Feminists are trying to make girl-friendly — or else – writes Christina Hoff Sommers.
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.
If federal agencies require “gender equity” in university math, science, and engineering programs, they’ll go the way of men’s wrestling teams, Sommers warns.
I can just see the interactive drama workshops in the lab.
Holy schlamoly! “Less stressful, less competitive, less time-consuming”? In other words, dumb it down because Barbie’s little brain can’t handle all that hard math. Make chemistry class more like a tea party, or maybe a caucus-race where everybody wins.
In the meantime the Indians, Koreans, and Japanese will clean our clocks. How will American dominate the world when we’re all a bunch of fat, TV-watching morons?
The idea that “women” find competition repulsive, or are emotionally unable to deal with it, is probably pretty offensive to the many successful women athletes, salespeople, and executives, not to mention the occasional female fighter pilot.
I think “progressives” are largely people who project their own limitations and deficiencies onto others.
I agree with you, David.
Yes, let’s change the culture of science. Hard work and long hours is not feminine. From now on no scientist will be allowed to work more than 40 hours a week. Anyone caught in the lab on evenings and weekends will be summarily dismissed. That will teach those mean men who are just trying to make women look bad by working all those extra hours.
So just how talented and aspiring can women be if they can be thwarted by invisible bias? Unfortunately Mother Nature does not yield her secrets easily. So what happens when these “talented women†are up against an intractable problem? Will they just give up because it is just so hard to solve?
Isn’t it funny that the very people who claim to be supportive of women are the ones who engender the worst stereotypes about women, namely that they are incapable of competing with men.
On the plus side, if efforts like this go forward, it’ll make repealing Title IX plausible.
Maybe, just maybe, chemistry is hard because chemistry is hard?
Good points, all.
I guess the wussifying of the American university science labs may be right around the corner. Let’s hope not.
I guess Madame Curie was not really a woman according to our modern standards. I know she busted her hump to succeed.
On the other hand a very large part of modern science and engineering are large groups of collaborating scientists attacking one important problem and they share the credit when it is solved. I do not know if all really share the fruits of success. I do not know if women are kept out of these high profile teams.
By my own experience I think some of my science courses were made needlessly difficult by poor teaching. I agree this tends to discourage more girls than boys.
And the old joke:
Three men, a physicist (insert preferred hard-science stereotype), salesman and preacher, were relaxing together, chatting and having some drinks and the subject turned to women and the question of, “Is it better to have a wife or a mistress?”
The preacher said it’s better to have a wife: you make a life-time commitment to each other before God and have a partner for raising children, etc.
The salesman said it’s better to have a mistress: you can enjoy the relationship while it makes you both happy and then move on when you’re ready.
The physicist said it’s clearly better to have both.
“Both!!” the other two exclaimed in surprise!
“Sure. The wife thinks you’re with the mistress; the mistress thinks you’re with the wife. Then, you can really get some work done!”
My college roommate and I both earned PhDs in the sciences, with fellowships and other such awards. Both of us were expected to ‘go places’, and both of us now (happily) teach part-time while tending to small children. I think we both were interested in working part-time during the rugrat years, but part-time research isn’t an option most places. Actually, during my postdoc I asked about doing part-time research and part-time teaching, and my boss said that there was really no way to fund a part-time postdoc.
So, while I absolutely DO NOT think that the sciences should become less competitive (collaborations sometimes just become scientific versions of cliques) or that shorter hours should be enforced (a lot of the top dogs really love being in the lab and the fun of some labs really helps get a lot done) I do think that it’s unfortunate that, unlike some fields, it is very difficult to maintain ties to the field if you aren’t interested in full-time, long hour work.
I took higher math, chemistry, physics in college a few moons ago. In chemistry and math, no problem , but in Physics the problem was not that the work was hard (it was), but some of the instructors resented having women in class and made it known.
Those women wanting a less competitive field and fewer hours are free to start up their own research companies and implement their ideas. Then they can see if their methods produce useful results. Of course, that route is very difficult. Instead, they really don’t believe women are intellectually capable of bucking the system and attempting to revolutionize how science is done.
It’s not the women in those fields - its a spill over from the colleges of Women’s Studies - most of whom wouldn’t know a differential equation if it bit them in the ***. Is frustrating that the penduluum has to swing from the old “no girls allowed” to “lets make it girly-girl” . It didn’t happen in B-Schools, and they seem to do a good job educating both genders fairly. I guess the uber-feminists stayed away from B-School because they are Socialist/Communist and wouldn’t touch the field with a 10-foot pole. This is a radical form of social engineering - aka the kind that did so well for the teaching profession.
LOL, Elizabeth, I’m a woman who wouldn’t know a differential equation if it bit me in the tush, and I want to be an engineer! I know this means I have bookoo learning to do, and I’m not afraid of that, but I don’t want to have my time wasted by the feminists trying to turn my academic experience into Barbie’s Dream Degree, you know.
Feminists think very little of women just as other leftists think very little of minorities. Everyone except white heterosexual males needs things dumbed down a little or they’ll never make it. Either that, or give them some extra points on the entrance exam or extablish quotas. These are the same jackballs that call those who don’t agree with them “sexist” and “racist.” Trouble is that many women and probably most minorities agree with them.
As your gently engineered airplane decides to not “collaborate” any more and can’t “compete” with the elements, and you fall screaming to your death, remember that the engineers were all happily working together and being kind and gentle and such other rot. No competition allowed, also designs will be lousy cuz we didn’t work too hard. Too much time taken up on lab theater and seminars on how to avoid invisible discrimination.
I took a class with med students this summer. Many were female. It was hard, they cooperated with each other, and I could “sense” the competition to be the best-either with their own self, or to just be the best.
Please save us from well intentioned people who really can’t get along with the rest of us.
I graduated with a degree in EE in 1963, the same year “The Feminine Mystique” was published. At that time the engineering honor society did not admit women. There were serious arguments about whether woman were inherently unsuited for science and engineering.
There were few women techies. Why? Seemed like a no brainer at the time.
Flash forward 45 years. The granddaughters of the women who read “The Feminine Mystique” in their youth are in college. We have had decades of affirmative action. Still few women techies. Maybe it isn’t such a no brainer at that. Maybe women — with few exceptions– just don’t wanna be techies. (Or don’t have the aptitude, as one President of Harvard was fired for suggesting.)
Individual cases of successful female techies are not relevant to the question. If I say more men than women are over 6 feet tall, I am not denying the existence of women over 6 feet tall.
Richard,
I ended up majoring in accounting because it pays way better than engineering. A partner in a good sized CPA firm makes $500k/year. If I had gotten a BS in Chemistry I’d be a Lab Tech.
A female physics professor I had in graduate school (in 1966), Dr. Noemie Koller, had this to say about her experiences.
Many might say that being a woman is the greatest challenge to having a science career, but I didn’t really feel that prejudice. I did not really consider this a challenge: I did what I had to do. I did not realize that being a woman could be a handicap. I did not experience any overt gender discrimination in my culture and did not expect to experience any while working at Rutgers. I never realized that the outside world was so anti-feminist. The only discrimination I noticed was in color.
http://sciencewomen.rutgers.edu/profiles/?a=display&f=girlgeeks&id=351
Even more telling was the following statement she made.
I didn’t have my first child until after I had received tenure because to get tenure, you have to work.
As it turns out, she was pregnant at the time I took her course, but she managed not to miss any classes when she gave birth. The joke was that she was not totally dedicated to her work. After all she did take off a morning to give birth.
I think there’s a Simpsons episode here somewhere…
BTW, Elizabeth, women Chemical Engineers may not make $500K/yr but they make very good salaries, even more than the CEs who are not women.
I think many of the respondents aren’t familiar with the academic culture of hard sciences at research 1 institutions. It’s not uncommon for programs to be designed to require 60 hours a week of work from graduate students, every week for two years or more. Similarly, I’ve had senior faculty say to me “I work every Saturday, and I expect every person in my lab to do the same”.
There’s a big difference between serious work and overwork. There are plenty of evidence that the quality of people’s work declines as they work more and more hours in a week, and that this decline grows stronger as the overwork continues week after week. To *allow* people to work more than 40 hours a week is reasonable - when I get really obsessed with a problem, I can put in 60+ hours highly productively. But to expect that every person must do that every week is to aim for burnout and failure.
Some people will thrive in that high-pressure environment. But not every person who would make an excellent researcher will; there’s anecdotal support for lower-pressure research environments producing just as well. And expecting all researchers to live this high-commitment lifestyle shuts them out of other things - I certainly couldn’t be as good a father if I were working 60 hours per week every week for years on end.
As Sigivald suspects, “chemistry is hard”; so is my discipline. But I can master my discipline and do d*mn good work, teaching my students, contributing to society and to the body of knowledge, with 40 hours/week of effort.
(Full disclosure: I left academia, but not over this issue. I’m now in industry, in a successful startup - which, despite being a startup, expects 40 hours from me most weeks.)
The academic culture is hostile to people who want to have families, especially women who bear a disproportionate share of the physical burden of birth. I think it’s wonderful that some women are able to not miss classes that they’re teaching because they can schlep in to teach 24 hours after giving birth. But those of us who have C-sections would be risking our health if we did that and it’s a ridiculous standard - I doubt students would have thought much of it if a male prof had an emergency appendectomy and took a few weeks off. But women are supposed to drag themselves into the classroom bleeding because birth is “elective” and not important enough to deserve time off for? Please.
Academic science is especially hostile to women because it allows for no breaks and no time off to have a family. You step off the wheel and your career is done. And frankly, the expectations in terms of teaching, research, and grants far exceed what they were 20 or even 10 years ago. It usually takes 12 years or more after undergrad to get into the place to be competitive for an academic position and then another 7 for tenure. That makes you 40 before you can even think about kids. Most people and most women don’t want that. Even Carly Fiorina took a couple of years off to have kids.
Frankly, the real loser is the academy. Women use their science degrees to go off and have great careers in industry - the academy loses the diversity of ideas that comes from having a diverse workforce. Men lose because the policies that protect women / families also benefit them if they are fathers or just people who want to have a life. Those policies only exist in a limited way in the academy.
Academics need to step off the wheel and demand more reasonable expectations in terms of workload. The current situation is untenable.
Tom, some of us do know about the academic environment because we lived thorough it. My professors actually discouraged us from getting married because they felt it would take time away from our research. I got married anyway and informed the head of our research group that I was going on my honeymoon. His response was “so what excuse are you going to come with next year to take a vacationâ€.
That being said, what would you want to have in place of this environment? Should there be a graduate student union that negotiates pay and working conditions? (Yes I know this has been done in some places.) The bottom line is that you are going to be rated by the quality (and quantity) of your work. All things being equal, those that work harder will get ahead of those that don’t. I spent evenings and weekends in the physics laboratory without thinking that I was being taken advantage of. I always looked at doing research as being equivalent to being a professional athlete. The ones that perform the best get ahead. Therefore it behooves you to do as much work as possible. Maybe that’s not fair, but nobody is forcing you to go into research.