Category: Education

Judith Kleinfeld On the MIT Gender Discrimination Study

Judith Kleinfeld recently wrote a column for The Christian Science Monitor summarizing her views and the recent Independent Women’s Forum study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sexual discrimination study.

MIT’s study claimed that the university had discriminated against female scientists, but on closer analysis the study was a political document devoid of any statistics or solid facts that would allow anyone to examine whether or not there had indeed been sex discrimination at MIT. As Kleinfeld writes,

Did MIT actually discriminate against its female faculty? Check out the study yourself at MIT’s web site (http://web.mit.edu/). You will notice an astonishing fact: MIT’s study is innocent of evidence of gender discrimination. Not an iota of data is offered to show that MIT treated its female faculty any differently from its male faculty.

Irrational self-flagellation — it’s not just for medieval monks anymore.

Source:

False solution on gender. Judith Kleinfeld, The Christian Science Monitor, February 27, 2001.

Mary Daly and Boston College Reach Settlement, But Continue to Argue

Feminist theologian Mary Daly recently reached a settlement with Boston College over her strange exit from teaching. For 25 years, Daly had refused to allow men in her classroom, and to their discredit Boston College officials grudgingly accepted this arrangement.

But in 1999, a student threatened to sue Boston College if Daly refused to allow him in her classroom. When college officials informed Daly that her sexist policy was no longer tolerable, Daly said she’d rather retire than allow a man in her classroom.

Boston College took her at her word and announced that Daly had retired. Daly claimed she had never said she was retiring and sued Boston College for breach of contract.

And then things got even weirder. A few weeks before Daly’s case was to go to trial, Daly and her lawyer approached Boston College seeking a settlement. The college agreed, and the two parties entered into a settlement that included a confidentiality clause — neither side was to discuss the terms of the settlement.

Except Daly and her lawyer apparently couldn’t resist getting in a dig at Boston College and put out a press release falsely claiming that Boston College had come to Daly seeking a settlement and proclaiming, “We are confident that, after hearing all of the testimony, the jury would have ruled in our favor and found that Professor Daly’s tenure rights and academic freedom had been trampled.”

Boston College was outraged by the breach of the settlement as well as the false claim that it, rather than Daly, had sought a settlement. The college threatened to sue Daly for violating the terms of the settlement. Daly’s lawyer responded by issuing a retraction of the comments that admitted Daly had sought out the settlement.

Regardless of who did what, hopefully, other colleges and universities will get the message that sex discrimination is simply intolerable at higher learning institutions. Ironically, Daly insists that the principle of academic freedom gives her the right to discriminate based on sex in her classrooms. What a twisted view of academic freedom.

Source:

Suit settled, feminist and BC still arguing. Patricia Healy, Boston Globe, February 8, 2001.

IWF Finally Brings Some Data to MIT Sex Discrimination Case

A little less than a year ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report, A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT, that claimed there was institutionalized discrimination against women at MIT. The university followed up that report by increasing the salaries of female professors and took other actions to remedy the discrimination.

But was there really ever any discrimination occurring at MIT? This question was raised by conservative groups who noted that the MIT report was a) written by the very same people who had filed complaints of sexual discrimination, and b) was completely devoid of any actual evidence of sexual discrimination. The MIT report essentially said that merely asserting sexual discrimination was enough to prove it.

The lengths to which the report went to avoid presenting any evidence was bizarre. Even such data such as average salaries for male and female professors was removed from the final report.

Unfortunately nobody but MIT has access to the salary data so the issue of how women and men are paid can’t be addressed, but the Independent Women’s Forum has released a study that does answer another question — assuming that men and women are compensated differently, is it possible that this is because men and women on MIT’s faculty perform differently?

Since this whole episode was kicked off by the allegations of biology professor Nancy Hopkins — who was also the chief architect of the MIT report — the IWF examined the productivity of biology professors. Specifically it looked at publications, citations and grant money by biology professors.

The results eerily mirror the claims about sex discrimination at MIT. For older professors who earned doctorates from 1971 to 1976, there was a wide disparity in publication and citation for men and women, while for younger professors who earned their PhDs between 1988 and 1993 there was a rough parity between the productivity of men and women.

There were 11 professors in the older group (six men, five women). Of those, three of the men had published more than 100 papers from 1989-2000, but only one of the woman had done so. Only one out of the six male professors had published fewer than 50 papers, but four out of five women had published fewer than 50 papers. When it came to citations, the disparity was even more dramatic. Three of the six men had more than 10,000 citations. The most widely cited female had a little under 3,000. When it came to federal grants, there was relative parity by gender except for a single male professor who had almost three times as many federal grants as anyone else in the group.

For the younger group, who had recently earned their doctorates, there was far more parity. There was a single male biologist who had published 120 papers and was cited 14,000 times — far more than anyone else in the group — but the second highest publication count was by a woman, and the second most widely cited individual was female. Similarly the top performer for citations per paper was a woman, and several women had more citations per paper than their male colleagues.

Based on this data, it would be expected that there would be wide disparities in salaries and resources devoted to the male scientists than female scientists in the older group, while we should see roughly equal salaries and resources among the younger scientists. Since MIT has refused to release the data it used, it is impossible to say for sure whether or not this is the case. However, when the MIT report first broke it was widely reported that younger associate professors reported much higher satisfactions with their salaries and available resources than female professors who had been at MIT much longer (and the younger professor’s views were routinely dismissed as being a result of inexperience or naivete).

Source:

Confession Without Guilt? Patricia Hausman and James H. Steiger, The Independent Women’s Forum, February 2001.

How Long Until Colleges Create Affirmative Action Programs for Men?

In recent months there have been a number of news stories about a gender discrepancy at American universities and colleges that is likely to grow even larger in coming years — women now are disproportionately represented in higher education.

This year, for example, men made up only 44 percent of admissions to colleges and universities. For a variety of reasons, that percentage is likely to decline further before it stabilizes. By 2010, the United States Department of Education estimates that men will make up only 42 percent of higher education admissions.

Already some colleges are creating what are essentially affirmative action programs for men to increase “diversity” on campus, and thanks to the feminist mantra that a statistical discrepancy is prima facie evidence of active discrimination, such programs are likely to survive and expand.

According to a Daily Telegraph (UK) report, The University of NOrth Carolina and DepauL University have already started targeting potential male students with more outreach than female students, including extra mailings with more emphasis on traditionally male areas of study such as engineering. Meanwhile, some women who applied to the University of Georgia sued that university because they argued it’s admissions policies were biased toward men. They lost their suit.

The Daily Telegraph claims that the decline is attributable to men opting not to go to college to pursue more lucrative independent careers such as with Internet companies, which may be true for a very small segment of men, but is unlikely to explain the entire difference. Rather the difference is attributable to the fact that women as a group tend to do better in high school then men as a group. Women have much higher graduation rates, and although men tend to do better on standardized tests than women, this is only because the male sample of test takers is skewed because far more men tend to take tests such as the SAT and ACT.

Given the disparities, should there be affirmative action programs for men? Absolutely not. Affirmative action programs were a lousy way to try to compensate for statistical disparities when they favored men and they would be a lousy way to compensate when the statistical disparities favor women.

Source:

University women in a class of their own. Philip Delves Broughton, The Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2000.

The Feminist/Postmodernist Assault on Academic Freedom

Jared Sakren is a successful theater professor who in stints at Yale University, Julliard Theatre Center and Arizona State University taught actors such as Annette Benning, Val Kilmer and Kelly McGillis. But at Arizona State University Sakren was fired in part because his performance reviews said that he was creating a climate of sexism in the classroom — the dean of the college of fine arts at ASU told CBS News that Sakren was guilty of sexual harassment.

What did Sakren do to earn such enmity? He refused to teach Shakespeare from a “postmodern feminist/ethic canon.” Translation: Sakren wanted to teach Shakespeare’s plays as having timeless insights into human nature. ASU wanted him to teach Shakespeare as an artifact of patriarchal culture that is oppressive precisely because it asserts there is something like a universal human nature (that’s a right wing myth according to the postmodernists.)

As Thor Halvorssen of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education summed up the case to the Washington Times,

ASU hired an international superstar teacher, promised him academic freedom, and then expected him to follow the politically correct orthodoxy of radical feminism and watered-down academic standards.

The irony of the case is that universities usually cite academic freedom whenever conservatives criticize their curriculum or class offerings, but quickly discard the notion whenever they need to appease leftist academics. In the ASU case, the university actually argued in court that although Sakren’s contract included a promise of academic freedom, that the clause was meaningless and legally unenforceable.

Source:

Professor fired for teaching Shakespeare gets new trial. Andrea Billups, The Washington Times.

Violent Hypocrisy

The Associated Press carried a story the other day on efforts to raise awareness about violence among dating teenagers (Schools struggle to contain dating violence). The story described efforts in Massachusetts, which has one of the most comprehensive programs in the nation to address and prevent such violence.

Addressing the possibilities of interpersonal violence and teaching young men and women to deal with their problems without resorting to violence is certainly an admirable goal and with some studies suggesting up to 1 in 5 students are victims of some form of dating-related violence sometime in their lives, this is certainly a worthy project.

Unfortunately, the Associated Press story included a quote from an alleged expert who argued that in some cases a physical assault or emotional abuse really don’t count as violence. What special cases are these? When the violence involves a young women assaulting a young man.

The surveys of violence among young men and women are pretty clear — both groups report similar levels of victimization, although as with violence between adults, women are far more likely to end up requiring hospital visits or other medical intervention as a result of an assault.

Still violence is violence, but not according to Carole Sousa, a consultant on dating violence to the Massachusetts Department of Education. According to the Associated Press story,

Some studies have suggested that almost as many boys as girls are victims of dating violence, but Sousa contends such figures are misleading. Boys
may be mocked or slapped by a girlfriend, but they often laugh off the
mistreatment, she said. Girls almost exclusively are the victims in cases of
sexual violence or injuries requiring hospitalization, Sousa said.

This is a bizarre claim. The obvious implication is that if a man just slaps a woman a little and calls her names, which she laughs off, that it is misleading to call this serious violence. I thought feminists wanted to call that battered women’s syndrome.

Why is it so hard for these activists to get it through their heads that violence is always an extremely serious matter even if it doesn’t lead to serious injury and regardless of whether it is perpetrated by men or women. Sousa’s claim outrageously minimizes violence committed by women, which is very odd given the general feminist claim that we need to set aside our pre-conceived stereotypes of male and female roles. Instead activists such as Sousa seem to be informed entirely by stereotypes of men as always being the aggressive victimizer and women as always being the passive victim. Which is ironic given that young men are far more likely to be victims of violence than any other group. Reducing violence requires a holistic approach, not the sex-segregated stereotypes being pushed by activists like Sousa.