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Re: Where Have All the Boys Gone?



This week's Irascible Professor commentary looks at the growing
imbalance between male and female students in U.S. higher education.
The number of women students in U.S. colleges and universities is now
approaching 60% of the total enrollment. This trend has significant
implications for the future of the scientific workforce.

Somehow I'm having a hard time seeing this as a big problem,
interesting yes, but not the end of Physics as we know it. I related
some of this, particularly the bit about boys being made to feel
dumb, to one of my more militant female colleagues this morning at
coffee and her reaction was to smile and say, "what goes around comes
around", or words to that effect.
Most schools have made a concerted effort to draw women into
science and mathematics. It should not surpise, or alarm us if this
effort is beginning to bear fruit. What seems to surprise everyone is
the unintended consequence that the boys feel unwanted or estranged.
Of course, we don't really know why boys feel this way, there may be
lots of other reasons, unrelated to the increase in female interest.

I can think of a couple factors that may contribute to the
gender shifts, neither of which is probably controlling. One would be
the relative safety of the research lab as a place where a bright and
ambitious young woman might cast her eye for lifetime employment.
Universities and Colleges are among the most equitable places to work
that I know of, although, admittedly, I don't have broad experience
across the work-a-day world. Most schools have put a lot of policies
and procedures in place to foster gender equity. Another reason
might be that equally bright and ambitious young men see the world of
technology and e-business as a quicker way to fame and wealth. Mr.
Gates is famous for not having finished college, and the news media
are full of stories about young people making it big starting up a
dot.com of some sort, or working for one. This is not to say that
young men don't want a safe work place or that young women are immune
to the lure of fame and wealth.

On a more fundamental level, I think one of the serious trends
affecting the future of physics is the increasing lack of experience
that all our young people of both genders have with the physical
world. As the level of technological sophistication of the every-day
world increases, it's not just the humanities types that are
alienated from the physical world, everybody is. As more of the
everyday devices become electronically controlled with computer
interfaces, fewer and fewer of us have any sense that we know how
things really work. Just talk to your average auto mechanic or
appliance repairman.
I used to say that my best students came off the farm. Farm kids
seemed to have a sense, because it's always necessary to get the
grain cut and the cows fed, of forcing their environment (equipment)
to do what needs to be done. That is, it was not strange to them to
work with apparatus until it would do what they wanted it to do. Farm
kids also grow up pretty close to nature, using lots of tools. This
is not to say that I didn't have lots of very able non-farm students,
but I always felt they were relatively disadvantaged.
On the other hand one could also observe that physics itself
has become less mechanical and more relient on electronics and
computation. This could (speculation here) be one reason why women
feel less intimidated by physics research or find it more welcoming.
If that is the case, then the gender shifts that we are seeing are
just a natural consequence these changes, and should not be viewed
with alarm or pointed to with pride. Enough!
--
--Jim Pengra, Walla Walla, Washington 99362 mailto:pengra@whitman.edu