See also: The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls

Many readers will remember Prof. Judith S. Kleinfeld from an article in our April 2000 issue, where she said that an MIT study which confessed to discrimination against women faculty was a "political tract." 

She had also reported back in 1998 about the Massachusetts myth that schools were shortchanging girls.

We print two articles here. The first is about the MIT study and the second is about the myth that schools shortchange girls.

MIT Study Was a 'Political Tract'
In our April issue, we reprinted an article by Prof. Judith S. Kleinfeld who challenged the MIT study which had confessed to institutional discrimination against females on the faculty. 

She called the study a "political tract" and said it "falls below basic standards for scientific evidence in the social sciences." She revealed that MIT refused to release any data from the study and a source close to the committee says they found no gender discrimination at all. (Search words for MassNews archives: "junk science.")

Kleinfeld reported that the teacher who originally complained to MIT was inexplicably made the Chair of the investigating committee. As a result she got a pay raise of 20 percent, an endowed chair, triple the laboratory space, research funds and numerous other benefits.

After Kleinfeld received an award for her article from the Women's Freedom Network at the National Press Club in Washington earlier this year, she told Massachusetts News, "I wanted to get back to first principles - why this issue is important beyond a fight over feminism. We are dealing with the corruption of science, certainly Massachusetts' premier industry."

This is a portion of what she said when she received the award in Washington: 

"I would like to ask in a serious way: Why does it matter? Why does it matter that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published a study claiming gender discrimination against senior female faculty without evidence?

"It is indeed the case that women are under-represented in the top ranks of scientists. It is indeed the case that fewer females than males enter such fields as physics, mathematics, and engineering. Why should I or anyone else criticize a report that calls attention to these facts, that gives women like Nancy Hopkins, the chair of the first MIT investigatory committee on the status of women, more laboratory space, higher pay, more research funds, and greater honors? What exactly is at stake here?

"This is a question I have asked myself during the six months I spent preparing my critique of the MIT Study on the Status of Women. I did it as a public service. What then is the public good that is to be served?

"Let me put a human face on this question. Let me talk, with her permission, about my sister-in-law Ruth Smilg who was diagnosed a few weeks ago with breast cancer. She is a young woman with a husband and two children. Her own mother died from breast cancer. She needs the best medical care. She needs to take advantage of all the knowledge science can bring to bear in fighting this terrible disease. And she needs help fast.

"One of the great glories of scientific research in America is that it has created an open culture. The most promising scientific ideas, in the judgment of the scientific community, receive the greatest resources: laboratory space, graduate students, years of funding. The process is not perfect. No process is. But this ideal - support of science based on the criterion of the merit of the research, not the criterion of the sex of the researcher - is our best hope that people like my sister-in-law will have the best chance they can.

"Such "research" as the MIT Study on the Status of Women undermines this scientific ideal. Laboratory space is not allocated on the basis of creative ideas but on the basis of sex. Certainly, Nancy Hopkins' laboratory at MIT was overcrowded. No one would deny it. But that is not the issue. The laboratories of other promising scientists at MIT, both male and female, were very likely overcrowded. When MIT's Dean of the School of Science, Robert J. Birgeneau, decided to allocate laboratory space and internal MIT funds in the millions of dollars to Nancy Hopkins, he was preventing the ideas of other scientists from flowering in the sun. 

"The pursuit of sex equity in the sciences has turned into an evangelical mission that threatens to undermine science itself. In their zeal to equalize the numbers of men and women in every scientific field, gender equity advocates are throwing out the rules of scientific research. In the MIT Study on the Status of Women, for example, Nancy Hopkins and her colleagues failed to publish the data on which their claims were based; thus other scientists could not evaluate the grounds for their conclusions. The MIT study substituted feelings for facts and didn't even code these feelings according to the established rules for analyzing qualitative data. Gender equity advocates are creating a culture of intimidation in the scientific world, which prevents robust and fruitful discussion of the most significant issues of the day.

"The social sciences have already fallen victim to a professional culture in which an ever expanding number of issues cannot be discussed or researched in an open, curious, and honest way. Other scientific fields may follow."
 

The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls:
Social Science in the Service of Deception

This is a portion of what Judith Kleinfeld wrote in 1998 in response to the American Association of University Women.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) put itself on the political map through its highly publicized 1992 report: How Schools Shortchange Girls. The media trumpeted the message around the world: In the schools, as in so many other areas of life, females are victims. Girls are silenced in the classroom, suffer a decline in self-esteem at adolescence, and fall far behind boys in such crucial subjects as science and mathematics. As the AAUW Executive Summary declares:

"The educational system is not meeting girls' needs. Girls and boys enter school roughly equal in measured ability. Twelve years later, girls have fallen behind their male classmates in key areas such as higher-level mathematics and measures of self-esteem. Yet gender equity is still not a part of the national debate on educational reform."

The AAUW provides a glossy order form for this report. The form features a photograph of a classroom peopled with attractive girls and boys from many groups, an African-American girl, an African-American boy, an Asian girl, a Caucasian boy. The irony is that there is one child in this photograph whom the schools are shortchanging, but this child is not a girl. This child is the African-American boy. This is the group in need of creative policy initiatives. 

What is worth remembering is that boys used to be the group considered shortchanged by the schools. The idea that the schools shortchanged boys was part of the common wisdom through the 1970s. As Brophy (1985) reminds us: 

"Claims that one sex or the other is not being taught effectively in our schools have been frequent and often impassioned. From early in the century (Ayres, 1909) through about 1970 (Sexton, 1969; Austin, Clark, & Fitchett, 1971), criticism was usually focused on the treatment of boys, especially at the elementary level. Critics noted that boys received lower grades in all subjects and lower achievement test scores in reading and language arts. They insisted that these sex differences occurred because the schools were 'too feminine' or the 'overwhelmingly female' teachers were unable to meet boys' learning needs effectively." 

As this paper documents, girls surpass boys in some academic areas and boys surpass girls in other areas. Indeed, a far stronger case could be made for the view that "the schools shortchange boys" than the other way around. After all, it is boys who get consistently lower grades in school even though they score just as high or higher than girls on many standardized tests of achievement. This is strong evidence of bias against boys. It is boys who end up far more often than girls in special education classes for students with serious learning problems. It is males who are falling behind in college attendance. As recent survey research shows, it is boys, especially minority boys, who believe that teachers are not as apt to encourage them to achieve their goals or do their best (Harris, 1997).

The AAUW has done women and the nation a service in drawing attention to the gender gap in science and mathematics and in encouraging an array of policies and programs designed to boost female performance in these fields. But the schools need to be equally concerned about the problems of boys. Boys mature more slowly than girls, for example, in areas like verbal skills. Late-maturing boys can be stigmatized as poor learners and assigned to "low-ability groups in the primary grades, especially in reading" (Halpern, 1997). Boys are also more active than girls and more difficult for teachers to handle. "Bright, bored, and rambunctious boys" have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and placed on drugs like Ritalin (Zachary, 1997). 

Neither girls nor boys nor the nation itself are served by politicized research and "noble lies." Major assertions in the AAUW report are based on research by David and Myra Sadker that has mysteriously disappeared. Evidence which contradicts their thesis that the schools shortchange girls is buried in supplemental tables obtainable only at great difficulty and expense. Such shady practices undermine public confidence in social science research. This damage done by the AAUW report will have repercussions that last far beyond the immediate issue of whether either girls or boys are shortchanged in the schools.