Crippled at the Starting Gate The Graduate Schools Created and Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science and Engineering

by Fisher, Robert Leslie

• ISBN13: 9780761849735
• ISBN10: 0761849734
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-25
• Publisher: UPA

Summary

In Crippled at the Starting Gate, Robert Leslie Fisher argues that the United States needs an education bill, much like the G.I. Bill passed after World War II, to send more Americans to graduate school in the sciences and engineering. Equally important, the graduate schools need to change their culture not only to recruit more women, African-Americans, and Latinos into science, but to promote them to senior faculty positions. Accomplishing these changes in university science and engineering departments will be challenging since the institutions have a strong propensity to recruit white males similar to the overwhelmingly white male senior faculty. In Making Science Fair (2007), Fisher urged new productivity metrics to assure that more women can advance in science. Now Fisher urges ending burdensome educational practices including requiring women and foreign graduate students to teach under-graduates, which adversely affects both the graduate students and the undergraduates.

Author Biography

Robert Leslie Fisher was educated in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, a special school for science oriented students, and has degrees in sociology from City College of New York (B.A. cum laude) and Columbia University (M. philosophy). Mr. Fisher had a varied career as a criminal justice planner, research contracts officer, and program evaluator in New York State government prior to his retirement in 2003. He is now an author and a director of a nonprofit consulting organization in the Capital District of New York. Mr. Fisher is also the author of two previous nonfiction books (The Research Productivity of Scientist and Making Science Fair both published by University Press of America); and a mystery novel Vanilla Republic (AuthorHouse, 2009).

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. vii
Preface	p. xv
Acknowledgements	p. xix
Introduction	p. 1
Hypotheses and Study Plan	p. 11
Cosseted White Male Students	p. 31
The Less Favored Graduate Students	p. 51
What Do Women and Asian Students Need and Want (And May Not Be Getting) from Their Graduate School?	p. 83
Schools and School Atmosphere	p. 105
Summary and Conclusions	p. 135
Questionnaire	p. 147
Additional Tables	p. 153
Bibliography	p. 187
Index	p. 197
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