Men once greatly outnumbered women in collegiate athletics—Title IX brought equality. Men currently outnumber women in science—could Title IX have the same effect? Associated primarily with sports since its inception 26 years ago, Title IX actually applies to sexual discrimination throughout education. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the National Science Foundation and NASA, at the behest of Congress, are quietly investigating whether the science departments of universities might be in violation of Title IX.
Yes, gender discrimination is a problem in science, when one is addressing the lack of equal participation and representation. Of this I have no doubt. The question is whether it is the only problem, or just one of many. (It is ironic that many of the discussions about this topic are so unscientific, because they assume that other factors play no role without having adequately established this) The issue here, though, is whether the comparison to sports is an appropriate one to make. It’s not.
Men and women don’t compete with and against each other in these sporting events. Title IX has been very successful at expanding womens’ participation in sports, because it focused on equality of opportunity and did not assume equality of ability — women are not fighting for a roster spot on a single football, soccer or baseball team, etc. Title IX did not require adopting direct competition between the sexes; there are obvious physiological differences that make this impractical. Certainly there are situations where the women would do better (the uneven parallel bars in gymnastics springs painfully to mind), but would have anywhere close to a 50-50 mix in most sports, if we had mixed-gender teams and ability were the only metric? The lack of opportunity for women that prompted Title IX was the lack of teams on which they could compete, and one could (and did) create and fund these teams. The situation in science is very much different in the difficulties that exist and the solutions that can be proffered.
I agree with you here in that I think Title IX was developed, as you say, with a different goal in mind (that being equal opportunity for competition). From my perspective as someone who teaches undergrads, it seems like the problem is attracting women – and other minorities – to science. I spent three years teaching Simmons College, one of the last women’s colleges in the country. The chair of my department at the time, who was a woman, really felt strongly that more, at this point, needed to be done to reach out to underrepresented males, e.g. Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans, and those from economically challenged backgrounds. That is not to say more couldn’t be done to improve the representation of women in the sciences, just that there were other groups with even less representation.
At the risk of getting flamed or worse, I venture a theory on the present demography of engineering, physics, mathematics, and computer science. To be clear, I do wish it were much more diverse. Nonetheless, at least in these disciplines, I have noticed an inordinate proportion of “geeks” (myself included) and “gearheads” (myself also included). Geekiness is certainly not an exclusively male thing, but there is anecdotal evidence to support the fact that a majority of geeks are male. Gearheads (who mostly end up as engineers, in my experience) seem to be somewhat less male-dominated than they used to be (e.g. there are presently three women actively racing in the Indy Racing League), but it remains far from a 50-50 balance.
Now, as someone who has a family full of people with autism spectrum disorders, somewhere in the stack of literature I have read on the subject indicates that people with autism spectrum disorders are more likely to be male for whatever reason. In addition, people with such disorders have apparently (again, according to the stack of literature I have read) shown a tendency to be “geeks” and enter fields such as physics, math, and CS. This might contribute, at least ever-so-slightly, to the gender imbalance. It does not, of course, explain the low numbers of other minorities. There, I think, is where outreach can really make a difference, showing people that these fields might be possible career options that they might not have thought about before.