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NOT Where Have All the Boys Gone



At 07:39 AM 6/30/00 -0700, Wes Davis wrote in part:
I find it almost impossible to counter [male-crushing] ideas that these
students have been exposed to all their lives.

85% of all public school teachers are women who, in many cases,
actively pursue their own feminist agenda.
...
The ratio of females to males across the board is
increasing. Where is the outcry that we heard from the feminists years
ago? All we hear on the media are continuing stories of discrimination
against females. Meanwhile, the numbers become continually more
imbalanced against males.

Flame on.

To which at 10:04 AM 6/30/00 -0500, David T. Marx responded in part:
Your commentary is thoughtful and on
target. I heard the exact same commentary on the Rush
Limbaugh show this week

I think you guys are getting too many of your "facts" from Rush Limbaugh.

Before answering the question "Where Have All the Boys Gone" it might be
worthwhile asking where all the young women have gone. Not many of them
have gone into physics research! According to the American Physical
Society, the percentage of women earning PhDs has increased from 3% in the
early 1970s to a whopping 13% in 1998.
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/women/women.htm
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/women/figure3.htm

This thread started with remarks on the prevalence of girls in
_high-school_ physics. Alas that's not the whole story, and that certainly
does not suffice to justify the conclusions being drawn from it.

At 01:20 PM 6/30/00 -0500, Doug Craigen wrote in part:
Then 1993 hit, my 2 year [asst. prof.] contract ended, and the
bubble burst. Since then my "academic career" has consisted of
occasional sessional teaching. A variety of things converged
simultaneously, but one of them was the high fraction of posted jobs
which I couldn't even apply for because I am a male. Its harder to
assess the impact of "the U of ... is an equal opportunity / affirmative
action employer" (a contradiction of terms), but I have been told off
the record many times that my only problem is being a white male.

It is implausible that 13% of the job-seekers are taking 100% of the
jobs. Indeed, according to the APS, 17% of newly-hired physics faculty
were women.
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/awf98.pdf page 7.

No kidding, I'm sorry if Doug or anyone else has trouble landing the job he
wants, but let's not pretend the "only problem is being a white male."