Science is becoming new focus of federal Title IX enforcement
According to the New York Times, although federal agencies’ Title IX enforcement efforts traditionally have been limited almost exclusively to sports, those agencies have found a new target in the field of science. The National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T., and the University of Maryland. To date, these Title IX compliance reviews have not had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. 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. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics. Two psychologists at Vanderbilt University, David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, have been tracking more than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years. They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects involving people and other living things. Despite their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities, not their gender, were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.
Applying Title IX to science was proposed eight years ago by Debra Rolison, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory. She argued that withholding federal money from “poorly diversified departments” was essential to “transform the academic culture.” The proposal was initially greeted, in her words, with “near-universal horror.” Some female scientists protested that they themselves would be marginalized if a quota system revived the old stereotype that women couldn’t compete on even terms in science. But the idea had strong advocates too, and Congress quietly ordered agencies to begin the Title IX compliance reviews in 2006.
The reviews so far haven’t led to any requirements for gender balance in science departments. But Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about gender wars in academia, predicts that lawyers will work gradually, as they did in sports, to require numerical parity. “Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,” Dr. Sommers said. “In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women’s level of interest.” Whether or not quotas are ever imposed, some of the most productive science and engineering departments in America are busy filling out new federal paperwork.
Source: New York Times, 7/15/08, By John Tierney