For anyone interested in the fate of women in science, a commentary and a study are worth noting. (Why be concerned? Given the campus gender imbalances, I think there’s an economic imperative to lure more women into the sciences). The most interesting of the two is a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars. The second is a study, reported on in insidehighered, about how to recruit more women into the science faculty

Let’s start with Wood, who attempts to explain why U.S. youth seem unaffected by the market draw of tech companies desiring to hire more math/science majors. The dearth of American candidates forces companies to lobby Congress to boost the number of visas to bring in foreign talent.

American students are driven by cultural cues, not market forces, argues Wood:

The aversion to long-term and deeply committed study of science among American students also stems from other cultural imperatives. We rank the manufacture of “self-esteem” above hard-won achievement, but we also have immersed a generation in wall-to-wall promotion of diversity and multiculturalism as being the worthiest form of educational endeavor; we have foregrounded the redistributional dreams of “social justice” over heroic aspirations to discover, invent, and thereby create new wealth; and we have endlessly extolled the virtue of “sustainability” against the ravages of “progress.” Do all that, and you create an educational system that is essentially hostile to advanced achievement in the sciences and technology. Moreover, those threads have a certainty and unity that make them not just a collection of educational conceits but also part of a compelling worldview.

The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with “identity.”

And, no discussion of the paucity of home-grown science talent is complete without rehashing the Larry Summers debacle:

The science “problems” we now ask students to think about aren’t really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences. President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for speculating (in league with a great deal of neurological evidence) that innate difference might have something to do with the disparity in numbers of men and women at the highest levels of those fields. In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.” Officials of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education are looking to use Title IX to force science graduate programs to admit more women. The big problem? As of 2001, 80 percent of engineering degrees and 72 percent of computer-science degrees have gone to men.

A society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn’t a society that takes science education seriously. In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert famously drew up a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics; 18 have now been solved. Hilbert has also bequeathed us a way of thinking about mathematics and the sciences as a to-do list of intellectual challenges. Notably, Hilbert didn’t write down problem No. 24: “Make sure half the preceding 23 problems are solved by female mathematicians.”

Obsession with the sex and race of scientists is just one more indication of how American higher education has swung into orbit around the neutron star of identity politics. Talk to recent college graduates and you are likely to hear something like: “Asian students are just better at science and math.” That is a verbal shrug, not a lament. The reward of 16 years of diversiphilic indoctrination turns out to be a comfort zone of rationalizations.

 Now for the insidehighered article. Here, the researchers explore the nitty gritty of trying to land more women on science faculties:

In some respects, their analysis found a clear willingness to hire women. The university offered jobs to 5.6 percent of female applicants, compared to only 2.9 percent of male applicants. But because 84.8 percent of all applicants were male, and because female applicants who were offered jobs were more likely to turn them down, the authors write that it is key to identify the factors that work for women.

 The researchers looked at recruiting methods such as ensuring that search committees included at least one woman: 

Another strategy discussed was having at least one woman on a search committee. Here, the research found no relationship between having a woman on a search committee and the number or share of female applicants. However, the study found (in figures very close to statistical significance) that searches with women on the search committee were more likely to have women as semifinalists and to make an offer to a woman.

There are multiple explanations for the positive impact of a woman on a search committee, the paper says. One is that a woman may reduce “tendencies toward homosocial reproduction by granting power over the hiring decision to members outside the dominant status group.” But another is that departments “more committed to integrating their faculty ranks will be more attentive to both the gender composition of search committee as well as the gender composition of their finalist pools.” Either way, the authors write, it’s a step that appears to yield results.

 

 

 

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