Celeste Baine's Blog

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I read an article today about federal agencies setting up programs to look for sexual discrimination at Universities receiving federal grants. Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies are targeting science. In short, if your university is receiving grant money, the government can step in to insist that you have a certain number of women professors/researchers in the ranks.

According to the New York Times article, A New Frontier for Title IX: Science, “The reviews so far haven’t led to any requirements for gender balance in science departments. But Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about gender wars in academia, predicts that lawyers will work gradually, as they did in sports, to require numerical parity.

‘Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,’ Dr. Sommers said. ‘In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women’s level of interest.’”

The enforcement seems great when you think about an “old-school” type of situation where highly qualified and deserving women haven’t been welcomed by the gate-keepers. A workplace full of bias and very low hanging glass ceilings.

However, the enforcement doesn’t seem so good when you think about this in terms of a successful young researcher, losing his position because the university had to hire a woman. The enforcement also doesn’t consider that the women hired may not be wanted which creates an environment where no one, males or females, are productive. Nevermind the fact that it marginalizes women by implying that they can’t compete and need a helping hand.

In engineering school you learn to solve problems first by analyzing it to determine the root of the problem. Is government regulation the solution to this problem? The first step should be to determine if women really want equal parity in engineering departments and how was this determined? If they indeed want it and are qualified, are they able to get it? Is there data to support the findings? If women make up 20 percent of the engineering workforce, should they be granted 50 percent of the jobs? It’s my assessment that the government may be trying to force a solution to the wrong problem. Asking if women want equal parity in an engineering department may seem like a no-brainer but if the department has no role models and is a lonely, limiting, and uncomfortable place to work, why would any woman aspire to be included? Especially when we know that intelligent, resourceful women have the world in the palm of their hand and therefore, also have many choices. I personally know of many women that left engineering school because of poor advisers, a lack of women friendly programs and a lack of mentors. Let’s start with the environment to make it more equitable and desirable and then we can consider Title IX.

To read the article, go to: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/john_tierney/index.html