Letters to the Editor
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The importance of three headed dogs...
..and other worthy academic pursuits.
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Jobs for the girls
And if being a feminist doesn't lead to a job, doesn't that suggest that society is still perhaps just a wee bit patriarchal?
In an ever tightening job market, there is a tremendous demand for doctors, nurses, physical therapists and other skilled health care professionals educated to the bachelors degree level or above, but surely the number of openings for women's studies graduates must be very small by comparison unless you are a brilliant academic who can get a job in teaching or go into graduate studies in this or a similar field.
And, as the articles say, there is no difficulty in studying feminist topics within other disciplines, for example if studying literature there are opportunities to study women writers, or in medicine you can go into gynaecology, obstetrics, or birth control, or in history you can study prominent women of the past, and so on.
What seems to be beyond doubt is that in the UK, at least, the reason that Women's Studies courses are coming to an end is that undergraduates are not applying for places.
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Feminism run amuck
Feminist/Women's Studies dogma run amuck is about to dismantle the meritocracy behind peer review in the sciences.
See this article of hers for more info on this sad state of affairs: http://tinyurl.com/2bnulg
An excerpt regarding the politically correct "analysis" of women and tenure done at MIT:
"In 1994, 16 senior faculty women, led by biologist Nancy Hopkins, complained to the administration about sex discrimination in their various departments. MIT’s president, Charles Vest, and the dean of the School of Science, Robert Birgeneau, dutifully set up a committee to review the complaints. But rather than bring in outsiders, they put the protesters (joined by three male administrators) in charge of investigating their own grievances. Under Hopkins’s leadership, the committee produced a 150-page study that found MIT guilty on all counts. Women, according to the document, had lower salaries, less laboratory space, and fewer resources. They felt “invisible” and “marginalized.” Vest and Birgeneau quickly responded with generous salary raises, improved lab space, and more equity committees. The women professed to be satisfied and the case was closed. The report was deemed “confidential” and “sensitive,” and to this day it has never been made public.
It is odd that a single study of postgraduate fellowships at a Swedish university should play such a prominent role in a campaign to eliminate 'hidden bias' in American universities.
What was released to the press, in March of 1999, was a brief summary of the report’s findings along with letters from Vest and Birgeneau admitting guilt. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, “MIT released a cursory report of the study it conducted, so it is difficult for outsiders to judge what the gap was between men and women.”
The summary of the report, nevertheless, created a sensation in the media and in universities for two reasons: (1) it appeared to be based on hard data, and (2) it had the full endorsement of MIT’s top administrators. The New York Times carried the story on the front page under the headline, “MIT Admits Discrimination Against Female Professors.” Professor Hopkins was soon everywhere in the press and on April 8, 1999, was invited to attend an Equal Pay Day event at the White House. Referring to Hopkins and her team, President Clinton said, “Together they looked at cold, hard facts about disparity in everything from lab space to annual salary.”
But cold, hard facts had little to do with it. After reviewing the available evidence and interviewing some insiders, University of Alaska psychologist Judith Kleinfeld concluded, “The MIT report presents no objective evidence whatsoever to support claims of gender discrimination in laboratory space, salary, research funds, and other resources.” Readers are told in the summary report that women faculty “proved to be underpaid.” But we also learn that the “salary data are confidential and were not provided to the committee.” So on what basis did they conclude there were salary disparities? Hopkins and the other authors explain, “Possible inequities in salary are flagged by the committee from the limited data available to it.” But “possible” soon became “actual,” and by the time it reached President Clinton it had morphed into “cold, hard facts.”
There were other oddities. The report claimed that the problems confronting women faculty were universal, but the summary concedes, “Junior women felt included and supported by their departments.” Instead of acknowledging that the problem might be generational and confined to a small group of senior women from three departments, Hopkins and the other authors of the report claimed that the junior women were naïve and simply did not know what was in store for them: “Each generation of young women began...by believing that gender discrimination was solved in the previous generation and would not touch them.”
Mathematics professor Daniel Kleitman, one of the three males on the Hopkins committee, told the Chronicle that he “never saw any evidence” of discrimination against women. He concedes the senior women were unhappy, and he does not fault the administrators for trying to remedy the situation. But, as he explained, you can find unhappy professors in all universities. “I am not sure what the women were experiencing was unique to women,” he said.
I recently asked Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science, about the report. He told me that although it was “widely praised in public, it was privately deplored and disparaged in the hallways of MIT.” His department was accused of bias, so he expected to see the evidence. “But it was never made available.”
When a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education asked Mary-Lou Pardue, an MIT biology professor who was among those who originally complained to the dean, about all the irregularities and the absence of data, she replied, “This wasn’t meant to be a study for the rest of the world. It was meant to be a study for us…. We weren’t trying to prove anything to the world.”"
I know a few folks in the Pardue lab. They keep their mouths shut because they need their postdoc positions, but they share the same disdain of many at MIT for this PC fraud.
Kiss American leadership in science goodbye when the Title IX gender cops and wimpified politicos get a hold of it.