AASWOMEN for June 20, 2008

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of June 20, 2008

eds. Joan Schmelz, Hannah Jang-Condell & Caroline Simpson

This week's issues:

1. Culture, Gender and Math

2. Gender Issues in Math/Science Education

3. How to Submit, Subscribe, or Unsubscribe to AASWOMEN

4. Access to Past Issues of AASWOMEN

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1. Culture, Gender and Math

From: John Parejko [parejkoj_at_drexel.edu]

This article on the math and reading scores of girls in different

countries might be of interest to the list.  Short summary: 15 year

old girls do better compared to boys, in both math and reading (as

measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment), in

countries that are more gender equal (as measured by the UN and World

Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index).  In the countries with the highest

levels of gender equality, the "math gender gap" essentially

disappears.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;320/5880/1164

Another take away point is that, apparently, girls are better than

boys, in both math and reading, in Iceland...

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2. Gender Issues in Math/Science Education

From: WIPHYS of June 17, 2008

WIPHYS [and AASWOMEN] subscribers might be interested in "Gender

Issues in Science/Math Education (GISME)" [Hake & Mallow (2008)].

This 11.8 MB compilation of over 700 annotated references and 1000 

hot-linked URL's provides a window into the vast literature on Gender 

Issues in Science/Math Education. The present listing is an update, 

expansion, and generalization of the earlier 0.23 MB "Gender Issues 

in Physics/Science Education (GIPSE)" by Mallow & Hake (2002).

Of course, Jeffry Mallow and I would be very interested in any 

comments any of you might care to make on GISME.

To access GISME, please click on 

< http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake >, scroll to item 55, and then 

click on [GISME-5k-Part1.pdf] for Part 1 and [GISME-5k-Part2.pdf] for 

Part 2. 

The earlier "Gender Issues in Physics/Science Education (GIPSE)" 

[Mallow & Hake (2002)] can be found on the APS website 

http://www.aps.org/programs/women/resources/gender.cfm

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3. How to Submit, Subscribe, or Unsubscribe to AASWOMEN

[Please remember to replace "_at_" in the below e-mail addresses.]

To submit to AASWOMEN:

 send email to aaswomen_at_aas.org

All material sent to that address will be posted unless you tell us

 otherwise (including your email address). 

To subscribe or unsubscribe to AASWOMEN

 go to http://lists.aas.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aaswlist

and fill out the form.

If you experience any problems, please email itdept_at_aas.org

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4. Access to Past Issues of AASWOMEN

Past issues of AASWOMEN are available at

http://www.aas.org/cswa/AASWOMEN.html

Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.

Having children in grad school

A friend of mine sent me this article about women who decided to have children during graduate school. It being the Boston Globe, they naturally stuck to Boston area schools.

Having gone to a Boston area school for grad school and having had both my kids during my years there, naturally this article resonated with me. For me, having my kids during grad school made a lot of sense. As the article says:

Some women say having a child during graduate school is appealing because their schedules offer flexibility. They figure potential employers won't be concerned with how long it took them to get their dissertation done. And they know once they get hired as postdoctorates, they'll be too busy trying to get articles published in high-quality journals to have a child.

However, that isn't to say that it was easy. Heck, having kids is never easy, period.

"They want to know how this can work," Jaschik said. "They're trying to figure out: 'If I have a kid, am I never going to finish my dissertation? Will I never have a job?' "

...

"I want to have a career. I want to finish this," Mazmanian said. "At the same time, I love being a mom."

These are concerns that will never go away. Here I am, in my second postdoc, still wondering if I'll land another job. I am constantly torn by wanting to be both a good researcher and a good mother. And really, it doesn't matter when you have kids -- you will inevitably feel this sense of divided loyalties.

On a side note, I have to wonder why men never seem to have to face these issues. Sure, they don't have to deal with pregnancy and post-partum recovery, but surely they worry about childcare issues, too. Surely they love their children just as much as women do. Is it because they aren't allowed to admit how much they care? Is it because they delegate all that responsibility to the mothers? Is it because a mother who delegates that responsibility to the father is by definition a bad mother? Anyway, back to the main story...

There's a ray of hope:

[A student committee at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences] recommended that the school adopt a policy that would provide child-care assistance. It also recommended that Harvard let students take up to a one-year leave to care for a baby by enabling them to stop the clock on their dissertations, keep their health insurance, receive stipends, and, upon their return to school, provide them flexibility in course work and teaching positions.

That's awesome. I'm glad to see a prestigious school like Harvard setting an example by making it easier for grad students to have children.

However, I argue that this isn't enough. Most of my peers in graduate school weren't even married. Not that that necessarily precludes having children, but being in a stable, long-term relationship helps immensely. Not to mention that having children on solely a grad student stipend is financially infeasible. In fact, in astronomy at least, the prime child-bearing years seem to coincide precisely with the post-doc years.

What sort of policies does Harvard have in place for allowing their postdocs to take time off to have children? Does it make childcare arrangements accessible to postdocs? What provisions do the Hubble/Chandra/Spitzer Fellowships allow for maternity/paternity leave? How do hiring committees view publication gaps: is it better or worse to mention children?

The US already lags far behind most industrialized nations in terms of laws protecting maternity/paternity leave. The academic community could do a lot to make things better.

From the NY Times May 20, 2008

---

May 20, 2008

Girls’ Gains Have Not Cost Boys, Report Says

By TAMAR LEWIN

The American Association of University Women, whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity, has turned its attention to debunking the idea of a “boys’ crisis.”

“Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense,” says a new report by the group, to be released on Tuesday in Washington.

Echoing research released two years ago by the American Council on Education and other groups, the report says that while girls have for years graduated from high school and college at a higher rate than boys, the largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels.

In examining a range of standardized test scores, the report finds some intriguing nuggets about the interplay of family income, race, ethnicity and academic performance. For example, it finds that while boys generally outperform girls on both the math and verbal parts of the SAT, the male advantage on the verbal test is consistent only among low-income students, and that among black students, there was no consistent advantage by sex from 1994 to 2004.

And while boys of all races and ethnicities generally outscored girls of the same group on the math section, the gap by sex for black students was only about half as large as other groups.

The report points out that a greater proportion of men and women than ever before are graduating from high school and earning college degrees. But, it says, “perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.”

Linda Hallman, who became executive director of the university women’s group in January, when the work was well under way, said the report was an effort to refocus attention on what she said were the real problems of education for poor and minority children, and away from a distracting debate about a so-called boys’ crisis. Ms. Hallman said the group’s members were concerned about arguments by conservative commentators that boys had become disadvantaged and were being discriminated against in schools intended to favor girls.

“Many people remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their male peers,” the report says , citing Christina Hoff Sommers’s 2000 book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.”

Ms. Hallman said, “To have this distracter out there, about the boys’ crisis, took away from our mission, from pushing forward for what we were trying to achieve, which is to be a leader in dealing with the education crisis that affects girls and boys without many resources.”

The report may provide new fodder in the battle over whether boys and girls need different methods of teaching.

“There’s still a lot of debate about whether there’s something we should be doing differently in teaching boys and girls,” said Sara Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, who has written on gender equity. “The people on the feminist-leaning side of the debate see the conversation about a boys’ crisis as a strategy to advance the single-sex education agenda. I’m not sure that’s correct. I don’t think the kind of data we have about boys’ and girls’ achievement tells us anything useful about single-sex education.”

The report finds that, generally, boys and girls of similar backgrounds have similar academic success. And the five states in which boys score highest on the tests known as the nation’s report card are also the highest-scoring states for girls, it says.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Working Twice As Hard for Half the Credit

Here's an interesting article: A Case Study of Gender Bias at the Postdoctoral Level in Physics, and its Resulting Impact on the Academic Career Advancement of Females, by S. Towers. From the abstract:

The study finds that the female researchers were on average significantly more productive compared to their male peers, yet were allocated only 1/3 the amount of conference presentations based on their productivity. The study also finds that the dramatic gender bias in allocation of conference presentations appeared to have significant negative impact on the academic career advancement of the females.
The author has a PhD in particle physics and worked for 6 years as a postdoctoral research scientist. She is currently completing a graduate degree in statistics.

It's interesting that the author included that last statement about her qualifications. It's as if she knows that some gender-bias-denialist might question her statistical methods and what not.

Not only does this study demonstrably show gender bias, but it supports the view I've long suspected, that if you want to land a plum job, you gotta get your name out there, and the way to get your name out there is by giving talks at conferences.

Guess I ought to get moving on submitting those conference abstracts...

[hat tip: Thus Spake Zuska. cross posted at Twinke Twinkle YSO]