That’s what Christina Hoff Sommers and others are reporting. Here, Stuart Taylor does a nice job analyzing the issue in the National Journal. Taylor is right in his arguments — although I’m a little wary of the generalizations about stark cognitive differences between men and women. I just got a copy of Pink Brain Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but the book is likely to serve as a balancing force in the debate over single sex schools. In brief, Eliot argues that small innate gender differences get magnified by nurture.

As for the alarm raised by Sommers and Taylor, it’s hard to argue with their core logic: If gender imbalances in math and physics indicate gender bias, then send in the troops to clean up the outrageous bias in veterinary schools, where 77 percent of the graduates are female.

The real issue I have with Sommers and Taylor is this: I find it hard to believe the federal government would actually take action here. A massive conspiracy spreading across hundreds of campuses? I mean, this one can’t pass the giggle test. Secretly I hope Sommers is right and the DOE does launch a legal attack. Great fodder for Colbert and Stewart.

Here’s the Journal article:

OPENING ARGUMENT
Selective Concern On Sex Imbalances
Gender-equity cops are pushing for preferential treatment for females over males in the sciences.
Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009
by Stuart Taylor

Women now claim more than 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, 61 percent of all master’s degrees, and half of all professional and doctoral degrees, according to Education Department data cited by University of Michigan economist Mark Perry and others. They also earn more Ph.D.s than men in the humanities, education, health sciences, and social sciences, in-cluding two-thirds of new psychology doctorates.

Such data might find a principled administration and academic establishment busy documenting and attacking discrimination against or cultural hostility toward underrepresented males.

After all, it is an article of faith in the Obama administration, Congress, and much of the academic establishment that there are no innate differences between females and males in interests or cognitive capacities. From this dubious premise, they conclude that only pervasive, ongoing sexism and stereotypes can explain the huge gender disparities in academic fields — hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics — that are still male-dominated.

But advocates of this disparity-proves-discrimination dogma apply it quite selectively. They have shown virtually no concern about the small and shrinking percentages of males in colleges generally and in most academic fields.

Instead, the interest — self-interest, in many cases — of the gender-equity cops is in pushing for spending programs, hiring goals, and other preferential treatment for women and girls over men and boys in hard sciences, engineering, and math.

Administration officials and others are “promising to litigate, regulate, and legislate the nation’s universities until women obtain half of all academic degrees in science and technology and hold half of the faculty positions in those areas,” as my colleague Neil Munro detailed in the July 4 National Journal.

With federal agencies already preparing aggressive gender-equity reviews, the feminists’ biggest potential weapon is Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex discrimination in education. While commendably opening up opportunities, Title IX has also been used to require colleges to field as many female athletes as male, even though fewer women are interested. Many colleges have met their quotas by cutting back programs for male athletes.

The push for what some feminists call “Title-Nining” the sciences makes especially timely the recent publication of The Science on Women and Science, a book of 10 essays edited by Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute.

If disparity proves discrimination, what about the small percentages of males in colleges and in most academic fields?

Three of the essays contend that anti-female discrimination or stereotypes remain pervasive. The others suggest that discrimination is no longer a major cause of gender disparities.

These include an essay by Sommers warning that federal intervention may do more harm than good by pushing girls and women where they don’t want to go, holding boys and men back, and thus degrading the quality of American science. “The evidence of gender bias in math and science is weak at best, and the evidence that women are relatively disinclined to pursue those fields at the highest levels is serious,” she writes.

Neither Sommers nor any other reasonable person doubts that girls and women interested in science or math (including a certain 22-year-old near and dear to me) should get every encouragement and advantage available to boys and men.

The question is whether that’s already close to being true or whether discrimination and damaging stereotypes are still so pervasive that only aggressive social engineering can set things right.

Amid clashing experts wielding fine-grained studies, I am especially struck by the simple but highly probative fact that all of the fields now dominated by women or approaching parity were once just as male-dominated as the few fields that remain mostly male.

The disparity-proves-discrimination thesis could explain this only if sexism has been and remains far more extreme in hard sciences and math than in other academic fields, such as veterinary schools, where 77 percent of the students are women.

That notion is implausible on its face. It is also hard to square with data showing that civil engineering, electrical engineering, math, and physics departments, although still dominated by men, now offer tenure-track positions to a markedly higher percentage of female applicants than male. The same is true in biology and chemistry.

The central theme running through most of the Sommers book is that innate differences in interests and (some say) in abilities, rooted in human evolution, incline women to pursue careers that involve dealing with people, while men focus more on things, numbers, and systems — and on spending every waking hour in the lab rather than at home with children.

University administrators seem almost eager to join the chorus indicting their own institutions as pervasively sexist.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, stresses in an essay that he would like to see women in half of science and math jobs. But research has convinced him that fewer women than men are “drawn to such fields.”

Baron-Cohen cites studies suggesting innate gender differences not in “ability per se” but in “drives or interests” that can, with practice, lead to advantages in ability — for women as well as men, depending on the activity.

These studies show “a female advantage in empathy,” he argues. From early childhood, girls are more interested in people and emotions; more responsive to others’ distress; better at “decoding nonverbal communication,” judging character, and certain language skills; and less competitive and physically aggressive.

Boys, on average, show more interest in and do better at building blocks; “imagining what a 3-D structure will look like if it is laid out flat”; reading maps; judging which of two objects is moving faster; and other forms of “systematizing,” or analyzing “the variables in a system to derive the underlying rules that govern its behavior.”

That helps explain why males are generally more drawn than females to toy guns and trucks, and to careers such as metalworking, auto mechanics, math, physics, and engineering. It does not, of course, negate the possibility that the world’s most brilliant mathematician or engineer could be a woman.

Although socialization no doubt accentuates gender differences, Baron-Cohen adds, it can hardly explain why, for example, 1-day-old girls show more interest in a person’s face than in a mechanical mobile, while more 1-day-old boys gaze at the mobile.

Other authors cite evidence that the tiny pool of people capable of genius-level work in math, engineering, or physics is disproportionately male. Various studies show boys consistently claiming an overwhelming share of the very highest SAT math scores. And Harvard’s toughest math course has been almost all male since 1990.

On the other hand, an essay by Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke and Katherine Ellison, a graduate student, asserts that “there is no evidence for a male advantage in intrinsic aptitude or motivation for mathematics and science.” They detail an array of cognitive tests comparing males and females, and their analysis casts doubt on any claims that innate gender differences explain everything. But they virtually ignore most of the powerful statistical evidence contradicting their thesis.

As the academic debate rages on, feminists seeking to engineer 50-50 male-female ratios have already directed millions of dollars of federal and university money to special efforts to increase the number of girls and women in math and science. They may also be sending a message that boys and men are on their own, except perhaps for re-education programs to purge them of gender bias. Ever-more-overt quotas (”goals”) in hiring and promotions to push women ahead of better-credentialed males are very much on the feminist agenda.

“Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade,” Sommers writes. “Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats they may soon be facing. The business community and citizens at large are completely in the dark.”

University administrators seem almost eager to join the chorus indicting their own institutions as pervasively sexist. Their long-standing deference to feminist demands only increased in 2006, when Lawrence Summers was defenestrated from Harvard’s presidency for speculating about innate male-female differences of the kinds documented by Baron-Cohen, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, and others.

A female-dominated National Academy of Sciences committee chaired by Donna Shalala piled on later in 2006 with a much-acclaimed — but in my view pervasively politicized — report titled “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.” Several essays in the Sommers book point to glaring analytical flaws and omissions in that report’s denial that innate gender differences could be a factor. A June 2009 report by another National Academy of Sciences committee also contradicted the Shalala group’s paper in important respects.

Meanwhile, amid the clamor about what Shalala darkly called the “crisis” of gender bias in math and science departments, the academic and political establishments treat as a non zproblem a real crisis that affects far more people: the ever-more-dramatic shrinkage in the percentage of males who graduate from college at all.

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Tags: sommers women science

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