2
2005
In all the to-ing and fro-ing these past few weeks about the League of Extraordinarily Stupid Gentlemen, I noted that it took an act of Congress to get women parity at a place like Harvard.
Now comes the Wall Street Journal's Karen Blumenthal saying yup, the Ivies resisted admitting women as hard as they could as long as they could. Harvard and pretty much every place else fought hard to keep Title IX from becoming a law that would require them to admit as many women as men. It's an interesting read. Have at it.
There's been some other stuff around in the news, too. So here's your weekly update.
The New York Times editorial page editor Gail Collins got two economists to take a look at how far women have come in the sciences. Here's their obvious and reassuring take: Scientists are made not born.
And the Times' Karen Arenson filed a piece on the slow progress women have been making getting tenure position in the Ivy League. This is, oddly enough, supported by a piece in Harvard's alumni magazine "Faculty Diversity: Too Little for Too Long," by Cathy Trower and Richard Chait.
They make an observation that applies universally:
Who teaches matters. In fact, the most accurate predictor of subsequent success for female undergraduates is the percentage of women among faculty members at their college. Although most women study at coeducational institutions, those who have attended women's colleges earn two to three times as many advanced degrees as those attending coed schools.
It's not just who teaches. It's who writes, who speaks, who leads.