So it’s not just our puny brains and highly emotional dispositions that are holding us back.
Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported today.
This should have been a fairly obvious conclusion. After all, girls perform on par with boys in the math and sciences. Women studying math and the sciences are graduating from college at higher rates than ever before. There isn’t a shortage of potential female academics.
For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minorities are “virtually absent,” it adds.
The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes, and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”
That last point is an important one. In the “traditional family,” the wife essentially serves the rolls of childcare-giver, housekeeper, personal assistant, and therapist. She enables her husband to dediate his entire life to his career, and allows him the privilege of not worrying about anything else.
Wives don’t usually have that privilege. And that matters.
Hopefully this report will actually spur some change.
You know, just now, outside my office, an associate whose wife just had a baby and a partner who has three young children were talking about diaper changes. The partner’s changed only three or four diapers in his life. Three kids, three or four diapers. Guess how he’s managed that? Yep, his wife stays home.
And this is a guy a year younger than I am.
Speaking of female academics, I know you’ve been blogging off and on about feminism in the middle east, and this just reminded me you might be interested in this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5359672.stm
Yeah, this guy where I used to work said once that his wife “helped out” with the newborn by breastfeeding. WTF? That’s “helping”? I think it’s called “taking sole responsibility for feeding the infant, allowing your lazy ass to sleep through the night”. I don’t think she was a stay-at-home for long, but I do know that when she went out of town, the grandparents came over to help. When he went out of town, she handled it on her own.