This Chronicle article  reports on women in the lead regardless of race or ethnicity. Article based on this National Science Foundation study:

Last year, for the first time ever, women earned more doctorates than men in every racial and ethnic group, according to a new National Science Foundation paper offering selected findings from the federal government’s annual Survey of Earned Doctorates.

In the chart, it’s worth noting the differences between science/engineering doctorates and the rest. Women are making progress in taking on more science doctorates, but is it enough to meet the needs of the economy? (Also, note the non-U.S. citizen figures in the science/engineering category.)

y. 

I suspect visitors to a blog about boys falling behind must be puzzled why I post so many articles about the paucity of women in computer science and engineering. It’s because I worry that political correctness has shielded us from considering the full implications of the gender imbalances we’re seeing on college campuses. This Sunday’s NYTimes article does a nice job summarizing the dilemma in one area: Despite modest gains in some areas, especially medicine, women are falling behind in computer sciences.

 What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.

When one looks at computer science in particular, however, the proportion of women has been falling. In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent. Data collected by the Computing Research Association showed even fewer women at research universities like M.I.T.: women accounted for only 12 percent of undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering in the United States and Canada granted in 2006-7 by Ph.D.-granting institutions, down from 19 percent in 2001-2. Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates.

 If women are to dominate higher education, there’s reason to care about what they major in — and don’t major in. Our international competitiveness depends on it. And yet all we get from feminist groups are comic-book takes on the issue: Must be discrimination, they say, as if thousands of computer science department across the country were joined together in a giant cabal. Something else is playing out here, and it warrants investigation. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but the sniff of political correctness surrounding this issue makes me determined to not relinquish this bone.

If the next President is Barack Obama, it’s safe to assume the federal Education Department will take up the issue of whether gender discrimination is the reason why there are so few women pursuing advanced degrees in the sciences and persisting with lifelong careers in those areas. If discrimination is the reason, then using Title IX to go after the discrimination is logical, a case made here in a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education. If lack of interest is the true cause, the issue becomes how to lure more women into the field, probably by restructuring careers to make them more female friendly.

As with most issues, the truth weaves between the two theories, although I lean toward the latter explanation. I’ve never been a friend of conspiracy theories … I mean, just try to imagine the scale of the conspiracy required for discrimination to emerge as the primary reason. I’m sure there are many examples of gender discrimination, some of them described here by Mary Ann Mason, a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security and author of Mothers on the Fast Track.

Wherever the truth lies, this is an important issue, mostly because gender imbalances on college campuses raise the importance of encouraging more women to take on studies important to the national economy. For that reason, I’m going to run Mason’s entire commentary:

(more…)

This article in Insidehighered does a good job laying out some of the subtleties involved in the challenge of encouraging more women to take on science/engineering academic studies and careers (a necessity, given the diminished interest in higher education shown by men, who have traditionally taken on those major and careers).

 The key player here is Harvard economist Claudia Goldin (pictured here):

Among the characteristics she is finding among the career paths that are both attracting and retaining women: flexibility in schedules, “transparent career paths,” and “predictable milestones” on the path to a career. The latter is important, she said, because the research shows that women are quite willing to study for long years (as in medicine) to be trained, but they want a clear path.

A comparison of medical and academic training isn’t favorable to academe. Medical school “is difficult, but it takes four years,” Goldin said, and medical internships have known durations. In graduate school for a Ph.D., students take some courses and prepare for some tests of their knowledge, but the process of completing a dissertation is mysterious to many and takes widely differing periods of time. “We say to take some exams and then we will give you a parachute and throw you out of a plane,” she said of Ph.D. training.

 This is an issue that is likely to take years to sort out. In the end, I suspect the solution will involve scores of minor adjustments in both academic programs and science/engineering jobs. In the interim, the key is resisting silly political solutions, such as using Title IX to root out “sexism” in college physics and engineering departments. If only life were that simple.

So maybe I’m not alone after all in thinking there’s a need to encourage more women to enter science and technology careers (The logic: Given the gender imbalances on college campuses, what women major in and pursue as careers now matters to the national economy).

Two developments in this area, thankfully unrelated, have emerged:

– The first is a loopy, Congressionally inspired (after being prodded by feminists’ groups) attempt to apply Title IX to the question of why fewer women than men major in the sciences. The result: an Inspector Clouseau-like effort to root out grumpy, sexist department chairs at the nation’s universities.

This NYTimes piece does a nice job laying it all out in great detail:

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.

For perspective, Times writer John Tierney wisely turns to writer Susan Pinker (pictured here), whose recent book, The Sexual Paradox, is a must read for anyone interested in the issue of why women choose certain majors and careers.

Writes Tierney:

  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.”

– The second is a serious contribution to the issue, a new book about what happens to women in academe. As described here in Insidehighered, the issue of why relatively fewer women become academic leaders in their field falls well short of a conspiracy theory:

Writes insidehighered:

A new collection of essays - some with new research findings - explores these contradictions. Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, features many essays that suggest that the barriers to women’s advancement today are less in the form of overt sexism (although that remains) than in assumptions, and larger patterns of the way colleges are organized.

…………

One example of that is a chapter in the book, “Shattering Plexiglas,” in which three scholars conducted an in-depth study of what happened to 20 male and 20 female professors in the three years after winning tenure (in a range of disciplines) at major American research universities. They found a series of “pulls” of women away from the scholarly research that first drew them to the academy - and did not find comparable pulls for men. Following tenure, 16 of the women studied and only 5 of the men experienced significant increases in their service obligations at their universities.

The study didn’t suggest that these service duties didn’t represent important work. Many of the assignments were valuable for the professors’ departments or institutions. The newly tenured women - much more so than the men - became academic program coordinators or were appointed to lead institutional committees with real clout. In a number of cases, the assignments also reflected values that were especially important to the women involved, such as playing a role in work to remove gender bias from the institution.

While these assignments may well help these women’s careers over time if they go an administrative route, and while these assignments may accomplish good, they take women more than men away from scholarship. The women reported feeling unprepared for some of their assignments and unsure about how they fit into their careers - but many did not feel they could turn down this role.