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The Title IX Hearings, the GAO report, and the Nelson report
Title IX Hearings
Title IX is a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded activity, although it is probably best known in connection with athletic programs. In 2002, Senator Ron Wyden chaired Senate subcommittee hearings to evaluate the need for Title IX enforcement in science education. In January 2003, Senator Wyden together with 203 concerned scientists (including our co-coordinator Mary Singleton) sent a letter to Education Secretary Rod Paige, asking him to investigate whether the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) "seen in our nation's institutions of science education is not due to violations of Title IX." The education department declined Wyden's request.
GAO Report
Senator Wyden and Senator Barbara Boxer requested a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study of Title IX enforcement by government agencies that fund stem research. In July 2004, the GAO completed its report. It found that enforcement was-to say the least-inadequate. For example, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and NASA have never conducted a Title IX compliance review of their grantees-although periodic reviews are required by Title IX regulations. The Department of Education has not conducted a review for almost ten years. This lack of oversight has huge implications for universities because they usually receive federal funding.
Nelson Report
Donna Nelson, a professor of chemistry, has surveyed the stem faculty, an extension of her earlier surveys for chemistry and physics (see Spring 2002 Newsletter). Her results are reported in A National Analysis of Diversity in Science and Engineering Faculties at Research Universities. Some of the findings: There are no female African-American, Hispanic, or Native American professors in the top fifty computer science departments. There are no female African-American professors in the top fifty physics departments. There are few female professors in stem, however, in many fields this is not due to a lack of qualified women. The number of women receiving Ph.D.s in the sciences is far larger than the number of women going into academe.
Response to Reports
In response to Nelson's study and the GAO report, the National Women's Law Center and Women's Prerogative have launched Women in the Sciences: Left Out, Left Behind, a nationwide public education and letter-writing campaign addressing the underrepresentation of women on the science faculties at major research universities. The Web site includes fact sheets on Title IX and statistics on percentages of female Ph.D.s in different fields of science and on faculties of major U.S. universities. (See the back page for URLS for the GAO report, the Nelson report, and more information about Title IX and the Women in the Sciences campaign.)
From Wyden Hearings
By Donna Nelson
I've been a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma for over twenty years, teaching and researching organic chemistry. Because of the barriers facing women and minorities in science, I collected the first published data, disaggregated by gender, by race, and by rank, on faculty at the top fifty research universities in each of fourteen science and engineering disciplines. Many science and education organizations have requested these data, telling me that I am the only source. I share them freely, but I can't help worrying-if so many organizations are truly interested in increasing participation of underrepresented groups in science, why did it fall to a lone chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma to collect these data?
-wage@wage.org-