The authors of a new study suggest that science and technology professors should “equalize average grades across classes” in order to draw more women into those fields of study...
Notably, the authors determined that women in the sample data, though possessing higher grades overall than the men, were underrepresented in STEM classes. Their contention? That “harsher grading policies in STEM courses disproportionately affect women,” according to the study itself.
Friday, December 20, 2019
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
The Camile Paglia feminist in me asks, Isn’t this just an admission that women can’t cut it in STEM fields? Isn’t this the most anti-feminist suggestion there is?
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If you're an astronaut putting your life on the line based on scientific and mathematical work determining situations like trajectory, do you really want someone who comes from a program where scores are averaged in order to make lower performing students feel better deciding your fate? This is something good students, and especially GT students, have had to deal with for years. The push for collaboration over achievement has created the situation where the good students do most of the work because they care about their grades and they care about learning. The low performing students just ride their coattails, leaving the bulk of research and presentation to the kids who care. This is just more of the same blather designed to make the demographics acceptable to sociologists without any sort of considerating for academic merit and quality.
Interesting. My anecdotal evidence is for 7 semesters teaching 300-level Probability & Statistics at UMBC. On average, my class is ~25% female (20 of 80) students. Those 25% are normally in the top 10% for grades. They are more likely to comment in class and more likely to ask for office hour help when they don't understand something.
So is the issue not that we don't have exceptional young women entering the field but not enough mediocre ones? Could that be the author's issue?
I find a pretty even mix between boys and girls in the top grades of the courses I teach.
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