WSJ Reports on Brain Similarities Between Adolescents of Different Sex

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal reported findings of government research that casts doubt on assumptions that male and female brains are significantly different during adolescence. As the article put it:

A common stereotype is that boys develop more slowly than girls, putting them at a disadvantage in school where pressure to perform is starting ever younger. Another notion is that puberty is a time when boys' and girls' brains grow more dissimilar, accounting for some of the perceived disparities between the sexes. Now, some scientists are debunking such thinking. Although boys' and girls' brains show differences around age 10, during puberty key parts of their brains become more similar, according to recent government research. And, rather than growing more slowly, boys' brains instead are simply developing differently.

The article also described research that puts those differences into context:

Dr. Eliot cites a neuro-imaging study from last year that showed the female brain has stronger neuronal connections than the male brain in certain areas, and vice versa. But in general, the study found that the male and female brains show more commonality than difference, Dr. Eliot says. The study, which looks at about 1,100 brain scans, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Giedd of the NIMH says his research also showed there are exceptions. In about 10% of the young people studied, boys' and girls' brains were more similar to the brains of the opposite sex than to others' of the same sex. Dr. Giedd says many factors can affect the rate of brain development, including the strength or weakness of testosterone receptors. Testosterone, a hormone usually associated with male traits, is present in both sexes and can help determine how quickly parts of the brain develop that account for typical male-dominated functions.

Because advocates of single-sex education point to such differences to defend the practice of separating boys and girls in the classroom, these findings could be relevant to the legal question of whether such efforts are based on generalizations about sex differences, and therefore impermissible under Equal Protection standards. They could also be relevant to the policy question of whether it makes sense to segregate on the basis of sex, rather than other indicators of learning styles and intellectual development.

SUNY Stony Brook Settles Sex Discrimination Case

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that SUNY Stony Brook has settled, for undisclosed terms, a Title VII lawsuit filed by a female former physics post-doc. The plaintiff, Sherry Towers, had alleged that the university decided not to extend her fellowship contract after and in retaliation for her complaints about sex discrimination by her supervisor, John Hobbs. According to the AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund (which supported Towers's case), Hobbs told Towers she was not allowed to take maternity leave if she wanted to receive future recommendations from him. He then insisted that she return to work within days of giving birth. And while Towers' workload was reduced to 30-35 hours a week, she received a 40% pay reduction, even though other post docs who worked similar hours received full salary.

As Towers herself suggested to the Chronicle, her case supports the argument that women aren't underrepresented in science fields like physics because of lack of interest and ability. The gender gap derives not only from workplace norms, like nonaccommodation of pregnancy, that systematically advantage men, but also hostility to women who seek to challenge those norms with more inclusive policies. Apparently, Towers was a talented and accomplished physicist who discovered evidence of a new particle (OK, I admit I have no idea what that means, but it sounds impressive to me!). Now she is getting her license to teach high school physics. If she had had the support of her institution, what else would she have been able to accomplish?

Obama, McCain answer questions on Title IX and women in STEM

Earlier this month the Obama and McCain campaigns answered questions presented to them by the Association for Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers. The entirety of their answers can be found here. The questions are largely centered on how the candidates intend to achieve more gender equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, including how Title IX might be enforced across the academy--and not just in athletics.
Neither, of course, suggested there should not be gender equity, but once again John McCain took the opportunity to show his ignorance of Title IX while trying to diss the Democrats. Though he does plan to enforce Title IX according to its "original intent" he has some caveats:
I am concerned, however, that the Clinton administration took unwise liberties in interpreting Title IX with the consequence that many schools have adopted policies of strictly equal funding for male and female athletic programs. Unfortunately, many popular athletic programs have been cut because the overall amount of funding available for athletics programs will not sustain identical men's and women's programs in every sport.
Because I have made this complaint before, I will keep it brief, in the hopes that someone from the McCain campaign will absorb it and pass the info on to their boss.
Title IX does not call for identical programs in every sport. This rhetoric clearly belies your intent to exempt football from the Title IX equation. Don't think we don't see this. And second, I have yet to see (though would be happy to) an athletic department that is equally funding its men's and women's programs.

Single-sex education and science

I usually stay out of the single-sex education blogging we do here because it is not really my area of expertise. I am, of course, opposed to single-sex classrooms in public schools and find the reasoning behind them highly suspect. Much of the rhetoric inspires great fear in me, actually.

But I also happen to live practically down the street from one of the most venerable women-only colleges in the country. And as more and more formerly women-only colleges become co-educational, I feel somewhat of a loss.

With the recent surge in the discussion over women in science and my own concerns and internal debates about the right to choose one's own learning environment, I found this editorial at Inside Higher Ed laid out some of the pros and cons. There is a lot in there but I will just highlight some of the issue raised.

The author, a chemistry professor at a women's-only college, writes about the benefits her female students have being in a single-sex environment and how that environment has facilitated their learning of the subject. She presents the possibility that such productive learning, for some students, would not have taken place in a mixed gender environment.

Unfortunately the confidence many of these young women gain in their undergraduate years just is not enough to help them deal with the highly sexist and misogynist environments they encounter in graduate school and in the work place. Would they have been better prepared for such opposition if they had had to deal with it in the classroom?

It is, of course, impossible to say. Individuals react differently to confrontations, discrimination, and stresses. But I think the raising of the issues, especially as they exist in slightly different versions than those that come up when we are talking about the K-12 system, are important to keep alive in the discussion.

Physics, Engineering, and Title IX Quotas, Oh My!

The alarmist tone of John Tierney's column in today's New York Times, warning that university physics and engineering departments are about to be "Title Nined," conjures up an image of banished male scientists being consoled by ex-wrestlers as they all gaze longingly at the university campus from just outside the gates. Science is about to invoke the dreaded Q-word (as in Quota).

Indeed, government agencies that dispense federal funds are becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of sex discrimination by universities who receive research grants.
But this doesn't mean that NASA or the National Science Foundation, for example, are about start counting scientists by sex the way that athletics departments do. Because while all education programs are governed by Title IX, only athletics programs are subject to the regulatory interpretation that measures equality by statistical proportionality (as one option among several). And this is for good reason. Only athletic departments have been granted the special dispensation to satisfy Title IX's nondiscrimination mandate by employing a "separate but equal" framework. Because athletic departments practice segregation, which history teaches is usually discriminatory, they have to compensate by proving equality in other ways, one option being statistical proportionality.

Because academic departments are not segregated, we are not likely to see anything like a "quota" forcing talented men out of science (or trapping talented women in, as Tierney seems to suggest). Rather, the application of Title IX to physics and engineering departments will more likely resemble the application of other discrimination statutes like Title VII to gender-integrated workplaces. In those applications, the focus is not on statistical parity, but on the rooting out of intentional discrimination, pretext, and "neutral" practices that have a disparate negative effect women. One has to wonder if these are practices that those who raise the red-herring of quotas secretly favor?

[h/t to BC, HW, and WM for sending along the link]

Women Graduates Expect to Earn Less than Men

A recent study by Duquesne University professor Charles Wilf shows that women who graduate from college expect to be paid less than their male counterparts. The survey, called the Collegiate Seniors' Economic Expectation Research (SEER) Survey & Index, is intended to be administered annually and tracks trends in career expectations.

Fifty-one percent of women and 35 percent of men polled expect to earn under $30,000 in their first year after college. Twelve percent of women and 24 percent of men expect to earn more than $50,000. (A 2007 report by the American Association of University Women has similar findings: women earn 80 percent of what men make one year after college; that gap widens to 69 percent after 10 years.)

This gender gap in expected earnings results, at least in part, from the choice of academic major. Women who participated in the survey tended to major in the social sciences while men tended to major in fields like computer science and engineering, which generally have higher starting salaries and greater marketability. This finding only highlights the importance of encouraging women students to feel supported and mentored when pursuing fields such as computer science and engineering, something that many colleges and universities are still struggling to achieve.

New book on women and science

Published at the end of last year, Who's Afraid of Marie Curie?: The Challenges Facing Women in Science and Technology, written by science writer Linley Erin Hall, addresses the many challenges women face in the field. Hall's book is aimed at a general audience and includes interviews with nearly 100 women who do or have worked in science, mathematics, technology, engineering, and medicine; studies about the "differences" in men's and women's abilities in the field, and, of course, the sociocultural pressures and barriers unique to women.
I haven't read the book yet myself but the review in the current edition of Bitch (the link is to the magazine's website but the review is not available there) is quite favorable--and it references Title IX, though it's not clear that the book itself invokes the statute.
Feminist Review also has a brief but positive review.

NCGWE Reports on "Title IX at 35"

The National Coalition for Girls and Women in Education has released a report on the status of gender equity in several aspects of education to which Title IX applies. The report, Title IX at 35: Beyond the Headlines, demonstrates that while progress toward gender equity has been made, many challenges still remain. Among its conclusions:

• Colleges and high schools have significantly increased the number of athletic opportunities offered to women and girls, but female athletes still receive proportionally fewer opportunities, resources, and scholarships than men. Women also are also significantly underrepresented among head coaches and athletic administrators.

• While the number of girls taking high school science and math courses has increased, women are much less likely to earn a bachelor's degree in many technical fields, including math, physics, and computer science, and engineering. The report attributes this trend to stigmas and stereotypes that female students internalize early on, as well as direct discrimination in which schools are complicit.
  

• Schools are also complicit in gender-stereotyping students in vocational programs, resulting in near absolute sex segregation in programs such as, for example, welding (95% male) and cosmetology (98% female).

• The report made several findings about employment discrimination in education, including the absence of women in positions of leadership (such as principals, only 44% female despite women making up 79% of public school teachers), a greater percentage of women holding part-time/adjunct than full time positions, and persistent wage discrimination against female teachers, instructors, and professors.
  

• Sexual harassment targets girls and boys, and is prevalent at all levels of education. 62% of female college students and 61% of male college students report having been harassed at their universities. Among K-12 students, 4 out of 5 report they had experienced some type of harassment.

• That public schools are increasingly segregating classrooms (and in some cases, entire schools) on the basis of sex, even though gender is not an accurate or consistent determinant of a student's learning style. Sex-segregation perpetuates the educational stereotypes at the root of many of the educational inequities already described, and its careless implementation could undue many of the progress that has already been made.

These are just the highlights; the full report offers much greater detail on all of these points, including citations to the research on which it bases its conclusions. For each of these areas, the report also and it includes recommendations for legislators, regulators, and educational institutions.

Girls Sweep Top Prizes at Science Competition

The New York Times reports that, for the first time, girls have swept the top prizes at the prestigious Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, a competition for high school students.

Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT, reacted positively to the news, but stated that girls winning science competitions should come as no surprise. She aptly noted, “Why do people think girls can’t do science?... Where did this crazy idea ever come from?”

Why Do Female Professors Leave the Biological Sciences?

InsideHigherEd.com recently posted an article called Why Women Leave Academic Medicine which describes the efforts of Phoebe Leboy, president-elect of the Association for Women in Science, to understand and ameliorate the lack of women in higher level academic positions -- dean, department chair, tenured professor -- in the biological sciences.

In contrast to the physical sciences, women earn half of the Ph.D.s awarded in biological sciences, so the problem is not attracting qualified women to the field, it's about keeping them there. Family-unfriendly policies and practices that disproportionately affect women are part of the problem, Leboy says. Another key seems to be research project grants, which are disproportionately awarded to male scientists.

The average male researcher, according to NIH data Leboy cited, has 1.4 basic research project grants, compared to slightly less than 1.3 for women. While men and women earn new NIH grants at roughly the same rate, women get “consistently fewer” competing renewals grants than men do. And for every dollar a male primary investigator receives, women get 80 cents.

Female researchers earn 42 percent of the NIH’s lower-level “career development” awards, which is about the rate one would expect given the rate at which they earn doctorates. But they get 25 percent of regular research grants and less than 20 percent of the bigger “center” and small business innovation research grants that the NIH is increasingly emphasizing. And only 17 percent of NIH-funded research centers at medical schools have women as their primary investigator, Leboy’s research shows.

I think these statistics raise some interesting and important questions about whether grant- awarding organizations and universities themselves can do more to ensure all professors are on equal footing when applying for grant money. As one person commented in response to this article, academic practices were created by men and "evolved to be what they are today by virtue of the extent to which they were designed, revised, and maintained to meet the needs and expectations of men." Is it possible that male scientists benefit from this pedigree when applying for grant money? Is it easier for men to rely on existing social networks for advice and support in this area? Does the application process create unnecessary barriers to entry for some women? Are there mechanisms to ensure that decisionmakers don't engage in gender stereotyping when comparing among applicants?

I hope that Leboy and others continue to shed light on the gender disparities in research grants, which seems like a predicate to dismantling the structural inequalities in the academic sciences.