I am a female scientist-in-training. I plan to have a career in science and education, even knowing that if I do go the academic research route I'm not making the most sound economic or career decision possible.
I really don't care. I love science. I love finding out about the properties that make this world work on a fundamental level. I'm fascinated by the fact that light is made up of electric and magnetic waves traveling perpendicular to each other. That we can use isotopes of hydrogen to probe the importance of atomic vibrations in friction. How the lack of certain peaks in NMR spectra are just as important as the peaks that are there.
I don't know where my love of science comes from, but it's there. And with it comes the desire to help other people see the beauty in the world through science. This is why I plan to teach high school science, at least for a little while. It's why I want to see a revolution in how we approach science and math education on all levels.
Too often we force the minutia of science of math and science on our students. Don't get me wrong, the minutia does play an important role in teaching our students. But it's not the only tool we have in our arsenal. Science is exciting, beautiful, scary, and always changing. Why do we not show our students this more often? Too often we get stuck in rigid thought patterns. We are constantly failing our students when we fail to acknowledge, or sometimes are completely unaware of, the fact that when we introduce new concepts, like the conservation of mass or multiplication, that they're not getting the whole story. That if they continue to study chemistry, they can come back to me some day and tell me I got it wrong.
I think a lot of the problem here stems from how we view science and math as a culture. It's hard, it's for the nerds. Why would I need to know calculus? Well, besides giving you another way to look at how the world works? Look at the technology that surrounds us. Just being able to read this post is the culmination of biology, chemistry, math, and physics. Yet how many people can even explain how a battery works from a very basic chemical or physical standpoint? I mean this is a device that has a profound impact on our lives. But there's a cultural of intellectual apathy when it comes to almost any subject, but especially math and science.
So when I encountered the article How Our Culture Keeps Children Out of Science by Peter Woods in the Chronicle of Higher Education I thought that I'd be reading a piece that points out the problems we face with things like ID, how kids are constantly bombarded with the message that science is for losers, that teaching for test scores is a waste of energy. What I got instead was an initially coherent piece that turned to garbage.
About 2/3 of the way through we get this oh so lovely quote:
The science "problems" we now ask students to think about aren't really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences.
And let's not forget poor Larry Summers:
President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for speculating (in league with a great deal of neurological evidence) that innate difference might have something to do with the disparity in numbers of men and women at the highest levels of those field.
Translation: It's all the fault of those damn bitches and uppity minorities that American science education is so poor, and that a great man like Larry Summers was fired for just telling it as it is.
When I decided to look into this guy, I went to the National Association of Scholars on found this.
We uphold the principle of individual merit and oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences.
Translation: Only us white males are good enough for the rigor and intellectual integrity necessary to make it in the world of academia.
This type of bullshit is part of the entire cultural problem surrounding math and science education, and society in general. This type of thinking is predicated on the belief that women and minorities aren't important. That it's alright to ignore the needs and potential of large portions of the population. Because when we do acknowledge them, we're forcing many of the people who hold these beliefs to confront the fact that their position is based on hundreds of years of white, male privilege.
Science education can be vastly improved when we reach out to all our students, and especially the students that are not being . We can motivate so many people to want to pursue an education or career in science and technology by giving our students a wide variety of mentors and role models. And the infusion of ideas and culture of learning that can come when you bring together people with different backgrounds and experiences is simply amazing.
And the only reason to be "concerned" with such attempts is quite simply a belief that "everyone else" isn't good enough.
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I read the same article, but didn't have that reaction at all; in fact, I tended to agree with it. I am a psychologist, specializing in evolutionary psychology, doing research in cognitive ethology. I have never been impeded or discouraged in pursuing this path by any male. I have had a few women disparage my interest, including university instructors of the type with "*A" degrees in frivolous subjects. I never paid attention to them.
My heroes have been such women as Carolyn Ristau, Marian Stamp Dawkins, Daisie Radner, Dorothy Cheney, Irene Pepperberg, Alison Jolly and Sonja Yoerg.
If you want to do it--whatever it is--if you are smart enough, determined enough and hard-working enough, you will succeed.
For some reason the link I put in isn't working, so here I go again.
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=03hp5gr19z5sb0cdvhtsk5qgp3yhdttf
Lilith- I would say about half to 2/3 of what Wood wrote was a decent description of some of the problems science education faces.
However, he starts the first part of his article basically saying we need to increase the participation of American students in the science, only to end with a pissy rant on how efforts to reach minorities and women have screwed everything up.
With lines like
A society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn't a society that takes science education seriously
you start to see that he isn't at all concerned with all of our American students, just select populations.
The message that Wood and his ilk spread is so dangerous, because they do have some good points. But hidden in the middle of the good stuff is misogynistic and racist crap.
I am a scientist on a different career track, and although I am not as interested in pursuing a career in education, I feel that I can comment about the situation of women in science a little bit.
While I agree with Lilith that if you are smart and determined you can succeed, I think it's naive to think that any woman in a traditionally male-dominated career has not been impeded at all by sexism. I know that, as I have climbed higher into academia, I have encountered more and more discrimination. Most of the time it's not so obvious, but it's there, especially coming from the older generation of scientists. Consider also that I am a molecular biologist, and the students in my graduate class are more than 50% female. Other scientific fields have less female representation.
After looking at that article, I am inclined to agree with the poster. There are some good points made, but anybody that excuses comments like those from Larry Summers is deliberately ignoring the very reason why women and minorities are less inclined to enter scientific fields. The only explanation for that is that you don't care if women and minorities enter scientific fields.
A more useful article on this subject is "A New Frontier for Title IX: Science" in the July 15 edition of The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15tier.html
An excerpt from the article:
"The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.
So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.
The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.
In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.
Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10 percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the possibility of bias.
But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics...."
Any time someone questions a need for more diversity, they automatically fail the conversation. Diversity isn't just about needing scientists who are women, it's about examining why we don't have more scientists who are women. Women can bring a different perspective to science, but the important thing isn't that, it's that women aren't in science because science is doing something wrong. Part of it is the way that the problem is presented. It shouldn't be that we need to bring more women in, but we need to remove the reasons they're forced out.
Also, anyone who honestly considers that there are less female scientists because of biology or anything inherent to women is a moron. The studies that "show" that fail to take into account deeply ingrained social standards, ones that tend to apply to nearly every culture. The recent study showing women's rising math scores demonstrates this: as we remove the societal barriers women preform to their true, genetic, biological, whatever potential.
I wish you sincere luck in teaching. I had some wonderful science teachers in my high school career and their enthusiasm for the field gave me a lot of respect for scientists. It's not my thing, personally, but if it was they would have been the ones who enabled me to pursue it.