportionately affect women, that I can immediately think of). Or perhaps girls who are interested in science are steered, without the steerers even necessarily thinking about it, toward medicine.</p>
<p>I mentioned this thread topic to some of my friends (male and female, nearly all in sci/eng), and it started some interesting discussion. A computer scientist said that in his field (being in the same field, I would tend to agree), most of the men are unconsciously sexist but convinced that they're too smart to be, and that the women are discouraged further because abrasiveness is encouraged in the field, and women in our society are socialized not to tolerate abrasiveness. An astronomer said that her field is full of old white men, with few female or minority role models. An acquaintance who runs an engineering summer camp, regularly gets calls from parents worried that their daughters can't do the soldering projects because "they're girls and aren't inclined toward that sort of thing." A friend who is an electrical engineer just left her job in part because of sexual harassment. The same friend had a high school teacher tell her that over his dead body (his words) would a girl be captain of the physics team. A friend who went on to be a math major was told in high school that since she was a girl, there was no reason for her to take more math classes. Some girls are still told by parents or grandparents that if they show up the boys in math and science, they won't be able to get a man.</p>
<p>The societal pressure is still there.</p>
<p>I apologize in advance for the long post. If you dont want to read it, in a nutshell it is my opinion that a few anecdotes regarding bias against girls do not prove gender discrimination and certainly do not explain the small percentages of females in some fields. Self-selection accounts for a lot of the differences. Title IX, since it is statistically-based, cannot be defended against and forces schools to use inappropriate quotas.</p>
<p>Many boys work at soccer for hours on end. Certainly, in any measurable way, elite boys are substantially more athletic than elite girls (e.g. 10 percent faster, 20 percent stronger; check all Olympic world records). However, boys and girls have similar hand-eye coordination (e.g. similar free throw percentages in basketball) in performing tasks in which strength and speed do not play a significant role. Therefore, if they worked with the same intensity for the same duration at the same tasks that do not demand speed and strength, they should have comparable outcomes. However, many young men spontaneously, without being forced, work on athletics longer than girls. Certainly, SOME girls work hard, but nowhere as many as boys. There is no physiological reason a boy should be able to juggle a soccer ball (i.e. kick it, head it, etc. to keep it in the air without using the hands and without it hitting the ground) more times than a girl. Nevertheless, on any good boys club soccer team, essentially all of the boys will be able to juggle a soccer ball many hundreds of times. On a comparably successful girls' team, perhaps a few players have skills this advanced. In my opinion, this is one type of proof that elite girls do not work as hard at sports as elite boys do. This obviously does not prove that NO girls work as hard as boys or even that most boys work harder than most girls. It only proves that among elite soccer players, the average boy spend many more hours kicking around a soccer ball than does the average girl. Title IX demands equal number of opportunities for girls in sports, even though elite girls do not work as hard as elite boys do. As a matter of fact, in Division 1 soccer, girls teams are allowed to provide 20 percent more scholarships than are boys teams. Assuming gender discrimination just because the outcomes are different (effectively how Title IX is administered) is bad analysis and in my opinion unfair (if you want to reward equal desire and hard work with equal opportunities).</p>
<p>Similarly, consider the type of person who, for no immediate benefit besides wanting to solve a challenging problem or develop something cool, spends thousands of hours developing computer code. Sure, some of these types of people are female. But the overwhelming majority happens to be male. There is no gender bias here, simply self-selection. This does not imply that the worlds greatest computer scientist cannot be a female, or even that most males would make better computer programmers than most females. But it does demonstrate that those who happen to love to work on computers (i.e. would do it even if they were not paid very much) are overwhelmingly boys. Is it surprising that a large majority of graduate students in electrical and computer engineering are males? If you were a faculty member in engineering looking for grad students (which I have been), would you not want to have students who absolutely love the subject? Or would you prefer to have a student who can tolerate the subject and only statistically should be capable of performing as well? Clearly, deciding in advance that a particular student loved your discipline based on the students gender would be wrong. But if you identified genuine enthusiasm in an interview during an interview, it would not be discriminatory to take that into account. And you MIGHT not end up with a gender-balanced research lab; but the statistics would not prove anything about your bias.</p>
<p>You may be able to provide some anecdotes of some females being covertly discriminated against. But you will also find in academia many cases of women faculty members being given overt advantages. When I was an engineering faculty member at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, our department was informed by the dean (I was at the meeting) that we could not hire any faculty members unless at least half were women. The applicant pool (around 400 PhD applicants for around two or three faculty openings) was overwhelmingly male, and the males were stronger candidates from much better schools. We were forced to interview and select a female candidate who would never have even been considered or interviewed if she had been a male. Of course, this is only an anecdote such as others mentioned. My only point is that any implication that gender discrimination in engineering is always, or even usually, against females is dramatically different than my experience. On the contrary, I have found that many faculty members (both male and female) in departments that do not historically attract females (e.g. mechanical and electrical engineering), when looking for grad students or deciding whether or not to fund a project, have frequently given females the benefit of the doubt, trying to encourage them. You cannot prove bias from statistical distributions of the number of females electing to enter or remain in different engineering disciplines. Self-selection is not necessarily the result of current or previous gender bias.</p>
<p>I also have a comment on previous posts related to the toys to which children are exposed. In my opinion, other than encouraging kids to be physically active and to avoid immorality, there is no reason to force your kids to play with one type of toy more than another one. This is as useless as giving your kid a gender-neutral name such as Sam or Alex. My sons both played sports, Legos, video games, guns, bows and arrows, etc., and they will likely both be liberal arts or business majors. My daughter, who played with dolls and still very much enjoys cake baking, is majoring in biomedical / electrical engineering. Why? Because they discovered that they like those subjects. How horrible! There must have been some major discrimination that forced them into those fields!</p>
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Population dynamics mght have a role in gender representation for future researchers in China and India. However, these cultures do NOT "discourage females from pursuing education" at all.
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<p>After working at NIH for a year I felt that a lot of the researchers were East Asian and South Asian (FOBs, not people born here). It's not like we're giving these people PhDs to go home instead of working here.</p>
<p>Also, I drew that those cultures discourage women from learning from the whole thing where people still kill their daughters at birth because they want to have sons. Those societies are very male dominated.</p>
<p>kill their daughters at birth because they want to have sons - </p>
<p>Because, in RURAL area of China, sons are bringing wife to a family, and daughter is leaving family when she marries. Only 1 child is allowed per family and family really need helping hands - from 4 very long trips to China (not me, my H).</p>