#daniel nuccio

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

‘It’s 2025, not 1970’: MIT hosts all-female debate on alleged gender gap in STEM | The College Fix

Debate hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance.

By: Daniel Nuccio

Published: May 5, 2025

A panel of prominent female scholars took to the stage recently at one of the nation’s most prestigious STEM universities to debate the fiercely contested topic of sexism in science.

“It’s 2025, not 1970,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, author and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who argued against the need to close an alleged gender gap in STEM.

“Look around,” Sommers said at the April 30 event. “The educational landscape has changed. Women have not merely closed gaps in key areas of STEM, they’re doing better than men.”

The debate, hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance and MIT Open Discourse Society, had the scholars debate the resolution: “We must close the gender gap in STEM.”

Systemic barriers prevent greater female involvement in STEM and must be torn down for women to enjoy financial independence and for America to maintain supremacy in an increasingly technological world, argued Pamela McCauley, dean of the School of Engineering at Widener University, and Jennifer Roecklein-Canfield, chair of the Department Chemistry and Physics at Simmons University, who took the affirmative position.

“As we enter into this new era of global competitiveness and artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, clean energy, and many other areas, every brain will count,” McCauley said.

“Closing this gender gap in STEM is a strategic necessity for the United States,” she added. “It will unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in economic growth, supercharge innovation and business success, and strengthen our national security. It will also secure America’s leadership in the global race for innovation and progress.”

Sommers, along with Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director for the Adversarial Collaboration Project, argued the alleged systemic barriers decried by McCauley and Roecklein-Canfield were abolished decades ago.

What differences remain in STEM fields result from differences in the aptitudes and interests of males and females, they said.

“One of the most robust and broadly true findings in psychology is that girls and women are relatively more interested in people and boys and men are relatively more interested in things,” Clark said.

“Women tend to be attracted to organic fields of study such as social sciences, humanities, biology, and medicine,” she said, “and men are relatively attracted to inorganic fields of study such as engineering and the physical sciences.”

“When educational and career opportunities opened to women decades ago, they made rapid progress and have surpassed men in the disciplines that interested them and [in] most disciplines, in fact,” Clark added.

Sommers cited how women currently make up the majority of college graduates, graduate degree recipients, biology and chemistry degree recipients, and medical students, while also completely dominating the social sciences.

The affirmative team did not attempt to refute these claims, but instead highlighted that men still make up the majority of students in mathematics, physics, engineering and computer science.

Clark acknowledged these disparities, but held that they were likely accounted for by men and women having different interests and making different choices regarding their academic and professional careers.

The reason women have not reached parity with men in physics and engineering, Clark said, is “not because sex barriers were held up in only these disciplines while they crumbled in all other disciplines, but because women on average have less interest in these disciplines.”

“Even among men and women in the top 1 percent of mathematical ability, where they all have the competence to pursue any discipline in STEM they want…women are still more interested in disciplines involving people,” she said.

Moreover, Clark said, “mathematically gifted women are also more likely than mathematically gifted men to also be verbally gifted – they’re more balanced, which is a typical female advantage.”

“These women,” Clark said, “are more likely to change their major – leaky pipeline – out of math and science into other disciplines.”

These choices, she said, should not be viewed as a deficiency in women nor as a societal tragedy that needs to be corrected.

Sommers at one point joked that this might “solve the mystery” of why her “mathematically precocious granddaughter” chose to study film.

Moving beyond the formal proposition of the debate, corollary topics were also discussed, such as why males are showing deficits in literacy, school attendance, college graduation, and workplace participation, as well as why certain segments of society do not seem to care.

“The gender equity movement deploys an unusual logic,” Sommers said. “Gaps favoring men, those are evidence of invidious discrimination. They demand massive attention, including national legislation. Gaps favoring women, no matter how large, no matter how momentous … those go unmentioned.”

Additionally, on multiple occasions, the negative side questioned whether the larger debate was about ensuring women have a fair opportunity to pursue careers in STEM or about achieving statistical parity in every STEM discipline, which Clark argued could only be achieved through “top-down social engineering that is a mix of soft coercion against women and illegal sex discrimination against men.”

The entire debate can be viewed on the MIT Free Speech Alliance YouTube page.

==

The gender gap in higher education is greater now than it was when Title IX - which demonstrably didn't actually change anything - was passed.

The fact that our primate cousins exhibit the same sex-typical things-vs-people preferences and behaviors as we do means that trying to act like humans alone are blank slates whose tendencies, behaviors and preferences are shaped by an invisible conspiracy-without-conspirators of brainwashing rather than millions of years of reproductive and survival pressures is as much supernatural evolution-denial as Noah's magic zoo boat.

[arcticdementor]

Scholars work at ‘Decolonizing Light’ to combat ‘colonialism in contemporary physics’ | The College Fix

Project intentionally targeted physics for decolonization due to field’s ‘unique scientific authority.'

A group of scholars at Concordia University in Montreal have dedicated themselves to “Decolonizing Light.”

The effort is not about banning flashlights, but rather advancing other ways of knowing about light, science and physics.

The group’s tagline is “Tracing and countering colonialism in contemporary physics.”

The effort, funded by the Canadian government, seeks both to explore “ways and approaches to decolonize science, such as revitalizing and restoring Indigenous knowledges” and to develop “a culture of critical reflection and investigation of the relation of science and colonialism,” according to the project’s website.

Led by Tanja Tajmel, a special equity, diversity and inclusion advisor to Concordia’s dean, core members of the group also include physicist Ingo Salzmann and Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies Louellyn White.

As detailed in a 2021 paper the three co-authored with Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, Concordia’s director of decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy, the project intentionally targeted physics for decolonization due to the field’s “unique scientific authority.”

“Physics is commonly regarded as the ‘most objective’ and the ‘hardest’ science,” the scholars wrote, “it fundamentally defines scientific key concepts such as energy, matter, force, light, space and time, for all the other sciences.”

“It is the narrative of physics as objective and as socially independent that constitutes and stabilizes its knowledge authority in relation to all other knowledge systems.”

“For our purpose,” they stated, “it is important to understand physics as a social field [italics in the original] rather than as ‘pure knowledge’ independent from social values and decisions.”

…

As part of their effort to decolonize light, the three wrote, they plan to develop courses with indigenous scholars and “Knowledge Keepers” in which indigenous knowledge is elevated and Eurocentric western science is de-centered and scrutinized for its alleged past and present contributions to colonialism.

[@mitigatedchaos, here’s another reminder that this sort of thing is just going to keep on coming, keep on getting worse, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it.] 

[arcticdementor]

Scholars spend $500K in taxpayer funds to deconstruct whiteness in physics | The College Fix

ANALYSIS: The unbearable whiteness of physics.

Deconstructing whiteness in an introductory physics classroom may seem like a nonsensical goal, but according to a pair of critical whiteness scholars from Seattle Pacific University, this endeavor is actually an important step toward the larger undertaking of freeing students and professors alike from the weighty fetters of whiteness.

Funded through a $495,847 National Science Foundation grant, researchers Amy Robertson and W. Tali Hairston aim “to develop a knowledge base that could lead to awareness of how power relations may be embedded in the way physics is taught and learned.”

The two record introductory physics classes and interview participants, then analyze them using a critical whiteness theory lens “to show how privilege operates in undergraduate physics teaching and learning.”

…

Yet, to date, the most notable study born from the Robertson and Hairston NSF-funded collaboration is “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study,” recently published in the prominent physics education journal Physical Review Physics Education Research.

For this study, the two researchers viewed and analyzed six-and-a-half minutes of footage from an introductory physics course, then interviewed the key players involved.

According to Robertson and Hairston’s description of those six-and-a-half minutes, a biracial but culturally white female physics professor gave an assignment to a group of students comprised of a male student of Middle Eastern descent, a female Hispanic student, and a white female student.

That assignment was to draw an energy interaction diagram on a whiteboard within a limited amount of time. During that limited amount of time, the male student of Middle Eastern descent, referred to by the pseudonym Drake, took charge, proceeding to work on the assignment while the two female students, referred to by the pseudonyms Paris and Gail, attempted to make sense of some of the relevant instructions and concepts, making some contributions of their own along the way.

Nothing about the described interaction would seem that out of place in a physics class. No one ostensibly behaved in a disrespectful or offensive manner. No one was recorded using a slur or telling an off-color joke. Yet, as banal as the episode may have seemed, according to the trained-eyes of Robertson and Hairston, the episode was actually riddled with blinding whiteness from start to finish.

…

In other words, Drake’s attempt to complete the task within the allotted period of time marginalized the attempts of Paris and Gail to make sense of the task and the relevant concepts. The assignment of a task with a correct answer as part of a class within a field that values correctness perpetuates white social structures, as does the larger structure of schooling in which people earn qualifications through grades.

Moreover, both the use of the whiteboard and Drake’s assertiveness in taking lead on the exercise, as well as his focus on completing the task correctly, further solidified the purportedly white practice of having a single, final thing of value to be evaluated for correctness, according to the researchers.

…

In their interview with the physics professor who taught this class, the researchers quoted the professor as stating, “[I]n an ideal situation I want the students to drive the class. I want the students to drive conversations and to do the sense making and explaining.”

However, this professor also is noted as recognizing a tension between her ideal classroom dynamic and the reality that students will not always come to the correct conclusion when left completely unguided by, say, a professor whose job it is to teach them.

In the eyes of Robertson and Hairston, “[This professor’s] agency is constrained by whiteness. The outcome [emphasis in the original] expected of her teaching is students who can access the center defined by physics. Though she values a nonhierarchical classroom organization, her efforts to cultivate this seem to jeopardize what whiteness enforces as valuable…correctness, as defined by physics.”

Yet, according to Robertson and Hairston, in an alternate pluriverse, things would be different.

A limited number of students would not dominate group discussion. Paris would not be so fixated on getting the right answer. The physics professor would not have her agency constrained by expectations that students in her physics class be able to access that which is correct as defined by physics.

No, in the pluriverse Robertson and Hairston imagine, things would be different. Instead of having a predefined task handed to them by their professor with the expectation that they do it correctly, Drake, Paris, and Gail would collaboratively establish a “shared purpose with many solutions and approaches.” Drake’s attempt to solve the problem would be valued equally with Paris and Gail’s sense making. A critical discussion of how systems of power uphold “mainstream academic knowledge” would ensue.

…

“We are keenly aware,” they wrote, “that these imaginings are challenging, if not nearly impossible, to manifest in a world where racism is permanent.”

But they added: “Scholars, Teachers, and Activists of Color have been dreaming and creating for ages…We want to dream together with you, toward physics teaching and learning as a ‘world where many worlds are possible.’”

Just picture our future when the engineers who maintain all our infrastructure have taken physics courses taught per Robertson and Hairston’s views.

[@mitigatedchaos]

[arcticdementor]

Professor of color denied funding for cutting-edge laser research due to ‘insufficient’ equity, diversity and inclusion enthusiasm | The College Fix

I think what they’re asking you to do in the EDI pledges is literally in opposition to the sort of things Martin Luther King taught us how to think in the 1960s.'