kitchen table math, the sequel: title-nining science

Saturday, April 12, 2008

title-nining science

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is legendary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester freshman course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences?

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?
By Christina Hoff Sommers
From the March/April 2008 Issue
The American

Oh, I don't know....

Possibly because they're not insane?

Just kidding.

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex...be denied the benefits of...any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

While Title IX has been effective in promoting women’s participation in sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of calibration could devastate academic science.

But unfortunately, in her enthusiasm for Title IX, Rolison is not alone.

On October 17, 2007, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology convened to learn why women are “underrepresented” in academic professorships of science and engineering and to consider what the federal government should do about it.
As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biology, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering.

There are many days when I think that one of the worst problems in education is the complete and total domination of the field by women. We desperately need some guys in the schools and running the schools.

Interestingly, Ed says that the field history continues to be a guy thing. Every other field in the humanities has been taken over by women, but men continue to outnumber women in the study of history. There are many more female historians than there once were, but the field hasn't "flipped," the way literature and art history fields have.

I don't know what to make of that.


Needed in class: a few good men
Are male teachers on the road to extinction?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is also an area where you need to look at the raw numbers. For a grant a few years ago, I dug out the number of chemistry Ph.D.'s. from the Survey of Earned Doctorates. (The NSF requires that you discuss the "broader impacts" of grants, so even if the grant is only for scientific research, you have to talk about women in science or minority recruitment or something along those lines). In 1994, 27.8% of chemistry Ph.D.'s went to women, while in 2004 it was 31.8%. However, since the number of men getting chemistry Ph.D.'s dropped by ~250 in that time, there were actually only 6 more women who got chemistry Ph.D.'s in 2004 than in 1994. That, to me, isn't something to celebrate. I'd much rather we talk about why fewer people, particularly fewer men, are going into the sciences at all than about percentages! Similarly, the numbers of degrees in Computer Science peaked in 1989, and focusing on gender issues and Title IX won't do anything about those totals. Fixing K-12 math education, on the other hand, could actually have an impact.

Catherine Johnson said...

why fewer people, particularly fewer men, are going into the sciences at all

wow

is that true???

I hate to say this, but I don't think I was aware of an absolute drop in numbers.

oh, boy

Well, this is the kind of thing that keeps me going. My district seems to have no real interest in whether our graduates can or cannot take college-level math courses.

I see, constantly, that my own particular kid is interested in areas that absolutely will require math (I'm thinking "public policy" realms - areas that are political and also pragmatic...)

C. is something of a "natural" (I think) in verbal realms and he learns math easily when taught systematically & carefully.

I have the strongest feeling that he's going to "need" math. Not that he's going to be a math major or a "quant" etc. ---- but that he's going to need a strong and solid mathematics education.

I'm essentially alone in this thinking (alone in terms of my school district).

People in general seem to divide the world into "math brains" and everyone else.

But that's not the way it is at all.

An intelligent and motivated person can learn math up to a certain level (I have no idea what that level is) very well.

But he can't teach it to himself.

Anonymous said...

I could write an entire blog bigger than KTM about the MIT report on women faculty at MIT, about what's wrong with MIT's physics and math departments (speaking as an physics major until my 8th term there, when I became a math major), and why women are miserable there.

But i'll try to restrict this comment to Math 55 at Harvard.

Math 55 is not a regular math course, even by math geek standards. It is taken by kids who went to Harvard to BE MATH MAJORS and who fully intend to GET PHDS in math.

These are kids who spent their summers at math camp. Do you all know about math camps? Ross at Ohio State, PROMYS at BU, Hampshire has one, etc. These are places where kids do more math (usually number theory) in 6 weeks than non math major college grads do in a lifetime.

To say that women "avoid" math 55 is putting the cart before the horse. There aren't 100 college freshman in the COUNTRY who put themselves into that class--apparently only 50 some even really try, and of them, only half decide to bother.

Suggesting that because "few" women out of 25 people from the thousands of college freshmen in a year chose this course that this says something about "women" is absurd.

If you want to ask why there are so few women who are in the grouping that would get you to even know about/care about Math 55, then maybe you can get somewhere. Why so few women in math camp? why so few women in math in high school? why so few women entering their freshman year of college "knowing" they want to be university level math researchers or profs? but to ask why only 25 people attend math 55 is the more reasonable question than asking why "women" don't.

Anonymous said...

The Title IXing of science may not be possible in the US at all, given the inability of the US to create an adult population with the skills necessary to be college science majors, actually, but I do worry about what the attempts will do to actual science. However, every time I really worry about that, I am reminded that we're talking about academia here, and honestly, research in science in american universities is so corrupted by federal government subsidies that I'm not really sure it matters. The academy barely does science anymore anyway. They do follow-the-funding-research.

MIT already had a lot of other Title IXing like bits. It had an admissions staff that believed in bringing in less qualified minorities and women on purpose, and in downplaying the standard quantitative elements of the admission application to help favor those "well rounded" students that were frankly, more like themselves than the faculty. Undergrads at MIT have been subjected to the same PC skits as every other university to "help them" to recognize gender bias.

They might ask themselves why this wasn't having any effect...

More title IX issues: graduate programs in the top science univs have figured out that they can take Chinese, Indian and Eastern European women and voila, they can meet the quotas. (perhaps congress will require it being Americans, but they dont' yet, iirc.)

re: creating women faculty: there are a lot of issues here. Most univs don't have the money to magically "fill" 30 percent of their depts with ANYONE, let alone women. Will they find women? Sure, right now, the inversion between the number of grad studetns/post docs and profs is SO GREAT that they could find people. Would they be qualified--to do what, exactly? in Computer Science, you'll find the women profs gravitate to specialties that are still "not as rigorous" --things like human computer interaction, or AI/Natural Language Processing--and in each field, that will probably happen--the schools and depts will find niches or redefine the boundaries.

The real issue is what being excellent in science faculty requires: real rigor will still be done by the tiny slice of people who are brilliant and driven--so driven that that work comes first. not family, not friends, not healthy life balance, but solving problems first and foremost. The second issue is still that academia puts a whole host of other requirements on science faculty: outrageous hours, outrageous time commitments, outrageous travel commitments. this isn't conducive to great science anyway. And here's where the Title IXing means so little: ACADEMIA IS MISERABLE for nearly anyone starting out, and miserable for young women who want families even more. Period. So they won't succeed at anything until their system accounts for that...can it? unlikely.

And remember, no one wants full time profs and faculty anymore. So the overall number of people going into grad school so that they can eventually just play a lottery to maybe get a professorship somewhere after 3 more 3 year post docs is going to dwindle. But as the real numbers fall, maybe the ratios of women in them will rise! woo hoo! :)

Anonymous said...

You can see some of the numbers (92-2002) here:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf04326/
Here you can see the numbers for women going up, while the numbers for men drift down (and this table doesn't break out foreign students).

The numbers have gone up a bit in the last few years, but most of that increase is in biological sciences, not in the more mathematical disciplines. You also don't see that increase if you only look at US citizens. In 1996, there were 31,542 science/engineering doctorates awarded to US citizens, and in 2005, it was down to 27,912. In physical sciences, it dropped more than 25% in that decade, from 2561 to 1900!

We're starting to see this effect in some fields in faculty hiring. It's especially significant in fields like organic or biochem where there are lots of industry jobs. We hired an organic chemist last year (at a small liberal arts college), and had about 30 applicants, about 10 of whom were really well qualified. The person we hired hadn't completed her Ph.D. yet, and very likely wouldn't have been considered 15 years ago (although I'm not sure the postdoc bias for small school faculty jobs is really legit).

Katharine Beals said...

The Title IXing of science may not be possible in the US at all, given the inability of the US to create an adult population with the skills necessary to be college science majors.

Absolutely.

Going back in the pipeline, I've had some disturbing revelations recently about what's going on these days in elementary school science classes, even when those are taught by designated science teachers.

I don't recall learning much science in 5th grade, but at least I wasn't turned off to it, as I surely would have been the way it's often "taught" now.

I've been blogging about my son's experiences at oilf.
(http://oilf.blogspot.com/)

Catherine Johnson said...

Thanks so much for these comments ---- boy, I am way overstacked on things that should be moved "up front."

lefty - haven't read your post yet, but quite a while back David Klein told me that the situation in science education is worse than the one in math.

I've been assuming that's less damaging because while you can't make up for lost time in math, I assume that you can in the sciences. (Obviously I don't know this --- I've been assuming it. I hope someone will tell me if that's crazy.)

Anonymous said...

I always assumed that the science ed situation is better than the math ed for a similar reason: you don't really start teaching science til at least 7th grade anyway, and real science until 10th grade in most places, so the kids don't have as much time to fall off the map, or to be misled.

But that's silly, now that I think about it. The science ed does exist before 10th grade, and it's all garbage political eco-green bilge. It's "the planet is in danger" stuff of catastrophes and Gaiaoism, without working hypotheses to test, learning how matter follows rules, etc. or data analysis. So even if you start remediation 10th grade, it's really too late to teach how to tell what's a theory that best fits all present data, etc.