A Woman's Domain and Range

During my years at Columbia, Sunita Williams has space-walked, Meg Whitman has served as the chief executive officer of eBay Inc., and Francoise Barré-Sinoussi has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The fact that women have made such great achievements in science-and- technology-related fields can deceive one into thinking that the gender disparity in these fields is diminishing. Yet, while more women are going into engineering, they still make up only 11% of engineering professionals nationally. The gap between males and females is lower on college campuses where women make up 19.4% of engineering undergraduates nationally. At Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, males still heavily outnumber the females. So why is the proportion of female engineers still so low?

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Statistics One-Liners

On the elevator news TV yesterday, I saw two opinion polls that really bothered me. They bothered me not because of what they they reflected, but rather because the media seemed to propagate stereotypes with such opinion polls.

The first poll stated basically that in the United States around 60% of men stayed in contact with their offices during vacation while around 40% of women did so (don't quote me on the figures for this one). On a light elevator reading of the poll, the impression given would be that men are more dedicated to their careers that women are. However, what the poll fails to mention is how in US, top executive positions are occupied primarily by men, and therefore they also have more of a responsibility to stay in contact with their offices. For example, according to an article from Perspectives journal quoted on Dartmouth University's website, "nearly half the thousand largest U.S. firms had no woman in their official listings of principal executives." The publishing of such a quote so casually presents a distorted image of reality to people, and in turn serves to propagate the stereotype that women are less dedicated to work, leading to in turn make it even more difficult for them to get promotions.

The second poll stated that 25% of the Muslims under 30 in the United States felt that suicide bombing is OK under certain circumstances (can quote me on this one; I'm pretty sure I got everything). Again, on the surface, an elevator-passenger would only be strengthening her or his stereotype of a Islamic war against the United States perpetrated by religion, and also believe that Muslims living in the US support terrorism. However, what the poll fails to mention is a) how few Muslims under 30 live in the US, b) how few of them must have been polled to get a nice round number like 25%, c) what is the definition of certain circumstances - even Christians believe in martyrdom; its all over the Bible, d) what did the other 75% of the Muslims believe? If 75% had believed that suicide bombing was outrageous, despite their better understanding of what is actually going on in the region, that would only show that Muslims living in the US were indeed way patriotic. Right after 9/11, Muslims and Sikhs living in the US had been attacked by other segments of the US population; such partial statistics that strengthen stereotypes only serve to propogate hatred.

The media needs to show a lot more responsibility in its publishing of statistics one-liners.