More Than Sports: Title IX, Women and Science

Ladies, start your engines, and your calculators, your computers, your autoclaves and your oscilloscopes. There's work to do. When Linda wrote about what it meant to her to watch Title IX change the field for women's sports and wondered why we couldn't do the same for science, I was reminded of someone else who wondered that:

"Title IX, though, does not even mention sports. It applies to all educational programs that receive federal funding. If pursued with the necessary attention and enforcement, Title IX has the potential to make similar, striking advances in the opportunities that girls have in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines."

President Obama wrote that to the Association for Women in Science last year. Of course those are not the only thoughts on women's ability to do math and science from the new administration. It's hard to have this discussion without at least referencing National Economic Council Director Larry Summers infamous comments while President of Harvard that women were innately less capable in math and science.

I particularly recall Summers talking about giving his daughter a toy truck, which she promptly began treating like a baby doll. What lesson to take from a toddler who anthropomorphizes her toy trucks? Well for me, it was that you can't fight kids' love for the Transformers. For Summers, though, it was that you can't fight nature. In other words, you can lead a girl to math, but you can't make her think.

Pop child psychology aside (as a child, I buried my lone Barbie in the sand pit, never to be seen or heard from again until she emerged during a particularly hard rainstorm the next summer, a sadder, wiser, more weather-beaten woman -- still waiting on Larry Summers to weigh in on what that one means), it bears noting that the latest large study showed no real difference between the math scores of boys and girls through high school.

So if the scores are trending together, this story from Summers shouldn't be much more than a footnote to history (much like how meetings with credit card executives make him feel awfully blinky), except that it illustrates one of the basic troubles: Gender differences in math and science are considered such a truism that even how a kid plays with a truck can be taken as confirmation -- and not only does that steer women away from the STEM disciplines as a matter of career choice, studies show that repetition of these ideas can actually cause test scores to worsen.

Gender differences in math and science may be myths, but they're myths that have sprung out into the real world fully formed and are now tromping through our streets, setting fires, overturning cars and vandalizing park benches as they go.

Title IX in science and math is not going to look exactly Title IX in sports. I'd be especially reluctant to see it, for instance, be a part of the determination for which research projects do or don't get funded. But there's not only a space but a need for it, in terms of things like setting up mentorship programs in disciplines where the test scores may be equal but the representation is not.