A Clear Voice

In junior high, my math teacher both years was extremely encouraging and helped me get onto the MathCounts team for the school, which won the state championship. In high school, I had a wonderful geometry teacher who would always bring extra puzzles and things to school for me to do. He even gave me a slide rule, which I never learned how to use, but treasure to this day. I then worked with the computer guy for the school learning how to install cards and make network cables. He was the person who made me want to get into computer engineering. My calculus teacher in high school was also great, and made it possible for me to get 10 credits of calculus out of the way before I even got into college.

Then in college I have been lucky to have a wonderful mentor who has employed me for the past five years, encouraged me to get into graduate school, and helped me learn about funding and research and writing papers and what it’s like to be a professor. He talks me up to everyone and has given me so much; I don’t even think I’d be in graduate school without his help.

I realize that just because I’ve had a good experience, doesn’t mean that everyone does. But the ultra feminists who control policy these days don’t even seem to consider anything other than outright bias as an explanation for the state of affairs. Consider, for example, this NOW press release last year about a study on diversity which begins with the sentence, “The Ole' Boy's Club is alive and well in academia.” The study finds that even though female enrollment in math, engineering, and the sciences undergraduate and graduate programs is rising, there still aren’t very many female professors in these fields. The study takes all this data and then irresponsibly attributes the reason to discrimination and the lack of female mentors without even considering any other explanation.

Allow me to suggest a few possibilities. Perhaps women are not eager to get into research in academia in the sciences where, as far as I’ve seen, a large part of time is spent on chasing funding. Perhaps women are not eager to get into an environment where petty politics can overpower their job. These and many other problems have always been issues in academia, but they have absolutely nothing to do with the gender make up of the faculty, and they’re not going to be fixed by “Adopt[ing] an extensive and candid program of accountability [towards diversity].” In fact, this will merely add to the problem.

Finally, even though I used to be an ultra feminist myself, who believed that all differences in gender could be attributed to social conditioning, I no longer believe that. There are so many ways that you can see generalized differences between boys and girls, even under a year of age. There are so many studies about girls being better at verbal skills and boys being better at spatial visualization. And I don’t see how anyone can think that the differences in body composition and hormones won’t have the slightest effect on how people think and behave.

In my opinion, the best thing to do about this “problem” is to improve the quality of education from kindergarten to graduate studies, and then just accept that perhaps the current percentage of women in certain fields is just how it is going to be. I know there are sexist people still out there, but for the most part I think they are not having that large of an effect on percentages of women in certain fields. I’ve also had a number of idiotic teachers of all sorts over the years, and I simply ignored them and moved on to a better one. All of the money we waste on diversity programs could be better spent on improving education and would go much farther towards making the world a better place. I'm sure there's more possible future female science professors languishing away in a terrible school than there are possible future female science professors being scared away by the "'Ol Boy's Club."

Update: More here.