The incredible shrinking man
A new piece by me describes how men are disappearing from science and academia in a host of ways, even as the public perception is the opposite.
Today a new piece by me appeared in Quillette entitled Academia’s Missing Men. It is available without a pay wall for the rest of this week. Here are some excerpts from it.
The voyage of discovery that science offers can take us furthest when it is open to the best and brightest, regardless of who they are and where they come from. Great scientific minds often emerge from unexpected backgrounds. Many scientific disciplines remained effectively closed to ethnic minorities and to women for far too long. But over the past 50 years at least, science has opened up and a host of affirmative action programs have been created to encourage women and minorities to consider careers in the field.
For some activists, however, these efforts have not gone far enough. In response, universities, industries, and research institutions have instituted a vast bureaucracy designed to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: a behemoth that is growing at a rate far exceeding that of investment in new faculty and facilities.
This has resulted in some disturbing new trends in academia and scientific institutions more broadly. In a desire to include women and minorities, white males are often excluded, and too often women and members of minority groups are tokenized by being promoted primarily for their gender or skin color.
I proceed to demonstrate how tokenism is now the norm in publicizing science, using examples of science promotion from Science Magazine to the American Physical society. Here are a few of the images displayed in the article.
From Science Magazine:
From the American Physical Society advertisement of their Annual March Meeting, hosting over 10,000 physicists from all over the world.
The next part of article outlines data on hiring, starting at the top.
Let’s start at the top. Six of the eight Ivy League universities—Harvard, Brown, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Columbia—now have female presidents, as do UC Berkeley and MIT.
MIT is a particularly striking case. Despite comprising many traditionally male-dominated STEM disciplines, its upper management team is largely female. The head of the MIT Corporation, the President, the Director of Research, the Provost, the Chancellor, and the Dean of Science are all women. The Institute’s core discipline, the School of Engineering, consists of eight departments, five of which are led by women. This is clearly not a coincidence, nor is it likely, given the demographics of the place, that this is simply the result of choosing the best people for those jobs. Were the situation reversed—if most of the faculty were female, but the leading administrators were all male—there would be an outcry.
Then I discuss general hiring.
It is difficult to obtain national statistics on this, but in 2015, before DEI initiatives reached current heights, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed a two to one preference for female candidates for tenure track positions in STEM.
New faculty announcements suggest a similar bias. For example, in 2021, UCLA announced the following new appointments in the physical sciences: Abigail Doyle (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Alvine Kamaha (Physics and Astronomy), Courtney Shelly (Statistics/Mathematics), Qianhui Shi (Physics and Astronomy), and Hong Wang (Mathematics). It did not appoint any new male faculty. Similar examples abound.
Next, I discuss the more general context of academic hiring and gender, and present some data.
In US academia in general, women now receive more doctoral degrees than men.
Women also occupy most faculty positions in post-secondary institutions.
Next, I discuss the case of enrollment in college, and graduation from high school.
…Nationwide, around 60 percent of students are female. And the gender gap is growing. Recent data show a significant downward trend in male college enrollments, which has coincided with the increasing prevalence of DEI programs.
In fact, women now graduate at higher rates than men at all educational levels.
I then presented some figures about programs for talented middle school and high school students, which appear similarly skewed.
I finally conclude:
We may be moving towards a future in which women will be significantly better educated than men and will occupy far more of the jobs that require professional qualifications and skills. The societal impacts of this are unknown.
We must continue to ensure that higher education and scientific training remain open to people from all demographics. But we should not encourage diversity at the cost of driving away talented people…After more than 40 years of intense affirmative action efforts, it may be time to take our thumbs off the scale and let a natural balance emerge. Young males—and white males in particular—should not be discouraged from pursuing higher education in science, or from engaging in any other field of intellectual activity.
let's say you admit 600 students, 60% female so that's 360 women and 240 men. Over the next four years you kick out 25% of the men, so now it's 360, 180. 1/3 of the women transition to male or nonbinary, with equal probability, now it's 240 women 240 men and 60 nb at graduation. Finally men and women are earning equal numbers of degrees, but the high rate of female attrition will call for more feminism.