Our friend Christina Hoff Sommers, long a thorn in the side of academic feminism and Women's Studies, is no doubt going to anger them again with her recent posting about the absence of women in physics, engineering or aeronautics. While much of the academy - and apparently the Obama administration and the National Science Foundation as well- endorse the view that such statistical disparities are evidence that women are systematically excluded from these disciplines, Sommers concludes that it's a weak argument that simply doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. (See her blog at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/ scroll down a bit to see it) As she puts it:
Here is the problem. Serious scholars have been producing study after study suggesting that simple bias is not what is holding women back. A recent example is the book "The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls," by Cornell University psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams. They review the current research on why women are underrepresented in fields like engineering and physics, and over-represented in disciplines like psychology and veterinary medicine. They show that institutional bias is a weak and implausible explanation.
Not that Sommers expects to get anywhere with this argument. As she can certainly attest from personal experience, anyone who ventures to challenge the reigning femininst ideological orthodoxy can expect knee-jerk, vehement hostility from just about anywhere in contemporary academic precincts, as former Harvard president Larry Summers could also tell you. Ironically, what apparently steams Christina's opponents more than anything else is the fact that her own arguments are usually unanawerable: she's got reason, facts, logic and evidence, while her feminist adversaries have mere bile. Check out the blog, it's well worth it.
