this was written by a schoolmate of mine, Leah Jerdon (
http://www.myspace.com/leahkitty)
NOTE: myspace screwed up the grammar/punctuation...
No You Cant: Addressing Womens Mass Exodus From Science
Growing up in modern America, we're all familiar with the phrase, "You can be anything you want to be." What I always really wanted to be was a scientist. As a woman, I was inclined to believe this was true as I received plenty of encouragement to go to college to pursue that goal. When I actually attempted to navigate through the intricacies of the system called SME (science/math/engineering) education did I realize that it was going to be much harder for me to achieve my goal of becoming a scientist than it would for other students, namely the male ones. Many discussions between the ladies in my department have centered on this very issue. What was causing us to feel this way? Surely we were not the only ones with this problem, but the faculty and other male students would have had us believe otherwise, calling our discussions whining sessions. We werent working hard enough, it wasnt a priority, or we just werent mentally cut out for it and the gender issue was a mere excuse. We discovered we all were having trouble; having felt discouraged and devalued by other made it even more difficult to remember our passion, determination, and desire to be a part of making scientific discoveries.
I found out that it wasnt just our department either. The departments of astronomy, physics, math, chemistry, engineering, and even biology with the highest undergraduate female enrollment in the sciences, all showed a disturbing trend. Not as many women are graduating with degrees are as enrolling in the programs. They all drop out at far higher rates than men and it gets worse as the degree level gets higher. For example, in astronomy, the ratio of women to men at each academic level declines; the undergraduate population is one female for every two males, graduates are two to five, and there are no female faculty members at all. Physics is even worse with one woman for every five male undergraduates, one to ten with graduates, and one to twelve in the faculty.
The scientific community still has a lack of equal female representation despite years of attempted integration. Although entry enrollment at the undergrad level seems to be equalizing between the sexes, the numbers of women to actually complete those programs is much lower. Science education is literally pushing women out of the community. Scientists and educators have closely observed this trend for years in many different university settings.
Noted science educator Elaine Seymour has done a great deal of work trying to understand what is at the root of these high attrition rates. A study she discussed in a 1992 paper observed that those women who did drop out of science/math/engineering were equal in ability, commitment, and even mean GPA scores as those who did not drop out. Many reported that they felt learning was difficult due to a lack of close contact with faculty and that they were discouraged by the tendency of first year courses to weed out some students, creating an unhealthy atmosphere of competition. It is reminiscent of a natural selection based not upon who is smartest but who can learn quickly, independently, and without the teachers guidance. This style persists despite evidence that collaborative learning is more effective at turning out greater numbers of passing grades. The research discovered that seventy to eighty percent of female students dropping out of undergraduate science did so because the competition fatigued their morale.
Another scholar, Roberta Hall, has noticed real physical differences in the way men and women communicate, which then negatively affects their ability to compete enormously. Her studies in the early 1980s found that men tend to be more aggressive and fast in their responses to instructors and tasks. In a competitive environment, womens abilities are severely marginalized because of the tendency to think longer while formulating responses, more carefully and reflectively as opposed to reflexively, before offering them up to the class. Simply due to this time gap, women never get the chance to express their views and subsequently feel as though their opinions are not important. It is clear how these innate differences seen by Hall contribute to the feelings of students like those observed by Seymour. The educational environment in SME is responsible for the high attrition rates among women in higher education programs. There is no difference in raw cognitive ability between the sexes, but the system is privileging the communication and learning styles of males. Men naturally do better in this system while women find it hard to flourish when their abilities and talents are marginalized.
This ideology is not conducive to the American way of life. It undermines our ideals as a country based upon equality and opportunity for all citizens. If our determination of a students qualification to become a scientist doesnt depend on ability, work ethic, or potential contribution, but rather the ability to compete and conform to a biased standard, then we are not really a nation that upholds its commitment to equity and freedom. How can we tell our children they can be anything they want in a system that obviously denies them the opportunity? Can we truly call ourselves committed to equality when we encourage women to pursue science and then refuse them the tools and environment to succeed?
For thousands of years, science and math have been off limits to women. In all that time, half of the total possible energy available to advance collective knowledge has been stifled. Given the total brain power generated by human beings of both sexes, societies have sold themselves short and only utilized about fifty percent of it. To further prohibit women from these fields means that any progress they could make will never be added to our combined human knowledge.
What can we do to successfully create a learning environment that benefits both male and female students? It is important to address all aspects of the classroom culture that are unsatisfactory in order to devise several steps in a larger plan. This involves not only the classroom gender dynamics, but the climate as well. Teachers can start by making sure they encourage equal participation from sexes in classroom discussions. If women need more time to reflect upon a question before answering, teachers should wait a few moments before selecting someone to answer, or even encourage small groups to talk about it amongst themselves before they all share their thoughts. Encourage them to ask questions whenever they feel the need. Slowing the lecture may be necessary to avoid anyone being left behind. What if there is too much material to be covered to accept unlimited interruptions? Then the ability of students to graduate in SME programs in four years must be reexamined. It is clear that this is not enough time, given the amount of information, to allow for the cohesion of so many concepts into most students brains.
Group work has the even more powerful property of also helping to eliminate competition between students. When students work in groups, a personal connection to the material is fostered as well as the feeling that individual opinions count toward the goal of the whole class arriving at consensus about the concepts at hand. The teacher can ask questions that guide the groups through the correct thought processes to understand the material. Also, while grading scales can be lowered to reflect the difficulty of that material, they should not be curved. Setting the scale to the highest students scores only serves to pit them against each other in an achievement war. Stating that all students are expected to perform well and will earn a grade truly proportional to their effort lets them know they are in equal territory. Disparaging morale is lessened if students feel the instructor truly wants them all to succeed.
The old, rigid structure of SME education must be changed so that all interested students, male and female, regardless of communication style or learning pace, have an equal opportunity to pursue higher degrees in those fields. We will be a step closer to living in a society that values the potential in of all members of its society, thereby championing those values through our actions and not just in our theories. The rate of advancement in scientific understanding would increase if more individuals capable of varied thinking styles were contributing. Important discoveries and innovations could be made much sooner than we think. Changing the science classroom culture and teaching styles are crucial to preserving our principles and our commitment to fully understanding the physical world.
MY COMMENT
very well thought out. you should talk with erin (formerly depietro, now dokter)... she's heavily into science education and learning techniques. and she's a woman, so there ya go.
that's so great. i wish i could be around more (wait just one more week ^_^) to be around to just sit and discuss this kinda stuff with you.
It really brings me back. It makes me want to keep going, but I feel like at this point I would have so much ground to cover to get to the level that I need to be at that it's just almost impossible right now. Which sucks, because your statement "What I always really wanted to be was a scientist." rings so true with me. But the struggle here has just taken so much energy out of me that I feel I can't go on with it at least to any end that might be considered successful.
But at the same time that statement still manages to make me proud. Even if I don't *use* my degree, and even if I fall into another statistic of someone who got a degree and never used it, I'm still very proud of what it is. I didn't pay for a psychology degree so I could party through school and still get a "degree" to take out into the world. No, I'm actually proud of spending these 5 years of my life doing what I've been doing, and I have no regrets about it.
I would have regrets if I *hadn't* have gone this route. Because I know that, now, there would be no way I would start up something like that at this point in my life. I've almost got it. And that makes me proud, if only to myself.
But anyway, again, well said, and hopefully you can shake things up at least a little bit in the sciences at our school.