papers/reports

Patricia Hausman

Your Subtitle text

Papers/reports

Plenty of Nonsense: How the Land of Plenty Report Denies Female Scientific Achievement. Former Congresswoman Constance Morella (R-MD) sponsored legislation in the late 1990s that established a White House Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology (CAWMSET). The Commission's report, Land of Plenty, was published in 2000. I wrote this critique for The Independent Women's Forum.

Confession Without Guilt: MIT Jumped the Gun to Avoid a Sex Discrimination Controversy, But Shot Itself in the Foot. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology made headlines in 1999 with a report claiming to show that it had discriminated against its female scientists. Actually, what the report really showed was that MIT had suspended its commitment to the scientific method. I wrote this critique of the report for the Independent Women's Forum with the assistance of James Steiger, currently professor of statistics at Vanderbilt University.

Feminizing Science: The Alchemy of Title IX. Title IX is a law that is supposed to insure that educational institutions do not discriminate based on sex. But as any fan of college sports knows, federal regulators have turned it on its head, using it as a tool to eliminate male sports teams. Now a report from a National Academy of Sciences committee has advocated use of Title IX to even up the numbers of males and females in science. Here I respond to the proposal ... and the inaccurate, one-sided, and contradictory arguments on which it is based.

On the Rarity of Mathematically and Mechanically Gifted Females. Women are well-represented in many areas of science , but physics and engineering are not among them. My doctoral dissertation examined this phenomenon on a model I derived from Helmuth Nyborg's Theory of General Trait Co-Variance (GTC Theory). To the best of my knowledge, this was the first test of GTC Theory using a sample of female subjects.

For more information about GTC Theory, I highly recommend Nyborg's book, Hormones, Sex, and Society.

Fuzzy Logic: A Critique of AAUW's Charge that School's Shortchange Girls. In 1996, the American Association of University Women published a widely heralded report alleging that the nation's schools unfairly disadvantage girls. This paper is my take on the scientific soundness of the AAUW's argument.