Space Forum / Astronomy / July 2008

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science
Victor Koen

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15tier.html

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have
set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities
receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of
lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and
engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of
Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible
impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty
members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at
Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some
critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could
seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women’s 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,
women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields
of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of
science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of
role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical
students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology
Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences
and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences
and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics
has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10
percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt
an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the
possibility of bias.

But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to
doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The
gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly
half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to
take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.

These numbers don’t surprise two psychologists at Vanderbilt University,
David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, who have been tracking more
than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years.

They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better
rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in
addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects
involving people and other living things. Despite their mathematical
prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or
engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers,
when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with
their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money
per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that
adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were
the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career
like physics.

A similar conclusion comes from a new study of the large gender gap in
the computer industry by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash of the
University of Kansas. By administering vocational psychological tests,
the researchers found that information technology workers especially
enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other
occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the
gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred
tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into
computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just
happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

Now, you might think those preferences would be different if society
didn’t discourage girls and women from pursuits like computer science
and physics. But if you read “The Sexual Paradox,” Susan Pinker’s book
about gender differences, you’ll find just the opposite problem.

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail
in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist),
argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by
assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who
abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in
fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had
faced discrimination in science.

Instead, they complained of being pushed so hard to be scientists and
engineers that they ended up in jobs they didn’t enjoy. “The irony was
that talent in a male-typical pursuit limited their choices,” Ms. Pinker
says. “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was
an assumption that they’d pursue it as a career even if they had other
interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the
program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it
was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that
the work made them unhappy.”

Ms. Pinker says that universities and employers should do a better job
helping women combine family responsibilities with careers in fields
like physics. But she also points out that female physicists are a
distinct minority even in Western European countries that offer day care
and generous benefits to women.

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll
choose what men choose in equal numbers,” Ms. Pinker says. “The freedom
to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split
in some fields.”

Applying Title IX to science was proposed eight years ago by Debra
Rolison, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory. She argued that
withholding federal money from “poorly diversified departments” was
essential to “transform the academic culture.” The proposal was
initially greeted, in her words, with “near-universal horror.”

Some female scientists protested that they themselves would be
marginalized if a quota system revived the old stereotype that women
couldn’t compete on even terms in science. But the idea had strong
advocates, too, and Congress quietly ordered agencies to begin the Title
IX compliance reviews in 2006.

The reviews so far haven’t led to any requirements for gender balance in
science departments. But Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about
gender wars in academia, predicts that lawyers will work gradually, as
they did in sports, to require numerical parity.

“Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but
now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may
institute quota systems,” Dr. Sommers said. “In sports, they had to
eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be
devastating to American science if every male-dominated field has to be
calibrated to women’s level of interest.”

Whether or not quotas are ever imposed, some of the most productive
science and engineering departments in America are busy filling out new
federal paperwork. The agencies that have been cutting financing for
Fermilab and the Spirit rover on Mars are paying for investigations of a
problem that may not even exist. How is this good for scientists of
either sex?