Category: Sex Discrimination

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.

Glass Ceiling at MIT? Where’s the Data?

For the February-March 2000 issue of Heterodoxy, Kathryn Jean Lopez reports on the bizarre turn of events at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here’s the short version: several female professors got together and wrote a petition demanding the school investigate gender discrimination at MIT. MIT dutifully convened a panel to study the matter and in March 1999 admitted to systematic gender discrimination against its tenured female science faculty.

Case closed? Not quite. Suspicions were first generated by the composition of the panel. The chair of the committee charged with studying discrimination was biology professor Nancy Hopkins who also happened to be the person who originated the complaint in the first place. Typically it’s considered bad form to place someone in a decision making position who has an interest in the outcome, much less was the original complainant.

More importantly, though, the committee investigating the sexual discrimination charge claimed that its findings were based entirely on statistics showing unequal salaries, office space, awards, etc. Unfortunately as of this writing, MIT still refuses to release those statistics.

Judith Kleinfeld, of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, wrote a scathing indictment of the report that was published by the Independent Women’s Forum. Kleinfeld has a possible explanation for why no data was release — apparently no data were collected. Kleinfeld relates that a member of the committee who spoke to her on condition of anonymity said that “Heroic efforts were made to get statistics but a lot of this information was hard to gather, like who had what space. There was insufficient data from any of these sources to determine anything in particular.”

For example, in three of the six science departments at MIT, there are fewer female faculty members than male faculty members, However, in those three scientific fields there are fewer women with PhDs than men. For MIT to conclude that a pattern of sexual discrimination explains the sex discrepancy, the obvious way would be to compare the proportion of men to women in those fields as a whole with the proportion of men to women at MIT. And, of course, there was no attempt at all to do this.

Perhaps it is for this reason that although MIT claimed there was solid statistical evidence (which it refuses to release) to support the charge of sexual discrimination, at the same time the report characterized the discrimination as “subtle” and “unconscious.” Apparently so subtle and unconscious that MIT had to completely ignore any real data and instead simply follow the politically correct feelings of the moment.

Regardless of sex: Mary Daly and the return of ‘separate but equal’

One of the areas where feminist activists deserve credit for genuine improvements in sexual equality in higher education. Through the first several decades of the 20th century, many elite colleges were simply closed to women while others strictly limited the courses and disciplines women could enter. Sex discrimination was the rule rather than the exception. Feminists initiated both legal and moral challenges that today have effectively eliminated such sexual discrimination. Now, however, some feminists want to modify this ban on sex discrimination in academia. The new credo is that sex-based discrimination is wrong unless it is directed by feminists against men.

That is the conclusion that a reasonable observer of the flap over radical feminist Mary Daly’s teaching practices might conclude. Daly is a tenured professor at Boston College, where she’s taught since 1967. The author of several feminist books, including Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology, Daly is one of the few people who make Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, look moderate in comparison. In Gyn/Ecology, for example, Daly devotes several
pages to the hidden sexually oppressive meaning behind the United States’ decision to name its lunar landing program after the Greek god Apollo (Daly complains that “while overtly promoting the oppressive ideal of the nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to erotic fantasies allegedly taboo in heterosexist society.”)

But the subject of the current controversy is not Daly’s bizarre beliefs but her teaching practices – she refuses to allow men to enroll in a class she teaches on feminist ethics. Daly says men are intolerable in her classes because “what the women do is become caretakers for the men. In those circumstances, I decided, and many others have, that there’s a reality called women’s space. There has to be a separate space for women.”

And, of course, by definition, a separate space for men. In the past, Daly had gone so far as to take a sabbatical for a semester when she suspected a male student might try to enroll in her class. To be fair to her, Daly is a firm believer in the principle of separate but equal. She is willing to instruct men outside the classroom setting in one-on-one sessions but maintains they are just
too disruptive for the classroom environment.

Daly’s separate but equal position received support from her students and prominent media pundits and academics. Kate Heekin, a former student of Daly’s, told CNN she didn’t want men in her feminist ethics classes. “I want to talk about women,” Heekin said. “I don’t want to teach anyone about why I feel oppressed, why we live in a patriarchy – I don’t want to waste my energy on that.” Heekin and 14 other Boston College students wrote a letter to college administrators asking them to keep the women-only policy.

Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara wrote a blistering article attacking male students at Boston College who dared suggest they were being discriminated against by the women-only policy. “Boys, boys, boys, settle down,” McNamara began her article. “Mary didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. She knows you hate being excluded, that you get cranky when you feel left out.”

McNamara went on to complain about the men “sulking” over not being allowed to enroll in the class. As McNamara puts it, the men have it all wrong. “She doesn’t refuse to teach men; she assigns them to a separate section … The studies are clear: from grade to graduate school, males dominate the classroom.
They demand more attention and they get it.”

“Given the choice,” McNamara concludes her remarks, “I’ll stand with Mary Daly.”

McNamara joins Daly’s attack on the male Boston College students who started the controversy by threatening to sue the college if denied entry into the class. Daly claims the threatened lawsuit was part of a broader conspiracy to “assert white male supremacy.” Aside from being white males, the students’ main offense has been to enlist the help of the Center for Individual Rights for legal representation. As McNamara puts it, “Of all the lawyers that might represent an aggrieved student, isn’t it curious his cause is championed by the Center
for Individual Rights, which has fought affirmative action policies at universities from Texas to Michigan?”

Harvard Divinity Professor Harvey Cox echoed the vast right-wing conspiracy angle in an opinion piece in the Boston Globe. “I cannot believe,” Cox wrote, “that the real issue here is about a few classes that are open only to women
… After two decades of relentless gender leveling in higher education, everyone now recognizes that some women (and men) learn certain things better in gender-specific situations.”

A major irony in the attacks on the male students seeking to take her classes is that Daly owes her position in part to male students. In 1969 Boston College decided to terminate Daly’s contract due to her virulent anti-Catholicism (after returning from Rome for the Second Vatican Council, for example, Daly urged feminists to “laugh out loud at their [the Catholic Church’s] pompous penile
processions.”) At the time Boston College was a male-only school, but more than 1,500 students turned out to protest the administration’s decision to sack Daly. Eventually, the college reversed its decision. Given a choice, the male students at Boston College decided that academic freedom should apply to professors of both sexes. Daly, unfortunately, choose not to reciprocate this gender-blind approach.

The reader can easily imagine the reaction to this controversy were the roles to be reversed. Imagine an engineering professor at a major American college refusing to allow women to enroll in his classes because, he says, study after study demonstrates women’s inferior mathematical abilities. After explaining how he can’t slow his classes down to accommodate the women, who will surely demand far more attention than the men, the sexist professor might offer to teach women one-on-one where he can meet their special needs without disrupting his classes.

A female student might decide this violated numerous federal laws and perhaps contact a leading civil rights organization to sue the offending college to end its practice. But, some astute columnist at the local paper might ask, isn’t that a
lesbian lawyer representing the plaintiffs? And isn’t she the same lawyer who has been trying to push the homosexual agenda down people’s throats by bringing hate crimes lawsuits? Clearly, the only possible conclusion would be that this is a well-coordinated attack by “feminazis” on everything true and good – after all, nobody in her right might could oppose sexual discrimination in public institutions simply because it is wrong.

Daly’s behavior and McNamara’s impassioned defense of sexual discrimination highlight how far contemporary feminism has wandered off the path of sexual equality. Where once feminists bravely stood up for the principle of genuine equality between men and women, today many feminists in academia and the media have merely reversed the ages-old conservative stereotypes of women, defining them as the norm and men as something less (or as “The Other” to use the faddish postmodern term).

Feminists did an excellent job in showing the hypocrisy of paternalists who kept women from pursuing higher education and effectively mocked those who argued women simply couldn’t handle intellectually weighty classes or might prove too much of a disruption in the classroom. In fact, feminists relied heavily on such ideas of sexual equality to force male-only schools such as The Citadel to open their doors to women rather than set up separate programs for
women which, feminists argued, would be inherently inferior. Today, however,
all too many feminists openly accept and defend the view that sexual stereotypes and discrimination are to be tolerated, if not encouraged, provided they are created by feminists and used against men.

The claim that some topics were simply too intellectually challenging for women or that women would disrupt universities’ learning process were extremely harmful myths, and their near-eradication by the feminist movement was a good thing. But in their place, some feminists have begun to construct new myths about gender that are equally odious. Although it is no longer politically correct (nor should it be) to suggest that women don’t belong in certain classes or universities, numerous Women’s Studies textbooks, journal articles, and other materials repeat claims that men’s participation in classes is wholly negative and disruptive (so much for the oft-mentioned goal
of diversity in the classroom).

Women’s Studies professors Marcia Bedard and Beth Hartung write in an essay that male (but not female) students who “stat[e] the exception to every generalization” that a professor makes are guilty of harassment. When several male students in Magda Lewis’ feminist theory class dared to suggest that violence was a human problem, rather than exclusively a male problem, Lewis included the incident in a Harvard Education Review article as an example of the sort of oppression women experience on a daily basis.

So long as so many feminists continue to agree with ultra-conservatives that men and women are fundamentally different and must be treated fundamentally differently in similar social contexts, a world of true equality will always remain elusive, much to the detriment of humanity regardless of sex.