On a wide variety of other blogging sites and discussion forums, people who openly declare themselves anti-feminists speak out against the feminist movement. Their arguments are nearly always bunk, and full of thinly veiled nostalgia for the time when general society took great steps to keep women barefoot and pregnant in their kitchens. However, there is one thing that they constantly discuss that I think warrants some thought on our part.
They point to the fact that many large universities have equal opportunity programs that attempt to bring the numbers of men and women enrolling in them as close together as possible. It is obvious that there is still a social stereotype that women are less skilled in math and science than men, and this discourages women from enrolling in technical schools like MIT, Cal Tech, and others. These schools often try to compensate for the fact that fewer women apply to them by lowering the standards for women to get in, in an effort to equalize the numbers.
I come from a small town where cultural and social development are much slower than in larger cities. Sexism is quite rampant here, and the barriers that women face when trying to become scientists or mathematicians is evident. The reason for there being fewer women applying to these types of institutions is obvious. It also seems clear that universities and other institutions, even in non-technical fields, giving some advantage to women is merely an attempt to counter the disadvantage society gives them to create what will amount to equal opportunity. Not all feminists even support such policies. None the less, these anti-feminists I am speaking of use this as a basis to claim that feminism is sexist against men.
Personnally, I am against such policies which give a definite, official advantage to women for several reasons, but most importantly because the use of these policies allowing women to get in to colleges more easily than men fuels a particularly detrimental idea among those less well informed about sexism. Many will look at these policies and say, "If women need extra help to get into college, they must not be as intelligent." The men, at least, will also say, "Why are women who have lower test scores than me getting in to the college I want to go to, but not me?" Social stereotypes are not always obvious, and are not the same in all settings. However, these official policies are obvious, and are fixed.
To a person who is probably not bad, but simply doesn't understand sexism, these policies look bad, and when feminism is credited with these policies, people will begin to oppose things labelled "feminist". They may even develop negative sentiment about women in general. It seems likely that the use of official policies, particularly in state schools, fuels both the idea that women need extra help because of their gender (not because of their social obstacles), and the idea that feminism is sexist against men. I also believe that it is dangerous to ever allow the state, or any state sponsored institution to make any distinction between people based on gender, lest it establish a precedent for future evils.
A social stereotype, such as "Women aren't as good at math and science as men." is not something people are born with, it is something that they are taught. I firmly believe that if a person is never exposed to sexism, they will either not be sexist at all, or invent their own unique sexist beliefs about which gender is better at what. The stereotypes that are common are common because society teaches them. As feminism makes progress, these stereotypes are believed in less and less. The whole point of feminism is to get society to the point where it no longer distinguishes between men and women; to get to the point where feminism is no longer needed. Obviously we aren't there yet, but someday we will be. At some point, the time will come when stereotypes are so rarely heard that we are better off forgetting them, and letting them die, then fighting them, and reminding people that they exist. At some point, measures like those taken by universities do far more harm than good, because the sexism that they perpetuate is worse then the sexism that they were intended to address.
I am curious about what other feminists think. To what extent should official government, or other policies try to address stereotypes on the street? If you do think that official policy should combat stereotypes, how will you know when those policies have out-lived their usefulness?
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The questions asked by men are actually very fair ones. Why should a woman get into college ahead of a man if she has lower scores?
I have many questions (for example: would society gain anything if half the nuclear scientists were women?).
Anyway. I think that the major problem with enforcing such a policy is that the policy actually reinforces the idea that women are, in fact, less able (at science or mathematics). In a meritocratic society, ability should be the number one criterion. If sex trumps ability, sex becomes the way people will be judged.
Is that really what Feminists want?
Is it in anyone's interest to lower standards, in any walk of life? Do I want all MDs to be trained to the same standard, or am I happy for women candidates to qualify with lower grades?
I play chess. I occasionally play against women (there are very few at tournaments). Over the board we are equals. I would be shocked if I was told to play with a Knight less on the grounds that only 3% of the participants were women.
The same principle should apply to science and mathematics: encourage applications, yes, set up programs to encourage women to take up those subjects. But then have everyone sit the same exams and be judged by their results.
So basically you're talking about affirmative action, the idea of making sure you have a certain number of minority students (which includes female students in a lot of fields), even if it means you have to lower the standards for them to do so.
Personally, I'm against it as a long term policy. I think it *might* have a valid place as a short term policy just to get people used to the idea of minorities in these fields, but I don't think its a good idea in the long run.
I'm a woman in the sciences, and I often have to deal with people thinking that I might not really be as smart as the other students, I might only have been accepted because they needed more women. In fact, I worry about this myself sometimes. They don't tell you when they're accepting you because you're female, and I worry a lot that I'm in over my head, and I wouldn't have been accepted if I was a man. I hate that I have to even wonder about that-- I want to know that if I was accepted to a prestigious university its because I was good enough that they wanted me.
There's also a practical issue. People in the sciences might go on to do many things, but a lot of them will end up in very critical fields, like medicine or engineering. I don't want someone to be hired as a doctor or an airplane designer unless they've shown they can do the job well, otherwise it can lead to disaster. I had a calculus teacher once who told us he would be grading harshly because if he didn't, planes might crash. A bit dramatic but he had a point.
So, I am against the idea of accepting people based on their gender or race who wouldn't otherwise qualify. However, there are some situations that are more subjective than that-- not every field has an entrance exam with clear scores. If you get to the point where its not an objective judgement which candidate is better, where they're close enough that its a subjective judgement being made by a particular person, then their sexism might be keeping women out rather than being fair. In that kind of a situation you *could* tell them they have to choose the female candidate, but I'd say thats a last resort. Better solutions are educating the people who make these choices, and coming up with systems that minimize the opportunity for sexism or racism. For example you can take all mention of gender and race off of the applications and give each person a number instead of a name and make the admissions committee decide based on that information. Then they can't be sexist, because they don't have the information about gender. This is obviously difficult to do when an interview process is involved, so different solutions might be necessary for different situations.
I think it was in Freakonomics that they described how traditionally people thought that women couldn't play some big manly instrument because they were too weak and fragile, I think maybe it was the cello? And they solved the problem by just putting up a screen in front of the person auditioning so the committee couldn't see them and had to judge on sound alone, and they ended up choosing both women and men after doing that. THAT is a fair solution where the woman knows she was chosen for her skill, and not for pity.
Pantheon - in my lived experience as somebody who got their job due to Affirmative Action (I'm an African American union carpenter), I find that Affirmative Action allows competent and overqualified women and minority males to displace underqualified and incompetent White males.
And that's a good thing!
Think about it - who would you want flying the plane you're riding aboard, the White guy who got the job because he's somebody's cousin, or the Black woman who was first in her class at flight school?
That's how it worked in construction - a lot of White men who were alcoholics and/or incompetents who were only in the field because they had a relative in the industry were displaced by hard working minorities and women.
Competent White guys who lacked connections were helped too - because now it wasn't who your father was but what you could do that was the determining factor in getting into our industry.
And the industry is better for it.
Right, but we're not talking about the black woman who was first in her class-- the idea is that she would get in anyway. We're talking about the woman who isn't horrible, but is below the level of candidates that would usually be accepted. Hopefully everyone can rise to the occasion, but it isn't really fair to reject someone who is better qualified to accept someone who really isn't.
Also, as someone else said, its really too bad that women are often discouraged from learning math. But that doesn't mean that its ok to hire someone who, for whatever reason, is bad at math, to do a job that requires math. A better solution is to have programs for children and younger students to try to make sure that everyone has a good chance at learning math; not to let people who haven't learned it do jobs where its needed.
And, of course, I'm also against hiring someone because they are someone's cousin.
I agree with Pantheon, gender-blind applications is the way to go.
I meet the male standards of my profession (USN sailor), and honestly, the mere existence of lower female standards feels like being spit on. They are the most condescending thing I can think of for someone who doesn't need them but who is allegedly weak due to membership in some random group. Because really, if someone as weak as a minimum-standards female can be an effective sailor, then they're pointlessly keeping out a lot of male sailors with unnecessarily high standards. Otherwise, someone that weak can't be an effective sailor, in which case the presence of such females is a detriment to the Navy's combat readiness. Either way, it's a jacked up policy.
I oppose sexism, and other -isms, because it distracts you from judging people based on their abilities. Thus, fighting sexism by considering anything else is utterly nonsensical to me.
Do they actually lower their standards? I'm pretty sure that the only thing affirmative action does is say that, if two people have the same scores but one is a minority, the minority gets the spot.
Also, how do we correct both past and current injustices against women and/or minorities if we keep everything status quo? If men and/or white people have had advantages in the past that has led a disproportionate number of them to attain a higher status in society, how can we raise the status of those who haven't had those advantages without tilting the scales in the other direction? I'm not trying to attack you but it does seem like you haven't considered that a major tilt in one direction can only be corrected by a major tilt in the other direction; you don't steer your car back onto the road without turning the wheel, after all.
I wonder, do women end up doing worse than the men in the universities? Do they lack behind the men in the classes? If not, this idea may not be bad for the present to compensate for the lack of encouragement women get in the sciences. I wish it werent that way though.
I go to Hobart and William Smith Colleges. It's hard to explain the system: it operates as one school except for some details such as females technically only go to William Smith and males go to Hobart. We have separate student governments but attend the same classes, same cafeteria, same dorms (mostly) etc etc. However, William Smith (the girl half) has more students and a higher GPA than Hobart, the guy school. More students nowadays are female and I think women, in general, do better at college than guys do.
The Colleges focus a lot on comparing the guys' school to the girls' school so I'm aware of all the differences - the guys' sports teams get more money from alumni because their history is longer, the girls do better grade-wise, the guys have more scholarships (though I don't know whether each one is a significant amount of money - some guys I know only get a couple hundred from a random scholarship they earned) and stuff like that. I don't know how much HWS reflects the rest of America, but there's that example.
I'm not in favor of keeping things status quo, but I am in favor of raising up females by making them actually as able as their male counterparts. Giving them the status without the ability accomplishes nothing except to unjustly advance the interests of a particular group, which is exactly the thinking that is the cause of these problems in the first place. A female who can't do math only because society discourages math proficiency among females still can't do math, and so shouldn't get to design bridges just because she can't do math while being female.
The way to do this is to treat people irrespective of gender and extol the people you influence to do the same. Only by the proliferation of such behavior will the situation be corrected, as everything we're trying to fix ultimately arises from failure to do exactly that. Even if affirmative action did accelerate the process, I would oppose it, as denying a more capable applicant in favor of a less capable one, regardless of why they have the qualifications they do, is just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So a more capable applicant is naturally white? Or did you just choose to ignore my first paragraph?
You might want to actually educate yourself on affirmative action before talking about it:
"All candidates for promotion are placed in a common pool and are subject to the same standards. Race can serve as a factor, but only when other differences are very small. As one officer put it, "Only fully qualified people are promoted, but not necessarily the best qualified. But don't forget, we are talking micro-millimeter differences in these cases." "
and
"Since 1964, admission to the University of California has been governed by a legislatively crafted "Master Plan." To be eligible for admission through the regular process, students must be in the top one-eighth of their high school graduating classes, take challenging courses, and do reasonably well on their SATs. From this pool, about half of each entering class is selected strictly on the basis of an "academic eligibility score" -- a weighted sum of grades and SATs. Roughly 45 percent are selected from the eligible pool on the basis of additional factors such as race and ethnicity. Five percent enter through a "special admit" category outside the normal eligible pool. Eighteen percent of African-American first-year students are in this last category; the other 82 percent are in one of the first two. [emphasis mine]."
wax_ghost: So a more capable applicant is naturally white?
Who mentioned whites? We're talking about females and males.
Anyway, if it is indeed true that males enjoy some advantage due to their sex, one would expect that to be true at the group level, since the privileged generally have access to better education and social encouragement to pursue valuable interests, among other things. At an individual level, of course not.
There's more to the world than academics, and there are forms of "affirmative action" besides university entrance processing. My own first comment referenced different physical fitness standards in the US Navy, which are not minor at all. If a male were only as fit as females are required to be, he would be a tremendous failure come the next Physical Fitness Assessment, which would get them kicked out of the Navy if they didn't improve on the grounds that, among other things, a sailor's strength and endurance can mean the difference between a ship sinking or not if they should ever be called upon to perform the very physically demanding job of damage control, which is everyone's job. In this case, if differing standards were disposed of, either a huge numbers of females would be disqualified from service or a huge number of males would become qualified. How is that a trivial difference?
Fine, so males are naturally more qualified than females, according to you.
Once again, you didn't actually read my post. That first quote is from the U.S. freaking military. Affirmative action does not lower standards. But you can keep trying to knock down a total lie if you want to.
It is in fact you who are deliberately misreading me. How can you get a claim of "natural" superiority from my claim that people with privilege tend to have more opportunities for advancement and improvement?
I did read your post, and the link. Again, you are apparently doing to me what you accuse me of doing to you by not reading what I'm saying: I'm talking about physical fitness standards, which are very different. The differences in deciding who to promote may be small, but if it were not for the lower physical ability standards, many women would not be up for promotion in the first place, since failing a PFA prevents you from advancing until you pass.
No, I'm just using what you have said plus actual facts. Like the fact that affirmative action does not lower standards but weights people with the same qualifications differently depending on their status as an underrepresented "minority", which, added to statements like "denying a more capable applicant in favor of a less capable one", means that you see women as inherently less capable than men (and people of color as inherently less capable than whites). Neat how that works, huh?
"the fact that affirmative action does not lower standards"
That is simply not a fact. It may be a fact in one particular type of affirmative action-- for example you could say that a particular university or corporation has a specific affirmative action policy that includes this statement. However, affirmative action is a broad term applied at many different types of institutions, and there are cases where they do lower standards (at least one specific example has already been cited in this thread).
Regarding all the talk about lowering standards, its also worth noting that a lot of times there isn't a specific cutoff line, rather the policy is just to accept the 20 top people. If 10 of the 20 top people are women, then they are accepted under that policy and it isn't affirmative action. On the other hand, if the top 20 people are men and they reject 10 of them in order to accept women who scored lower, then that is an example of affirmative action and they are lowering standards.
So in this type of situation, either there is no affirmative action at all, or they are lowering standards for affirmative action. There's no possible scenario in which they can accept 20 people, implement an affirmative action policy, and NOT lower standards.
This is a bit of a simplified situation, but the point still holds. For example, graduate program acceptances are usually done like that. They have a certain number of spots, so they can't accept everyone who meets a certain criteria (which probably includes test scores and research interests matching up with professors) ; instead they accept the top however many people. If they do anything other than accept the very top people, they are lowering standards.
Alice, you apparently believe in the "presumption of White male competence" theory.
It's a commonly used argument against Affirmative Action.
It's also a justification for White male privilege.
In the real world, there are lots of incompetent White men who have their jobs because or a mix of race privilege, gender privilege and nepotism.
Let's give an example -
At the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center of New York (a place I worked at off and on from 1994 to 1999) prior to 1995 the only way to get a steady job there as a carpenter, electrician, stagehand or teamster was to be related to a union official or to be related to or an associate of a member of the Genovese crime family.
If you weren't connected, you might get to work there sporadically - if you were, you got to work on every show they had at that venue.
The connected guys were, in the main, White male ex convicts who had little to no actual construction work experience, training or skills.
Despite their gross incompetence, many of these men made over $ 100,000 a year working at the Javits Center.
The workers who were hired by the day were, in the main, highly skilled construction workers - but despite their competence, they were given as little work as possible (basically, the skilled workers were only called in when all of the incompetent felons were working and there was still work left over to do).
The State of New York took over operation of the center in July 1995 (basically because many of the White men used their jobs there as a cover for criminal activity - in particular, theft of trade show exhibits), and fired all of the incompetent felons.
The Center opened hiring to the public, and the incompetent White men were replaced by a highly competent workforce that - not surprisingly for a convention center located in Manhattan - was heavily Black and Latino and included a large number of women.
The current racially and gender integrated workforce is far and away more competent than the White men they replaced.
The Javits actually doubled the amount of business it did - from 60 days of shows a year to over 200 - directly because they got rid of the incompetent White male workers and replaced them with competent women and minorities.
Well, yeah. That sort of thing is to be expected of unions, whose entire purpose is to favor some workers at the expense of others, often along racial lines.
As a small point of interest, aside from tech/engineering type schools AA is going the opposite direction these days for gender, as I've heard it (though I'm not sure I could site a source for that.) Men tend to get into college with lower grades (and test scores?) than women since women are doing better in high-school.
Also, as far as AA and race-- exams like the SATS ARE culturally biased towards whites both in questions and in weighting (of how much questions are worth... ie, the ones that white students answer well are weighted more heavily than the ones they tend not to answer correctly)-- So I have to agree with waxghost. No, AA isn't a permanent solution. However, the delegalization of racism (and sexism? or this hasn't happened yet, has it?) does not mean that there do not continue institutionalized racism and sexism. As Clay initially wrote (more or less)-- people forget that AA is based on the idea that people need the extra help because of social obstacles they face, NOT because being a certain gender or race (or anything) means that you are innately inferior and we want to fill quotas.
The signals that are most respected in this society are easiest to get if you are a white male because of structural racism and sexism that confronts people at every step of the way. AA is a stop-gap measure of sorts, and we need solutions that works from the root of problems (that attack causes, not effects) too, and more. But stop-gap measures are necessary in their own right.
You are correct about practices swinging in favor of male students at some schools. I will find the relevant links and post them below. 60 minutes did a piece (2003 I think) on the practice that many colleges have quietly been implementing to keep gender parity at colleges close to 50% at the expense of qualified female applicants. I believe ABC did a story on it as well...the links are bookmarked on my other computer though...
Even in some traditionally male technical fields the trend points to woman applicants soon outpacing men in terms of qualifications.
It's interesting that these practices have received very few inquiries and complaints in light of our society being increasingly anti-affirmative action.
Perhaps it's partly because few people know about these policies. Or partly because people feel that male students are now disadvantaged in our society in similar ways that women are and were.
For me though this demonstrates a few things:
1) How quickly you can socially engineer conditions where a historically privileged group now gets a helping hand versus how slow we are and were to change the social engineering that created barriers for blacks, Hispanics, women, low-income students, etc.
2) How quickly people assume that 50%-50% gender parity is the natural and thus desirable when men are the one's with declining numbers. Yet woman are still fighting for gender parity in many fields and career because of perceived inferiority.
"They point to the fact that many large universities have equal opportunity programs that attempt to bring the numbers of men and women enrolling in them as close together as possible."
Interestingly, I read in The Sexual Paradox that men are now receiving favouritism in this area. At certain ivy league universities in the states, they want the gender ratio to stay close to 50-50 even though women applying have better grades and other qualifications. Apparently men admitted have lower qualifications than women admitted on average.
"The reason for there being fewer women applying to these types of institutions is obvious."
Is it? What is the reason?
Yeah, I believe the current situation is that liberal arts colleges are getting more female applications, and majors like humanities and soft sciences are getting more women. Technical and engineering schools and hard science majors still typically have more men. And both of those groups are trying to make the gender balance equal even if it means rejecting better candidates, and I think its wrong in both cases.
It also leads to a lot of "oh, he's not really that smart, they just needed more men in psychology" and "she's not really that bright, they just really needed more women in physics." And the fact is, sometimes the people saying that are right.
At least they don't ask for photos when you apply to schools in the US. I applied to a couple places in Europe and they asked me to send a passport type photo along with my application. I have a feeling that would be illegal in the states.
As wax_ghost said, my understanding of affirmative action is that they don't actually lower their standards but that if two candidates are equally qualified the minority gets the spot. (My worry about this is what "equally qualified" means - after all, two people are never exactly equal in that kind of way. I suppose it probably works out that if there is real debate about which of them to pick and both seem like about equally good choices, the minority should be favoured.) As a result, the various horror story scenarios about incompetent women in jobs they're really not prepared for because of affirmative action really don't apply. On the other hand, I can really sympathise with what Pantheon and the others have said, though; I'm another woman in a male-dominated field and the mere thought that one day I could get a job or position which I wouldn't have got if I hadn't been a woman makes me want to scream and smash things. (Then again, there'll probably be jobs and positions which I *would* have got if I hadn't been a woman. Does that balance it out? It somehow doesn't feel like it.)
"my understanding of affirmative action is that they don't actually lower their standards but that if two candidates are equally qualified the minority gets the spot."
I think it depends on a lot of factors. When they use a quota system, they ARE usually accepting people with lower scores over people who are more qualified. Nowadays a lot places have done away with strict quotas because its illegal to decide based on race or gender, so they have to come up with other methods like asking people to write an essay about hardships they've encountered, and then accepting people with lower scores who wrote about how it was hard to be a minority or a woman.
Also, when you are accepting thousands of undergrads, its easier to say well, we have various quotas, and you have to get the right number of different groups even if it means accepting some people with a lower score and rejecting other people with a higher score.
For grad programs, they tend to be a lot smaller (sometimes less than 20 people). In general there are still fewer women in grad school for math and science, and in some fields its a BIG discrepancy. They also don't usually accept people strictly on their scores; you have to write an essay, your research interests might have to match up with a professor there, etc etc. So they can't really have a strict policy of choosing a woman when scores are the same, but they CAN have a policy of making sure to choose a certain amount of women, even if the men are really better candidates.
I don't want to be too specific because I'd like to remain anonymous, but right now I'm at a prestigious math/science grad program at a well known university. Its got a pretty large number of students for a grad program, so percentages aren't completely meaningless and random. I counted, and its about 15% women. Now, they haven't announced any policies about that that I'm aware of, but most schools these days are making an effort to accept more women in math and science. Its pretty obvious that not that many qualified women applied to this program, and I worry that they might have lowered the standards to let me in just because they need more women. This is a serious program, so I know they wouldn't have accepted me if I was completely hopeless, but I do wonder if I was just a little below the cut off and they accepted me instead of some guy because they were grasping to even get the 15% women that they have. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't. But just the fact that these practices are widespread, even if they aren't being used in my particular case, means that I will always wonder about that, and people who hear that I was accepted to this program will always wonder about that. I've heard guys make comments when a woman gets a scholarship or something, "oh, well, clearly they were favoring women and minorities for that one, so I didn't have a chance." These policies have the effect of casting a doubt over the ability of women who have made it to grad school in math and science.
Another thing is these "hardship essays." A lot of places have outlawed things like quotas and overt affirmative action for women and minorities, but the schools still want to look good by accepting a certain number of minority students. The information about your ethnicity is now supposedly taken off the application before it goes to the admissions committee (at least at some schools) but they still want a way to figure it out. So they have an essay question that asks you to write about hardships you've endured, and its usually code for writing about how it was hard growing up black, or it was hard being a woman in math, or whatever. Again I don't know the intricate details of how they choose people, but the result is that our perception of the process is that they'd rather choose someone who got a 600 on their GREs and wrote about how they had challenges growing up because they were black, than accept someone who got a 750 and wrote about how they are inspired to do important research in their field.
When I was doing my applications, there were a lot of questions like that. I had to think about whether I should try to write about how it was difficult to be a woman in math/science. But the fact is, it hasn't been difficult for me. There's a higher percentage of guys in my classes, sure, but it hasn't bothered me or affected me at all. The professors have always been fair, and the departments tend to bend over backwards to welcome the women that decide to do a major like that. If the male students or professors have a problem with it they certainly don't let on about it. And up until now my classes were always easy, so I didn't have this feeling that I might have been accepted past my competency just because of my gender. This year, my new program is much more difficult and so now I'm suddenly wondering about that a lot. Am I in over my head this year because they needed more women? I hope not, but I'll always wonder about that, because I feel like for the first time I'm having a much harder time than the guys in my classes.
I also had a tough call on the ethnicity questions, because I'm part white and part a minority group (again don't want to be too specific). I look white, but I'm still in touch with the "ethnic" side of the family, have lived in that country, speak the language, etc. If I applied to math/science as a woman AND a minority I'd be virtually guaranteed a good spot and a scholarship. I don't think that's fair and I don't want to end up somewhere where I'm not good enough and I'm always struggling, just because they needed to look "diverse". So in the end, I "declined to state" my ethnicity at all. Too bad I couldn't decline to state my gender.
That's an interesting thought. Why can we refuse to give our race but not our sex/gender?
(To be clear, you can't always refuse to give your race, and some forms have much better lists of options than others. But in many cases you can refuse to state, or choose "other." I don't remember noticing any other or decline to state options under gender, ever.)
I do really sympathise with this. I'm, as said, also in a male-dominated field (maths - which seems to be the best of the hard sciences as far as gender representation goes, but that isn't saying much). In the courses I've taken so far, it didn't seem so bad - in my undergraduate, I actually counted and found out we were one-third women, and in the graduate course I'm doing right now I think we're around there again (it's huge - two hundred something people - so I'm not sure). The number drops off dramatically once you reach faculty, though; I've only been taught by two women in all five years of my studies.
I don't know whether there's any AA going on, but I remember being quite surprised that there didn't seem to be a great drop in the percentage of women going from my undergraduate to my graduate course. Someone told me that this is because the professors try to get half women and half men when accepting their outside applicants, and my first reaction was complete *fury* because I knew there had to be much fewer women than men applying. I got absurdly high enough scores in my undergrad that I'm pretty sure they didn't lower their standards for me (my scores being *way* above what was demanded), but the mere insinuation that they might have, that there might be male professors or coursemates looking at me and thinking I didn't get in on my own merit, that they might be *right* - and knowing I'll have to deal with these doubts throughout my whole career- ZAILYN SMASH.
At the same time, I really don't know whether there *was* actually any affirmative action going on and how much of what I know about affirmative action is accurate and how much a caricature constructed by MRA types. And something has to be done about the dismal gender balance in these subjects for certain.
Before I'm off to get those links about quotas benefiting male students I wanted to write some thoughts on AA.
I was in college in the late 80's and early 90's arguably the height of affirmative action program in California schools. Now what's interesting is that my family has a history with the university of california system so I like to compare and contrast my situation with my father.
What burns me up is that people today feel like AA contributes to the notion POC are under-qualified. Yet this prejudiced notion long pre-dates AA. For example my father (we're black) completed his Master's in Math and Chemistry in the California university system back in the 60's; yet he was still systematically discriminated against for jobs (and for loans when it came time to purchase a house by the way--the house which would determine which school I could attend and therefore 18 years later which college I would be eligible for).
Forward to the 90's and I remember my friends proudly gloating about how their cousin was a legacy admit to the this or that school. Or even last year how so and so made a phone call to their friend on the admission board to put in a good word. It's funny that these folks don't seem to have any problem or conflict about using every resource available to them to move ahead in the game, yet poor black folk and women need to be constantly looking over our shoulder because people think we don't belong? Fuck them! It's their problem, not mine.
One of the most undemocratic features of a society is where you have whole communities monopolizing resources in a society, while other groups are shut out. This is actually a global phenomena with no easy solution: Italy, Brazil, India, South Africa, France, just off the top of my head are countries that are considering or have already implemented similar programs to what we've done in the US. Why? Because it works. Is it perfect? No. But nobody has found out any other way to achieve what can be achieved with affirmative action style programs. And of course AA shouldn't be implemented forever. The goal is getting to a place where we are well integrated socially and gender wise.
And as far as under-qualified people getting through the system? Well, I've had the pleasure of working with woefully under-qualified white males who weren't pulling their weight on the job. And? So?
If I were then to concluded that all white men are under-qualified and simply got to where they are because of historical privilege and boys networks I would be racist now wouldn't I? So why entertain people who feel this way about women and POC?
Ok I just posted 4 linked references related to gender preferences benefitting male college students in the USA, and the comment is in queue for moderation??? I've been having trouble posting links on the community side as of late.
Anyway, if the post doesn't show up here later I will try to repost the links again.
Everything was searched via google. The articles were from USA today, CBS news, CS Monitor and the 60 minutes piece that aired in 2002.
I think the site didn't like the fact that I put in 4 links in one comment so I'll try the links separately. Male gender quotas for college enrollment:
CS Monitor
Inside the ivied halls of higher education, a quiet courtship is taking place. The suitors are admissions directors who seek out qualified males. With women outnumbering men on many campuses, schools use gender bias to adjust a gender imbalance.
Some institutions entice men by adding engineering programs or football teams. Others seek out high school boys who take early college-entrance exams. Many make sure that admissions staff include men.
When researchers at US News & World Report magazine analyzed data from more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities, they found that in the past decade, many schools had maintained gender balance by admitting many more men than women, even when the women candidates were more qualified.
Success! Except the whole quote didn't get italicized above. Ooops. Next reference on college enrollment bias favoring males:
60 minutes, originally aired 2002.
Let's see if I can sneak in 2 links in one comment here:
USA today
CBS News.
While I certainly agree that gender parity in higher ed is a reasonable goal, if you poke around on the likes of Glenn Sacks, etc, you'll see that many people of course blame feminism and a "feminized" learning environment on the current need for the pro-male gender bias in enrollment.
And I posted these links not because I disagree with the policies, but because people when arguing about quotas and affirmative action seem to be a bit fuzzy on the facts of who actually benefits and how broad these programs reach.
Good point. I'm just as against it either way :-)
There is a very simple way to combat underrepresentation of women in math and science programs.
It's called Affirmative Action with quotas
Now I know there's been 40 years of propaganda against Affirmative Action (mainly initiated by overprivileged White men who wanted to defend their privileges) but it works, and it's the best way to get equality.
Also, it displaces lots of underqualified and incompetent White males and replaces them with competent - and in many cases overqualified - women and minorities.
You're making the assumption that the cause of underrepresentation of women and minorities (well, some minorities) in math and science programs has to do mostly with acceptance bias on the part of program administrators.
I'm sure that there's some of that, yes, but you're completely ignoring a large part of the cause which is what our culture tells women and minorities that they are and aren't "good at." I've seen plenty of smart, talented women who could easily excel at hard sciences (or anything else) go into humanities or soft sciences because that's what our culture says they're supposed to do.
Some particularly strong evidence is the huge, huge differences in the gender breakdown after controlling for race. I teach engineering/math courses at a major Canadian university, and in my classes, there are very few white women and even fewer who are exceptional students, compared to plenty of white men. On the other hand, the number of Chinese women vs. Chinese men is a lot closer (I use Chinese students as an example because they're the largest minority in the program).
Applying quotas at college admissions or graduate school, or even later, is always going to fall short. There are fewer women in hard sciences because fewer women want to study and work in hard sciences, and the reasons for that start in elementary schools and homes. Programs that encourage girls to get involved in math/science classes and extracurriculars are the type of action that will actually make a lasting difference.
Question: if Female and Gender Studies had a majority of female applicants (and I guess they must), would you call for action to redress the balance?
If not, why not?