In addition to calling my attention to the article that is the subject of the preceding post, daughter Jessie also alerted me to an upcoming lecture at Caltech, as part of the Women’s Center’s recognition of Women’s History Month, by Dr. Debra Rolison of the Naval Research Laboratory.
Debra Rolison is a leading figure in nanotechnology and a strong proponent of women in science. Her talk will focus on the improvement of women’s status in scientific academia through the enforcement of Title IX legislation. Her work on using Title IX to evaluate academic science and engineering departments recently led to a hearing on “Title IX and the Sciences” before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space. Sponsored by the Women’s Center.
Wow! Title IX has enough teeth to increase the number of girls/women playing with test tubes, etc., or whatever scientists do? (I keep trying to get Jessie to tell me what she does in her lab for 10–12 hours a day, but so far to no avail.)
Curious, I did a quick Google, and here’s one item that came up, from a previous talk by Dr. Rolison:
It is past time that women thrive, not just survive in their career homes. Some external drivers that might rouse the stewards of the current S&E [Science and Engineering] structures from their passivity include activism that spans from actions by the individual to mechanisms to withhold Federal or foundation-derived funds from undiversified departments. Practical, achievable goals to improve the environment include aggressively recruiting good women candidates for faculty openings, fairer evaluation of the contributions and productivity of candidates and faculty who are women, ensuring on-campus day care, career-long mentoring of the faculty, and first-and-foremost rewarding the good teacher/scholars because of how they guide and challenge their students. It is not coincidental that these suggestions help men, too.
It’s not clear to me how withholding funds from “undiversified departments” helps men, or how rewarding good teaching would necessarily help produce or protect more women.
Evaluation procedures should, of course, be fair for everyone. I confess, however, that, even though my daughter is in science, I’ve never been persuaded that it was necessary or even desirable to take aggressive measures to recruit more women scientists. People should do science who want to do it, and have the skills. It shouldn’t be necessary to persuade anyone to do it. If something in “the environment” discourages women from going into science, whatever that is should be gotten rid of.
Does anyone know whether, say, Methodists are underrepresented in science and engineering? Does it matter?
Most women don’t want to be scientists and engineers. They don’t like working that much with “stuff”, and prefer more socially engaging work. I work as an engineer, and most offices have few women, and not for lack of active recruitment. The women engineers also tend to be a bit less feminine than average (just an observation, not a knock).
Quotas won’t change the situation either, since its not due to ability or discrimination. They just don’t want to be engineers. Many women are also waking up to the fact that feminism and the great migration to the workforce has meant an Exciting Career for only a select few, while the rest are relegated to the white-collar salt mines of cubicle-land.
i don’t have data on methodists in particular (i could get it if neccessary) but i thought this would be a good approximation. using the pooled GSS, i created a “scientist” variable for people with an occupation as a practicing scientist or engineer (i excluded “science teachers” as some of these are high school teachers). (occupations 43-79 from this list http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/rnd1998/appendix/occu1980.htm)
i also created an alternate version of the variable excluding people who are unemployed.
the “1” column shows the raw number or percentage of people working as a scientist or engineer.
the “total” row shows the number/rate overall.
bottom line, protestants are under-represented, and hindus are WAY over-represented. be careful interpreting the religions with small sample sizes.
unfortunately it’s a little hard to read what with proportional spacing, etc.
. tab RELIG scientist
RS RELIGIOUS | scientist
PREFERENCE | 0 1 | Total
———————-+———————-+———-
PROTESTANT | 27,907 308 | 28,215
CATHOLIC | 11,263 153 | 11,416
JEWISH | 958 15 | 973
NONE | 4,178 114 | 4,292
OTHER (SPECIFY) | 877 25 | 902
BUDDHISM | 56 4 | 60
HINDUISM | 24 8 | 32
OTHER EASTERN | 16 2 | 18
MOSLEM/ISLAM | 52 2 | 54
ORTHODOX-CHRISTIAN | 56 2 | 58
CHRISTIAN | 206 2 | 208
NATIVE AMERICAN | 12 0 | 12
INTER-NONDENOMINATION | 89 3 | 92
———————-+———————-+———-
Total | 45,694 638 | 46,332
. tab RELIG sci_employed
RS RELIGIOUS | sci_employed
PREFERENCE | 0 1 | Total
———————-+———————-+———-
PROTESTANT | 13,122 308 | 13,430
CATHOLIC | 5,530 153 | 5,683
JEWISH | 458 15 | 473
NONE | 2,515 114 | 2,629
OTHER (SPECIFY) | 514 25 | 539
BUDDHISM | 54 4 | 58
HINDUISM | 22 8 | 30
OTHER EASTERN | 16 2 | 18
MOSLEM/ISLAM | 46 2 | 48
ORTHODOX-CHRISTIAN | 53 2 | 55
CHRISTIAN | 199 2 | 201
NATIVE AMERICAN | 11 0 | 11
INTER-NONDENOMINATION | 85 3 | 88
———————-+———————-+———-
Total | 22,625 638 | 23,263
. tab RELIG scientist, row nofreq chi2
RS RELIGIOUS | scientist
PREFERENCE | 0 1 | Total
———————-+———————-+———-
PROTESTANT | 98.91 1.09 | 100.00
CATHOLIC | 98.66 1.34 | 100.00
JEWISH | 98.46 1.54 | 100.00
NONE | 97.34 2.66 | 100.00
OTHER (SPECIFY) | 97.23 2.77 | 100.00
BUDDHISM | 93.33 6.67 | 100.00
HINDUISM | 75.00 25.00 | 100.00
OTHER EASTERN | 88.89 11.11 | 100.00
MOSLEM/ISLAM | 96.30 3.70 | 100.00
ORTHODOX-CHRISTIAN | 96.55 3.45 | 100.00
CHRISTIAN | 99.04 0.96 | 100.00
NATIVE AMERICAN | 100.00 0.00 | 100.00
INTER-NONDENOMINATION | 96.74 3.26 | 100.00
———————-+———————-+———-
Total | 98.62 1.38 | 100.00
Pearson chi2(12) = 245.0888 Pr = 0.000
. tab RELIG sci_employed, row nofreq chi2
RS RELIGIOUS | sci_employed
PREFERENCE | 0 1 | Total
———————-+———————-+———-
PROTESTANT | 97.71 2.29 | 100.00
CATHOLIC | 97.31 2.69 | 100.00
JEWISH | 96.83 3.17 | 100.00
NONE | 95.66 4.34 | 100.00
OTHER (SPECIFY) | 95.36 4.64 | 100.00
BUDDHISM | 93.10 6.90 | 100.00
HINDUISM | 73.33 26.67 | 100.00
OTHER EASTERN | 88.89 11.11 | 100.00
MOSLEM/ISLAM | 95.83 4.17 | 100.00
ORTHODOX-CHRISTIAN | 96.36 3.64 | 100.00
CHRISTIAN | 99.00 1.00 | 100.00
NATIVE AMERICAN | 100.00 0.00 | 100.00
INTER-NONDENOMINATION | 96.59 3.41 | 100.00
———————-+———————-+———-
Total | 97.26 2.74 | 100.00
Pearson chi2(12) = 118.9744 Pr = 0.000
Speaking as a woman who has done very well in mathematical fields (and thus I speak for the entire group, doncha know), I find there are too many groups who “need more women” and there’s not enough of us women to fill those slots. Though it’s not the case here, but many of the people decrying the lack of people-with-uteruses in any particular field are people-with-uteruses who aren’t in those fields to begin with. It’s tempting to tell the professional gender bean-counters to actually get math & science degrees themselves and stop doing all that girly touchy-feely people stuff. Oh, they don’t like doing math or science themselves? Then shut up and leave me alone.
From the front lines of diversity: I was just at an actuarial class in Chicago, and I noticed that the gender balance was about 50-50, and people who came from other countries were “overrepresented” (some people from China (3 or 4?), Macao, Swaziland, France, Canada (a couple). And almost all of them were from near Chicago. And the actuarial department of my company in New York City has a bunch of Orthodox Jews (and Nebraskan insurance companies don’t have many of those in their actuarial departments). What does this mean? Not much. There’s a concentration of Orthodox Jews in NYC vs the rest of the country, and there aren’t many actuaries out there, so it’s a pretty international community. Also, this particular seminar is given several times a year, at locations across the country (and sometimes Hong Kong), so many times people wait for one to be scheduled near where they work — thus the overabundance of Midwestern actuarial people.
So if a particular university, say the University of North Dakota, has very few black students, it may not have anything to do with racism but everything to do with very few black people living in ND to begin with. As the first commenter said, in the aggregate there are gender differences in personal preferences: more women prefer to work with small children than men do — and yet, I don’t see many campaigns to (futilely) get more men in elementary education classes or as daycare workers. No, we’ve got to complain about the lack of women in the “important” careers, which must be about sexism and not honest personal preferences.
No one seems much to notice the flip side of the (relative) paucity of women majoring in the hard sciences and engineering, which is the (relative) paucity of men majoring in everything else. The elite universities already have considerably more female than male students, and if the hard-science depts. are heavily male-skewed, obviously the rest of the programs are decidedly female-skewed. Yet I haven’t yet encountered the article asking why a certain minority group can’t attain parity among undergraduates in an important field of study — the “minority group” being “men,” the “field of study” anything you like in the humanities — English, history, &c.