Tag: Independent Women’s Forum

Independent Women’s Forum on the Inaccuracies in Women’s Studies Textbooks

Christina Stolba has written an excellent 33-page summary of the overwhelming deficiencies of the most popular textbooks used for Women’s Studies courses in the United States. According to Stolba’s report,

Rather than offering young men and women exposure to knowledge, these texts foster a cynical knowingness about women’s status in society, one that consistently emphasizes women’s supposedly subordinate position. The danger of such a worldview, particularly for a generation of young men and women who enter the classroom already steeped in popular myths about women’s place in society, is that it will ripen into a form of anti-intellectualism.

One of the textbooks Stolba looks at is Sheila Ruth’s Issues in Feminism, which I skewered here many years ago.

Stolba goes through the litany of problems from absurd factual errors to stereotyping to the anti-intellectualism (in too many of these textbooks, critical thinking is blasted as an artificial construct of the patriarchy). But the most absurd abuse of the textbooks is their condescending attitudes toward young men and women.

Stolba notes, for example, that the authors of the textbook Gender & Culture in America conducted surveys of their students and found that, “nearly all of the women, but none of the men interviewed, plan to curtail or cease their paid employment after their children are born.” They cite one female student proud of her GPA and career prospects but who tells the authors that she believes “children suffer if their mothers work outside the home.”

Of course to a movement that places so much emphasis on reproductive choicest, there can be no room for allowing young women to make their own choices in other areas. The authors of Gender & Culture in America simply conclude that women like this student are victims who “are apparently unaware that in these decisions they are following traditional gender stereotypes.”

Except when having an abortion, no woman in radical feminism ever makes choices except when their actions agree with the radical feminist view of the world. Anything else is chalked up to false consciousness, patriarchal oppression, and/or implicit societal-wide threats against women. And yet, even though radical feminists constantly circumscribe the range of acceptable choices for young women, they still scratch their collective heads in amazement at the general rejection of their philosophy.

Could it possibly be that, unlike their sisters in academia, young women in fact take the pro-choice message about deciding for themselves to heart. For academic feminists, “pro-choice” is just a convenient ideological term that serves a political purpose. For many younger men and women, however, choosing for themselves is a way of life, and such people have as little use for the boring constraints of radical feminism as they do for traditional anti-feminism. And good for them.

Source:

Just in Time for Women?s History Month, Review of Women?s Studies Textbooks Reveals Questionable Scholarship, Ideological Bias, and Sins of Omission. Independent Women’s Forum, March 20, 2002.

Independent Women’s Forum Runs Provocative Ads in College Newspapers

The Independent Women’s Forum has recently begun running a provocative ad attacking campus feminism and women’s studies departments. The text of the ad debunks what the IWF calls “The Ten Most Common Feminist Myths.”

These myths include: One in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape; Women earn 75 cents for every dollar a man earns; 30 percent of emergency room visits by women each year are the result of injuries from domestic violence; The phrase “rule of thumb” originated in a man’s right to beat his wife provided the stick was no wider than his thumb; Women have been shortchanged in medical research; Girls have been shortchanged in our gender-biased schools; “Our schools are training grounds for sexual harassment… boys are rarely punished, while girls are taught that it is their role to tolerate this humiliating conduct”; Girls suffer a dramatic loss of self-esteem during adolescence; Gender is a social construction; and Women’s Studies Departments empowered women and gave them a voice in the academy.

For the most part I agree with the IWF’s analysis of common feminist myths, but the opening text to the ad really crosses the line. According to the IWF ad,

Campus feminism is a kind of cult: as early as freshman orientation, professors begin spinning theories about how American women are oppressed under “patriarchy.” Here is a list of the most common feminist myths. If you believe two or more of these untruths, you may need deprogramming.

Some Women’s Studies departments on American campuses certainly do their best to spread myths, but comparing them to cults and the students who buy into the myths as requiring deprogramming is a cheap rhetorical tool designed to enrage rather then enlighten.

In fact many people who take these courses are able to see through the faulty reasoning. Comparing Left wing Women’s Studies departments to cults is just as obnoxious as feminists who dismiss the IWF and other groups as participating in their own oppression or being nothing more than tools for patriarchal ideas.

If reasoned discourse prevails, the myths that the IWF complains about will quickly be punctured. In choosing to go for a gut-level emotional response and accuse these departments of being cults, it will end up alienating many students who might have otherwise taken a more seriously look at feminist myths.

Source:

Take Back The Campus. SheThinks.Org, April 17, 2001.

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.

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.