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.