Title Nining The Sciences

Title Nining The Sciences

Professor Volokh pointed to this very interesting article by Christina Hoff Summers at the American Enterprise Institute which provides a useful overview of the effort now underway to use Title IX's approach to college athletics as a method of increasing the number of top researchers 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.

Summers goes on to point out that there is a fair amount of evidence that the gender disparity in the physical sciences reflects gender differences with respect to interests. In the veterinary sciences, which are also quite demanding, women are rapidly becoming dominant in research, at least partly because its connection to medicine goes well with a female tendency towards caring and concern. She also points out that this may not be just a cultural thing:

Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser has what seems to be the appropriate attitude about the research on sex dif­ference: respectful, intrigued, but also cautious. When asked about Baron-Cohen’s work, Hauser said, “I am sympathetic…and find it odd that anyone would consider the work controver­sial.” Hauser referred to research that shows, for example, that if asked to make a drawing, little girls almost always create scenes with at least one person, while males nearly always draw things—cars, rockets, or trucks. And he mentioned that among primates, including our closest relations the chimpanzees, males are more technologically innovative, while females are more involved in details of family life. Still, Hauser warns that a lot of seemingly exciting and promising research on sex differences has not panned out, and urges us to treat the bio­logical theories with caution.

Nevertheless, it is hard not to be attracted to theories like Simon Baron-Cohen’s when one looks at the way men and women are distrib­uted in the workplace. After two major waves of feminism, women still predominate—some­times overwhelmingly—in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education, social work, veterinary medicine, and psychology, while men are overrepresented in the “system­atizing” vocations such as car repair, oil drilling, and electrical engineering.

The real danger here is that using the Title IX approach--as both Democrats and Republicans in Congress seem inclined towards doing--might have the same effect as it has in college sports--largely wiping out male athletics, because there simply aren't that many college women for whom athletics is a major focus. And unlike athletics, our nation's ability to defend itself and innovate is dependent on the physical sciences.

As one of the commenters over at Volokh Conspiracy points out:

Veterinary schools have over 75% female students, medical schools are over 50% female, I would guess the grad student enrollment at many schools of education is over 70% female and I heard 90% female percentages of grad students are not uncommon in English departments.

Imposing gender preferences in STEM using Title IX would seem to further unbalance the female/male overall student ratio.

And I rather doubt that anyone is going to require those female-heavy departments to "do something" about the shortage of men.