Monday, February 23, 2009

Changing science to suit the feminists

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt warned about this years ago in their book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, which I reviewed at the time for the Lexington Herald-Leader--that, not only the humanities and the social sciences, but the hard sciences too were becoming the targets of the politically correct ideologues. Now there's more proof for their thesis.

One of the victims of the "more women in the sciences" movement, it appears, is the sciences themselves. Here's Jay Shalin of the fabulous Pope Center, with a report from the field:
One of the “more-women-in-science” movement’s leading lights, Susan Rosser, the dean of Georgia Tech’s college of arts and sciences, spoke on the topic at UNC-Chapel Hill recently. According to Rosser and other feminist proponents of the movement, the “real” explanations why men dominate the world of scientific inquiry are cultural traditions, overt sexual discrimination, and unwitting bias—not biology.

Rosser identified a number of factors that, she said, contribute to the disparities in science: women’s tendency to dislike competition, their need to feel some sort of connection with the subject they are studying, their tendency to not isolate problems without context, their desire for social relevance, and the insecurities they tend to feel in such a male-dominated world.

It almost seems as if she was saying that women are too emotional for the world of science the way it is presently constituted.
But don't tell the feminists they are overly emotional. They get very upset when you say that.

One wonders how, in the name of equality, someone would demand that the standards of inclusion be lowered for them, but there you have it. And one way to lower the bar for a group is to stamp out competition:
Rosser wants competition de-emphasized, to make the classroom more comfortable to females. She would also like to see less classroom focus on concepts like “right and wrong” and “black and white,” a bizarre notion to promote in a world where synapses fire neurotransmitters or they don’t, the molecules combine or they don’t, and the software compiles or it doesn’t.
Yes, truth can be so politically troublesome, can't it?

Maybe when the Darwinists catch a breath between rants about creationists plotting to destroy science they can devote a little time to the real threat to science in their own backyard.




1 comment:

Terri said...

Please read this all the way through when thinking about women in the sciences. It will require you to put your privilege away for a few minutes and actually consider the ways in which we teach our sons and daughters. Some often speak of the 'soft bigotry of low expectations,' with little regard for how telling girls they aren't as smart might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't believe it's some nefarious scheme - it doesn't have to be. Give her toys to play with that tell her all she's ever meant to be is a mother or housekeeper and, well...