The Battle Over Creationism in Texas

I missed this story in the New York Times yesterday, but the battle over creationism in Texas is heating up again. Clearly, the implications for this debate are big, since Texas is the largest producer of school textbooks in the country.

A while back, Texas adopted some weird language that directed teachers to explore the "strengths and weaknesses" of a scientific theory (read: Darwin's theory of evolution). The problem is that this language has nothing to do with science and ignores the fact that scientific theory is very strong and has lots of evidence. Basically, it is the creationists way of attempting to undermine facts. It's true that most teachers ignore the "strengths and weaknesses" doctrine when teaching science, but it seems weird that we would teach something that is unscientific rather than teaching evidence and the scientific method. No wonder we're lagging in science and math when we're struggling just to allow science to be taken seriously by schoolchildren and teachers.

Wanted: Geekettes

There’s an interesting piece in The New York Times today about the lack of women in computer science. While women are actually starting to approach parity in other hard science fields like math, and engineering, there are fewer women in computer engineering classes at places like MIT than there were 25 years ago. In other words, the number of women in the field is actually dropping. The article concludes that the reasons are varied and rather intangible, but one contributing factor could be stereotypes about men and women set at an early age:

Justine Cassell, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Technology & Social Behavior, has written about the efforts in the 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately, increase the representation of women in computer science. In commenting as a co-contributor in a new book, “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming,” Ms. Cassell writes of the failure of these efforts, “The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were ‘boys’ toys’ and that true girls didn’t play with computers.”

She said last week that some people in the field still believed that the answer to reversing declining enrollment was building the right game. Another school of thought is what she calls the “we won” claim because women have entered computer-related fields like Web site design that are not traditional computer science. Ms. Cassell points out that it’s not much of a victory, however. The pay is considerably less than in software engineering and the work has less influence on how computers are used, and whether this actually accounts for the diminishing numbers of female computer science majors remains unproved.

Ms. Cassell identifies another explanation for the drop in interest, which is linked to the pejorative figure of the “nerd” or “geek.” She said that this school of thought was: “Girls and young women don’t want to be that person.”

Cassell believes it has a lot to do with stereotypes. I definitely think that’s part of it. Interest in these fields develops at a young age, and if young girls are taught that computers are for boys, then they probably won’t engage with them. But there’s more to it than just stereotypes.

As I wrote in one of my three articles on women in academia last spring for Campus Progress, part of the problem with getting women to go into science, especially academic science, has a lot to do with mentorship. There’s a lot of reason to believe that women simply don’t get the support that’s needed to be competitive in academic sciences. There are few women to serve as role models and mentors. One way that a group of women in academic sciences approached this was to be peer mentors to one another, gathering every other week to talk about academic and career goals. This kind of mentorship becomes especially important in fields that are so heavily dominated by men.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Athena in Science

Sylvia Ann Hewlett had a piece in the Financial Times this weekend highlighting a study she co-authored (called "The Athena Factor" published in the Harvard Business Review) about how women tend to drop out of the science industry, especially in a corporate setting. Many cite factors such as isolation, like being the only woman on a project, and what Hewlett calls "male behaviour" since "63 per cent of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment." The fact that women aren't as prevalent in science as they could be isn't a new idea. I reported a story about female academics in hard sciences last year for Campus Progress.

One of the greatest factors really can be a lack of mentorship. When a woman feels isolated by being the only woman on the team, and there aren't any strong mentors in the company that they can turn to because other women have "dropped out" the job itself becomes very demoralizing, even if it's in a field that these women have chosen to dedicate their lives to. One thing I discovered while reporting the story was a book written by Ellen Daniell called Every Other Thursday, in which women in the hard sciences found each other and formed a group to help each other stay focused, vent about sexist shit that happened in their department, or just encourage each other in their personal lives. The women in the book really found their own kind of mentorship that they just weren't getting from other people in their departments. Those kind of relationships shouldn't be taken for granted.