Victimized Women
By John Stossel on Gender
Predictably, the New York Times gave space to the latest trendy victimhood claim: a gender bias report from the American Association of University Women which says that gender bias and stereotypes keep many women from pursuing careers in science, engineering, and math. Women do earn only 19 percent of bachelor's degrees in computer science and engineering, and 21% of physics degrees.
But so what?
Women earn 60% of biology degrees… almost 80% of psychology degrees… half of all medical degrees. Do engineering and physics departments discriminate, while biology and psychology departments do not? In fact, women dominate higher education, earning the majority of undergraduate and masters degrees. I never hear any hand-wringing about the fact that men earn only about 22% of psychology degrees and only 21% of education degrees. Do we need million dollar grants from the government to get men interested in psychology and education careers?
No. What these number reflect is that most men and women just prefer different careers.
The American Enterprise Institute's Christina Hoff Sommers points out that women earn most advanced degrees and that the physical sciences are the exception, not the rule. Sommers once set me straight when I fell for an earlier report by the same silly group. The AAUW claimed that teenage girls were losing self-esteem. But Sommers examined the AAUW report more carefully than I had and noticed that the poll responses didn't really say what the AAUW said it did. Had I examined the report more carefully, I would have noticed there were plenty of examples where girls did better than boys. Girls and boys said teachers liked being around girls more, and both girls and boys thought girls were smarter. In its quest to portray girls as "victims" needing government money for "gender-equity" programs, the Association ignored those answers. AAUW cherry-picked the answers. In fact, most of the teen girls said that they were happy the way they were. But the AAUW sold b.s. to the media, and we bought it because it fit our "victimhood" narrative.
At the time, she told me: "We're going to have gender bias experts and gender bias facilitators offering workshops . . . addressing a crisis that doesn't exist."
Now we've got that. America spends hundreds of millions of dollars on things like Gender Bias Bingo and ADVANCE programs.
Sommers and I will address the junk science of the gender victimhood movement on my FBN show next week. |
