Re: MentorNet (one woman's response)

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

This thread has so far not focused on what can be done to improve women's
performance in physics classes.  The evidence for this problem  goes way
back and there are many articles in Jour. of Res. in Sci. Teaching (JRST)
which investigate this problem.  It starts in grade school and continues all
the way through graduate school.  At each stage women have difficulty and
drop out.  Science, and especially physics seems to be a filter which
removes women.

The first piece of evidence comes from examining the behavior of boys and
girls in classes.  Boys tend to shout out answers, but girls do not.
Essentially male aggressiveness tends to shut out the females.  When they
are separated in single sex schools there is evidence for equal performance.
This simple evidence gives clues to what can be done.  Just controlling the
class, discouraging shouting out, and picking equally between boys and girls
should help.  Using an anonymous voting system such as PRS
http://www.educue.com/ is useful.  If such a system is used as part of a
fully interactive lecture it actually will improve learning for both sexes.
Some schools have experimented with segregated classes.  Group work should
be controlled with boys and girls in segregated groups.  In either case a
mixed group should have a clear majority of girls.

Other evidence shows that girls have weaker spatial visualization skills
than boys, but one study showed that it is possible to give students with
weaker spatial visualization skills training which brings them up to speed.
When this is done the performance difference between boys and girls is
erased.  I have noticed this problem in some female colleagues.

Various studies on the research based physics curricula show that much of
the difference in performance is erased.  My own personal in class
observations confirm this.   Also, while I do not have enough statistics, my
observations show that learning differences do not predict lower performance
when research based teaching is used.  Indeed LD students often find that
learning can be easy, and as a result they enjoy the course and actually
work harder.

Beyond these strategies, it is necessary for male teachers to be aware of
hostility towards females.  Even in college the boys can be hostile towards
girls who perform better than them.  When I was an undergrad. I well
remember an incident.  We were all taking a course in E&M.  The class of
engineering physics students were boys with one girl, a brilliant person who
was known to be related to the school's founder.  After the test we were all
trudging out and complaining.  The girl bounced by and said it was not too
bad.  One of the boys made a very crude sexual remark about what he would
like to do to her.  He would never would have made any suggestion about the
top boy who always got the top grade.  As I later reflected on the incident
I was very ashamed that I never thought of telling him that his comment was
offensive and unwarranted.  Eventually she left physics to enrich another
related field.  This may have been because her boy friend (fiancée?) was in
that field, but I wonder.  Remember the old boy network shuts out both the
old and young girls.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of the Catholic church,
the Bahai church, or the Hindu faith.
> At 13:08 11 10 2002 , the following was  received:
> > So, what shall we do?  A. Shall we require that every new physics hire
> > at University X shall be a woman until the % of women in physics becomes
> > equal to ~50%?  (regardless of whether or not an equally or better
> > qualified male applies or not).
>
> Well, James, I think that I agree with your conclusions, but just
> one quibble:
>
> Non-males (at this point I don't know how to refer to this kind of humans)
> as a class are NOT equivalent to men and probably can't be.  They
> certainly
> don't want to be. -- They are almost a different species -- at least they
> think that men are.  In some ways they are not as talented/capable as
> men.  In some ways they are typically much better qualified for a
> task that
> men.   They are certainly welcome in any of my classes -- because I think
> that they as a group turn out to  be better physicists than men
> -- however,
> most have better judgement and don't follow this path.
>
> The idea that non-males are the same as males is fiction.  The idea that
> there "should" (whatever "should' might mean) be 50% of non-males and 50%
> of males in any position is folly. IMVHO.
>
>
>
> Jim Green

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.