To this article by Stuart Taylor, I have little to add (National Journal, 10/24/09).  It seems that the campaign by feminists against men in academia continues.  Needless to say, it is a campaign based on sex; many men, after all, agree with and promote feminist values and support feminist positions on many issues.  They should be aware that when it comes to holding an academic job, they are every bit as much in the feminist crosshairs as anyone else with a... well, you know.

Not content with women being 58% of undergraduate enrollees or earning the same number of post-graduate degrees or making up the vast majority of faculty members in Education and the humanities, feminists are now declaring that S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) faculty positions must also be distributed equally between men and women.  They make no mention of achievement or ability, only sex.

As Taylor makes clear, this is a "disparity equals sexism" argument.  Feminists, and apparently the Obama Administration, hold as a self-evident truth that men and women have equal aptitudes required to excel in the S.T.E.M. fields.  That that is contradicted by a good deal of neuroscience troubles them not at all.  Neither do studies that show that, while men are disproportionately represented at the extremes of high and low functioning in, for example mathematical aptitude, women tend to group in the middle.  Because academic positions in math tend to demand only the highest-level functioning, it's reasonable for those jobs to be held predominantly by men.

But acknowledging what's reasonable is not exactly the goal of the feminists who are now demanding strictly equal outcomes in S.T.E.M. academic hiring.  I say 'now' because, if other academic disciplines are any indication, female majorities in any of those fields will immediately result in feminists reversing course and ignoring gender inequalities in hiring.

And that brings me to my first quibble with Taylor.  He rightly points out the fact that feminists pretend that disparity in outcome can only result from anti-female sexism.  But he neglects to add that once women become the majority in a particular field, their complaints vanish.  Their hypocrisy should escape no one.  If, as they claim, disparity is necessarily the product of sexism, then male minorities in the humanities must necessarily indicate anti-male bias.  But feminists neglect to mention that.

More important than feminist hypocrisy, which is as familiar and unwanted as your crazy aunt in the attic, is the simple fact that, if there's sexism in S.T.E.M. areas of academia, someone ought to be able to prove it.  Taylor omits this point.

Where is the evidence that any academic department anywhere has refused to hire or promote a woman because of her sex?  Is there a single example?  Is there a single memo circulated among the members of a hiring committee discouraging the employment of women?  And what's the explanation for the fact that so many colleges and universities have male-dominated S.T.E.M. departments?  Is it a conspiracy?  Where's the evidence of that?

As I never tire of pointing out, employment discrimination on the basis of sex is against the law.  Where's the proof that colleges and universities across the country are violating state and federal statutes forbidding discrimination based on sex?  And where is the evidence that this pervasive discrimination occurs in S.T.E.M. departments but somehow in no others?  Someone show me a single shred.

Of course there's not one.  And that's not just my opinion, it's the clear finding of not one but two separate studies that have come out within the last six months, both of which I've blogged about here and here.

The first was a study by a group of researchers at Cornell led by Dr. Stephen Ceci; the second was done for a congressional committee.  Both were studies into hiring and promotion in S.T.E.M. academic employment.  Both found an entire lack of discrimination against women.  Both found that men and women were hired equally, paid equally and promoted equally.  Both found that the only difference between the sexes came when women dropped out to attend to the requirements of childcare while men stayed on the job.  That resulted in greater advancement, hirer earnings and greater seniority in the long run for men.

The only way that anyone would hang her hat on disparity in result to "prove" discrimination is if there was no other evidence.  And that, of course, is the case here.

With those two minor quibbles, kudos to Stuart Taylor.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Feminism/NOW, Men, Women and Work. You can trackback from your own site.