Math, Tech and the Women Who Don't Love Them

By GERRY SHIH
December 28, 2009, 9:35 pm
Gerry Shih/The New York Times

Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, is now promoting a federal science and math education initiative.
It's no secret to anyone in Silicon Valley that math, science and technology fields remain dominated by men, despite some progress by women in recent years. Women make up 46 percent of the American workforce but hold just 25 percent of the jobs in engineering, technology and science, according to the National Science Foundation.
To Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, that persistent gender gap is a national crisis that will prove to deeply detrimental to America's global competitiveness.
In recent months, Dr. Ride has served as a visible emissary for President Obama's broad push to improve science and math education, including the $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative announced in July. The program would identify and fund effective education programs with the aid of corporate partners.
In an interview earlier this month, Dr. Ride said that hard money is needed to attract more qualified teachers and apply data-driven analyses of education programs.
But she also suggested that much of the problem lies with social and cultural expectations. "There are subtle stereotypes," she said. "There are unsubtle effects of the lowered expectations that we surround our kids with."
At a California Institute of Technology science festival in 2007, a mother approached Dr. Ride with her 12-year-old daughter in tow and bragged for several minutes, Dr. Ride recalled.
According to Dr. Ride, the mother was sending an unconscious message to her daughter that her interest in science wasn't normal. "She was saying, 'I don't know where she got this, she's so different from everyone else,'" Dr. Ride said. Girls "internalize the message that scientists are geeky-looking guys with labcoats and pocket protectors who never see the light of day."
Dr. Ride said children ages 10 to 12, especially girls, are the most susceptible to being "pushed off the track" of pursuing science by negative stereotypes. Ten years down the line, at the gates of colleges and graduate schools, the effects are stark: Today, more than half of the students in American graduate programs in the physical sciences and engineering are foreign-born, Dr. Ride said.
At Stanford University - where Dr. Ride double-majored in physics and creative writing and found time to play on the formidable tennis team - 408 men and 208 women undergraduates enrolled in the college of engineering at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. The math department had 70 men and 19 women, the computer science department, 122 men and 19 women. (The complete breakdown by gender and department at Stanford is found here. We'll post the numbers for the University of California, Berkeley, when we get them.)
Since leaving the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the late 1980s, Dr. Ride has been steadily advocating for science education.
Leveraging her enormous name recognition at the time, Dr. Ride immediately wrote several books for children about space after leaving N.A.S.A. In 2001, she formed an educational company, Sally Ride Science, to attract - and crucially, retain - children interested in science and engage their parents through festivals, science camps and programs that involve engineering challenges with toys.
With her involvement in the new federal initiative, Dr. Ride has recently become more vocal, challenging schools to subject their performance to quantitative measures and compete for federal money.
"We need higher expectations for our students," she said. "Schools need to expect their kids to be taking science and math and we need to measure how they're doing."
And now, with her involvement in the Obama administration's program, Dr. Ride speaks like someone ready to move in policy circles. "We need politicians to appreciate how important this is for the future of our country," she said.
• Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company