Baseless Bias and the New Second Sex
Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated. If there is a crisis in the academy that merits a congressional investigation, it is not that women Ph.D.s are being shortchanged in math and science hiring and tenure committees, for that is not true. It is that men are quickly becoming the second sex in American education.
8 Comments:
It seems like this trend was accepted until Larry Summers reopened the debate at Harvard.
The trend up here in Canada has been astounding! In law and medicine, we are seeing female enrollment around 70%.
Cannot speak for engineering schools but the professional schools are clearly trending towards women.
A few weeks ago, at the Montreal science fair of the 10 participants selected to go to the regional science fair competition, 9 were girls.
The drama is not female participation but boys quitting school, it is a tragedy not being addressed.
There are two abilities which women tend to score much higher than most men..graphoria (clerical checking) and ideaphoria (creative imagination). Both of these abilities help women high in graphoria & ideaphoria to score better than men in traditional examinations.
The graphoria improves accuracy and speed on examinations while and ideaphoria helps the student to generate ideas quickly for short answer and essay questions.
Traditional testing methods favor the majority of students high in these skills (predominantly women) while students low in graphoria and ideaphoria (primarily men) tend to struggle to finish examinations within the allotted time. Examinations are not testing knowledge of the subject or intelligence but the ability to rapidly generate answers.
Finance,
A very disturbing trend.
What's really disturbing is how this is destroying families as more women don't value raising children and focusing on their families.
In caveman days men had a comparative advantage in hunting and women had a comparative advantage in child nurturing and fine handwork.
Now that our economic structure is advanced enough to produce massive quantities of food with little labor and child care is relatively cheap, it is absolutely wonderful that we have the productive talents of women in our labor force.
I'm more concerned about the general malaise of young men and the excess enrollment in unproductive college majors. I doubt many Chinese major in Environmental Science, Sociology, Kinesiology, or Mongolian Studies.
The other post about the computer competition is frightening. While thousands of Russians and Chinese are programming advanced algorithms for mathematics problems, our kids are playing with their X-boxes. At best, they're designing video games which amounts to little more than being a computer graphics artist.
KJ,
What's even more disturbing is your neolithic view that women should be the primary care-givers to their children, rather than equal contribution from both parents, or fathers being the primary care-giver to their children.
Pursuing higher education or a career in no way means a woman does not value children or family. Working mothers do not destroy families. Throughout history, most mothers have worked, and this has benefited their families and their children.
Go back to your cave.
Hmmm, 'graphoria' and 'ideaphoria'...
Very interesting words QT and for me quite educational...
Thanks...
anon's words of pique: "Throughout history, most mothers have worked, and this has benefited their families and their children"...
Well my personal experiences (yes, anecdotal) anon is that in countries that are considered more third world, the working mother model as you've described it is very much on target...
Here in the states and in some of the European countries that I've been to more than once KJ's comment doesn't seem to be all that far off target but of course its not to be taken as a blanket statement...
Isn't it the case than when women actually have more real choices some choose not to be mothers even though they may have initially made the choice to be mothers?
Just asking...
Iz all lies comrade, put forth by the sexist male imperial complex.
76 cents///// No, *57* cents on the dollar!!
Glass Ceiling!
Gender bias!
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