[game_edu] Interesting Article on Diversity & Science: Want more women to study science? Hire more female professors.

[S. Gold]

This is an interesting article I found in Slate Magazine
(http://www.slate.com/id/2219701/pagenum/2).

A Formula for Success: Want more women to study science? Hire more female
professors.
By Ray Fisman Posted Friday, June 5, 2009, at 7:19 AM ET

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox Corporation. Ursula Burns will become CEO of
Xerox in July The soon-to-be-completed leadership succession at Xerox from
Ann Mulcahy‹a woman‹to Ursula Burns‹also a woman‹is one for the record
books. It will be the first woman-to-woman transition at a Fortune 500
company, and Burns is the first African-American woman to take the helm of
any such corporation.

Mulcahy has balked at the notion that the über-competent Burns needed her
help‹or anyone else's‹in making her way through the ranks. Nonetheless, the
paucity of women in senior positions who might in turn mentor young women on
their way up the ladder is one of the primary reasons put forth to explain
the continued existence of the glass ceiling in corporate America. In
science and technology, the situation is even bleaker‹women are
under-represented at every level, from advanced college classes to the
executive suite, making Burns' rise from math major to CEO of tech giant
Xerox all the more remarkable.

Of course, female mentorship is only one strand of a complex web of
explanations‹from aptitude to temperament to societal discrimination‹for the
gender gap in science and elsewhere. A recent National Bureau of Economic
Research Working Paper on gender and academic achievement at the U.S. Air
Force Academy, however, finds that the importance of female mentors may be
even more powerful than previously thought. The study, by University of
California-Davis economists Scott Carrell and Marianne Page and their
colleague James West at the Air Force Academy, finds that replacing a male
instructor with a female one has such a strong effect on female achievement
as to erase the gender gap entirely.

The trio of economists examined the undergraduate careers of 9,481 cadets
taught by nearly 250 different science and math instructors at the USAFA
during the years 2000-08. Untangling the impact of an instructor's gender
from the many other factors that influence student performance has hamstrung
most research on the topic: If women taught by women perform better (or
worse) is it because the instructors attract better (or worse) female
students rather than teach them better? Or is it because women "dumb down"
their syllabi or exams to make it easier for lower-performing women to do
well? Or is it something else entirely?

For the students at the Air Force Academy, the researchers are blessed with
the rigid curriculum and protocol of a military college, ruling out most
complications. Cadets face a heavy slate of compulsory first-year courses,
including a battery of science, technology, engineering, and math
requirements, and within each science-related course, students are randomly
assigned to one of several teaching faculty members. So whether a
student‹male or female‹was taught by a woman was a matter of luck rather
than any active choice by student or professor. Each class used an identical
syllabus and all students took the same exam, which prevented the various
instructors from adjusting their courses to cater to better or worse
students. Further, since the researchers also had access to students' math
SAT scores, they could take account of any differences in quantitative
abilities among the students.

The authors found that women on average obtain scores that are 0.15 grade
points lower (half the difference between an A and an A-) than their male
classmates, even after accounting for students' SAT scores. The gap in
performance was widest for women taught by men. When a female instructor was
put at the front of the classroom, nearly two-thirds of the grade point
gender gap evaporated. (It was also the case that men performed better when
taught by other men, but the difference was far less substantial.) The
authors persuasively demonstrate that the overall male-female performance
difference is due in large part to the fact that men dominate the Air Force
Academy science faculty (as is the case in most schools), with only 23
percent of courses taught by women.

The researchers also found that the influence of professor gender was even
starker for the set of students who were math whizzes when they entered the
Academy (those with math SAT scores above 700). For these students, a female
instructor eliminated the gender GPA gap entirely‹and solely because
high-performing women did well in their classes rather than because
high-ability men underperformed.

What's more, having a male instructor didn't just affect female cadets'
performance in their first-year classes‹ramifications could be seen
throughout their undergraduate careers. Not surprisingly, students who did
well in their introductory science classes were more likely to go on to
obtain science degrees (and presumably go on to science-related
professions). Among high-math-SAT students‹those most likely to be the ones
to go on to obtain science degrees‹the authors calculate that having a
women-only roster of faculty would create gender parity among science
majors.

What is it about a woman instructor that is so important for female pupils?
It's unlikely to be simply the sense of empowerment of seeing that women can
in fact make it in science. If that were the case, then having all female
professors should help their female students catch up to the men and having
all male professors should cause the male-female performance gap to widen.
Yet the authors found that, while female students perform better on average
in classes taught by female professors, there are some male professors under
whom there's no achievement gap between male and female students (and also
some female professors for whom the gender gap is as big as that of some of
their male colleagues). So some men are very good at mentoring women, just
not nearly enough of them.

What kind of man makes a good mentor? Is it because, as is sometimes
suggested, men with daughters make good mentors, having developed greater
empathy for the challenges faced by their female students? Or differences in
teaching style? The authors unfortunately don't know much about the
Academy's teaching staff, so for now the enormous impact of professor gender
remains a bit of a black box.

Regardless of the underlying mechanism at work, the study has wide-ranging
implications for what might be done to keep talented women on science career
tracks. Most obviously, the findings provide further justification for
affirmative action programs to promote women in the sciences, to break the
cycle of talented women opting out of science because there are no women in
science. At the same time, we might unravel the mystery of what makes
people‹men or women‹better at mentoring their female protégés.

I posed the question of how to create gender equity in science to Stephanie
Pfirman, a Barnard College environmental scientist and a member of a
Columbia University initiative on women in the sciences. She pointed out
that recruiting female mentors and making men into more women-friendly
bosses and teachers are both efforts aimed at changing the environment faced
by young women. While these are worthy objectives, she suggested developing
coping mechanisms to deal with circumstances as they are‹for example,
realizing that getting an A- or even a B+ in an introductory course doesn't
spell the end of your career as a scientist, as many high-achieving young
women believe. Yet the results of this study suggest that just by helping
more women to overcome the adversities they face in becoming scientists
today, we will make science less of a man's world for the female scientists
of tomorrow.

-- 
Susan Gold
Skype: tahoegold

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
Oscar Wilde

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