Re: [Phys-l] Women Earn 46% of Undergraduate Math Degrees butRepresent Only 8% of Math Professors ??

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 22:03  -0700 6/2/06, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
> Well, I agree w/ the first part, but not the second. Since the vast
> majority of AAs are servers or unemployed * I don't think it's a bad
> assumption, at the faculty club and not wearing a server's uniform excepted.
Maybe I didn't make a clear enough example. I have seen many white 
male professionals--people who damned well should know better--assume 
that any woman in the room (that they don't immediately recognize) is 
a secretary and any black person is there to help serve the 
refreshments. Of course it isn't a matter of not recognizing a black 
person, since to those enlightened individuals, all blacks look alike.

Even in this supposedly enlightened age, I continue to be surprised 
at the indifference of many white male professionals to the dignity 
of those they (rightly or wrongly) assume are servants for other 
menials. These are the people who still think it is OK to do business 
in a racially restricted, all-male club, who assume that poor people 
are that way by voluntary choice, and who think that offering people 
a decent living wage will only make them fat and lazy.

I also often enjoy the discomfort of many white people at the 
menacing appearance of some black people. Two of my black friends 
look truly fierce--long dreadlocks, rough skin, looking like it is 
scarred, husky builds--the kind of people you might think would never 
be seen in polite society. In fact these are two of the most kind and 
gentle people I know. One is a professional electronic media 
technician and the other is a professional classical musician. Both, 
despite their gentle nature can be somewhat diffident around white 
people because of the assumptions often made about them, based solely 
on their appearance. I was at a workshop last summer, and one of the 
workshop attendees was a young college student--black, quite large, 
and looking a bit menacing. What we all found out, to our surprise, 
was that he was a poet of extraordinary skill, and during hte 
workshop he read two of his poems, which left much of his audience in 
years, and by the time he was finished this young man, who looked 
like a defensive tackle for the Steelers, also had tears running down 
his cheeks.

My point is, we all make too many assumptions about other people by 
their looks, and two of the most obvious features are sex and skin 
color, and when we are in a professional setting it is way too easy 
to assume that anyone of the female sex and anyone with a high 
melanin content in their pigmentation doesn't belong there.

That, I contend, is the most common reason that most university 
science, math and engineering departments, and others as well but 
somewhat less commonly, still are populated mostly with white males. 
The exceptions are notable just because they are uncommon.

I won't even start on the different ways we treat blacks and women 
from the first days of their schooling, that tends to socialize them 
to the expectations of the dominant white male community. This 
results in black students being suspended from school at a 
substantially higher rate that white ones (often for lesser 
offenses), and being several times more likely to do jail time if 
they are arrested, and even more likely to be arrested when they run 
afoul of the police than whites, to the extent that about one young 
black male in four will be in police custody by the time he is 25. 
That's close to 10 times the chances that a young white male will 
suffer that fate. And it results in, among other things, women being 
considerably less likely to study a technical field in college, even 
though more women are now attending college than men.

But I said I wouldn't start on that, so don't get me going.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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