When daughter Jessie was 7 or 8 years old some friends of ours who owned a small diner arranged for one of their customers, a Russian chess master, to tutor their two older sons, and they invited Jessie, who was moderately interested in chess at the time, to join them. After several weeks with no word from the Russian, my wife finally cornered him one night and asked how she was doing. “She’s pretty good,” he replied, “for a girl.”
I was reminded of this chess story from our past this morning after reading an excellent article in the Daily Princetonian on sex bias in the sciences by Michael Medeiros, a Princeton freshman.
“You’re the best girls in Integrated!” shouted an animated male student as two aspiring scientists left the room. My fellow first-year Integrated Science sequence students, of whom only three of 19 are female, had organized a casual party to celebrate our completion of the sequence’s first semester. The party was drawing to a close when the departure of the remaining female students provoked this statement, consequently reminding me of the gender bias in the sciences.
Medeiros goes on to nail the bias he sees.
The bias lies in the fact that female mathematicians, scientists and engineers are often judged by a different standard than their male counterparts.
In fact, he writes, there are
certain gender biases that are widely accepted by some who seek to increase the number of women in the sciences. If you’ll remember, gender bias is defined as being judged by a different standard because of sex. There is also bias present, therefore, in aspects of the academic system that are easier for women than for men.
There is evidence that university admissions in math, science and engineering have become biased in this way; making the system fairer for women might have been confused with giving them an unfair advantage. For example, in 2006, Princeton’s acceptance rate for women in graduate-level science and engineering was 2.4 percent higher than the rate for their male counterparts. At MIT, the discrepancy is much greater. Women applying for undergraduate admission in 2005 were 16 percent more likely to be accepted than men. If we operate from the assumption that the male and female applicants were on average equally qualified, then the reverse bias becomes clear. More data must be analyzed before any conclusions can be drawn, but this data nonetheless hints at a disturbing trend.
Affirmative action for women? Maybe.
These examples of disproportionate admission for women in the sciences resemble affirmative action; the traditionally underrepresented group is accepted at an unexpectedly high rate. Though I do not have room in this column to argue for or against race-based affirmative action, I will point out that one of the crucial arguments for keeping affirmative action does not apply to the case of women in the sciences. The argument is that race-based affirmative action brings together different cultures, fostering cross-cultural growth. Unless you are of the opinion that men and women belong to separate cultures, this argument carries no weight in the debate over disproportionate admission for women in the sciences.
Indeed.
