Do girls avoid STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields because of ongoing, widespread discrimination? Or do girls with the skill sets that would give them entrance to STEM fields prefer fields that involve working with people over fields that involve working with things? (A note on the correct use of language. Women are justifiably offended when people, especially […]
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The Office of Civil Rights’ mandated procedures for investigating sexual assault are tilted heavily against the accused party. The institution can hire “neutral fact-finders” who produce the equivalent of a grand jury presentment, deny the accused an advisor of his choice, add witnesses that the accused student does not request, forbid the students from cross-examining […]
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Imagine a hypothetical gourmet grocery store chain — let’s call it Wholly Wholesome Foods — that serves haute cuisine specialties at sushi/deli/lunch counters only in its stores located in upscale neighborhoods. Now imagine the long zealous arm of federal, state, and local enforcers accusing WhoWhoFoo of discriminating against inner city residents and forcing it to […]
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Using federal statistics, Laura Norén has prepared a series of graphics showing gender distribution among recent recipients of undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D./professional degrees. The charts are visually striking, especially since all three sets of charts show movement in an identical direction. According to Norén, by 2020, women are projected to earn 61 percent of all […]
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Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have articles this morning about a new survey of Economics PhDs that finds a dramatic gender gap on policy questions. Among the findings, women economists are: 20% more likely than men to disagree with the notion that the United States has too much government regulation; […]
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Why is it admirable to “target” women and minorities for some educational programs but a violation of federal civil right laws to “target” them in others? That’s the question that must be asked about a federal lawsuit filed by seven Mississippi women, five of them African-American, against for-profit Virginia College, […]
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When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology—about 58 percent of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics […]
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President Walsh, trustees, faculty, friends, noble parents…and dear class of 1996, I am so proud of you. Thank you for asking me to speak to you today. I had a wonderful time trying to imagine who had been ahead of me on the list and had said no; I was positive you’d have to have […]
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Yale and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recently announced a settlement of a Title IX complaint brought by several Yale students alleging a “hostile environment” on the campus toward women. (The idea that any contemporary Ivy League campus is hostile to women is nothing short of preposterous.) The settlement’s terms included the […]
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Here’s something to think about when debating the position of the Catholic bishops on religious liberty and contraception: all-women colleges are allowed under Federal law to discriminate against men in admissions, at least on the undergraduate level. Because they are private, these colleges are free under the law to design their mission (the education of […]
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Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is scheduled to speak Friday at a Georgetown University commencement event, setting off protests among Catholics and others who believe the Obamacare mandate violates religious liberty. So far, some 25,000 people have signed petitions asking for the invitation to be withdrawn. On campus, the reaction seems more […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. Provisions are being added to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that could undermine due process on campus and in criminal cases, as civil liberties groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and civil libertarians like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer have noted. The changes are contained […]
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Soviet ideologues were famous for adjusting Marxism to the zigs and zags of history, but they were pikers compared to today’s campus affirmative-action apparatchiks. The latest installment from university diversicrats is–ready for this–affirmative action for men, not black or Hispanic men, but white men (see here and here and especially here). Allan Bakke, come back, […]
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The American Association of University Women, the voice of hard-line campus feminism, published a survey today showing that 48 percent of American 7th to 12th graders were sexually harassed during the last school year, with 87 percent of those harassed suffering negative effects such as absenteeism, poor sleep and stomach aches. These are alarming numbers, but then, the AAUW […]
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Males are keenly aware that when they go to college they are entering a hostile environment. Freshman orientation alone has had a distinctively anti-male cast for years: heavy emphasis on date rape, stalking, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual harassment amount to an unmistakable message that males are patriarchal oppressors and potential sex criminals. The lesson […]
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In his comment on my Sept. 19 essay, “The Feminist War Against Fraternities,” Duke Cheston has abandoned the argument he made in a Sept. 13 essay for the Pope Canter that college fraternities are incubators of rape–and hence should be abolished. Indeed, he quotes with approval from Heather Mac Donald’s “The Campus Rape Myth,” her […]
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The Pope Center’s Duke Cheston has issued what is essentially a call for the abolition of college fraternities, adding a conservative battle cry to a war which hitherto has been largely waged by liberals: feminists, political correctness-besotted campus administrators, and, lately, the Obama administration’s Education Department. In an essay for the Pope Center’s website he […]
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Writing here over a year ago in The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity, I noted that “Sometimes it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren’t more women in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain […]
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Another day, another bunch of dollars thrown at studies lamenting “the gender gap in science and technology fields.” The most recent comes from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation. From its Executive Summary: Our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is crucial to America’s innovative capacity and […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports that a workshop at the University of Washington is attempting to reduce the number of women who work in STEM fields in industry. Neither the IHE article nor the organizers of the workshop put it quite that way, of course, but that nevertheless is clearly the workshop’s purpose. “The organizers of the On-Ramps […]
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Let’s face it, our noble efforts to detoxify today’s PC-infected university have largely failed and the future looks bleak. This is not to say that the problem is incurable–though it is–but it calls for a solution different from the current approach. Here’s how. Begin by recognizing that all our proposed cures impose heavy burdens on […]
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Some readers of Minding the Campus may have noticed the little fracas at University of Iowa between College Republicans and anthropology/women’s studies professor Ellen Lewin. You can read about it in any of the many stories listed on this Google news page. The details are simple. UI College Republicans sent out a mass email, approved […]
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The academic gender wars are back in the news, with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announcing an investigation into a Title IX complaint against Yale University. Sixteen current and former Yale students claim that the university discriminates against women by allowing a sexually hostile environment to flourish. Is there really a problem […]
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Forty years after co-education came to Princeton, the campus has been in a tizzy because, Inside Higher Ed reported a few days ago, “female undergrads tend to eschew high-profile executive positions at the most prestigious student organizations in favor of less glamorous — but often equally labor-intensive — leadership roles.” In the decades after Princeton went co-ed in 1969, women regularly rose […]
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At about the same time as the release of MIT’s new study on the status of its women, which I discussed recently here, two more studies appeared on the anemic underrepresentation on higher education faculties of another marginalized group, political conservatives. Both studies, by Neil Gross, Ethan Fosse, and Jeremy Freese, conclude that “self-selection,” not […]
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The latest MIT report on the status of its faculty women– earlier ones appeared in 1999 and 2002–finds impressive progress and “an overwhelmingly positive view of MIT,” but the key word in the seemingly endless stream of reports on women in STEM fields, “marginalization,” inevitably pops up as well, this time in reaction to “the […]
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Are you a female STEM student (or wannabe STEM student) suffering from a stereotype infection? Then, according to new research recently described in Inside Higher Ed (“Inoculation Against Stereotype”), you should take a course from a female instructor to inoculate yourself. The research, based on a study at U Mass Amherst by Nilanjana Dasgupta, associate professor of […]
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The year was 1996. Bill Clinton was serving his first term as president. Barack Obama was a civil-rights attorney in Chicago who had yet to hold any public office. It was that long ago. According to J. Patrick Kelly, vice dean of the Widener University School of Law, 1996 was the year that Professor Lawrence […]
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When news came out recently that this year’s college freshmen rank their emotional well-being at record-low levels, observers in the media and the ivory tower began to wring their hands. Just how depressed are young men and women on campus? According to researchers at UCLA who conduct the annual “American Freshman” survey, the percentage of […]
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Supporters of Title IX such as the National Coalition for Women and Girls In Sports regularly claim that “loss of male collegiate athletic participation opportunities is a myth.” Tell that to the University of Delaware, which announced in January: that it is downgrading its men’s cross country and outdoor track and field teams from varsity […]
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