STEM Status Report: Progress or Regress?

Good News

• Miami Herald article (2004): Girls are taking more math classes, evening the score on standardized tests and doing better than boys on class-related exams, and being inspired by good summer programs.
• Joanne Jacobs reports on a USA Today story and has a fascinating discussion in her blog comments.
• Education World on Summer Science for Girls
• In England, girls are closing the gap with boys
• Women win computer game-design contest
• Countering the stereotype gap is an amazing study which indicates the subtle ways in which gender bias can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Bad News

• The usual excuses (childbearing, and so on) don't work: study shows that women in science are less successful for reasons not explainable by the variables in the study. (MSNBC, 2006)
• AAUW report (2000) on girls and computers has a lot of bad news about declining enrollments.
• Washington Post on Why so few girls choose science and math (2005)
• The Inequality Taboo, by Charles Murray and more on that book
• Proof and Prejudice: confronting bias for women in mathematics

News

• Lawrence Summers controversy (Jan-Mar 2005)
• New York Times article
• Guardian
• Stanford Daily (on Faculty Women's Forum)
• SF Chronicle (on brain development research)
• Tomorrow's Professor posting: Encouragement, not Gender, Key to Success
• Building the Circle of Support, and continuing it at the college level
• This does show we've made progress since Pythagorean times, but it's painfully slow: Are Numbers Male?
• Stanford's Institute for Gender Research
• Links giving a global perspective on women in science from MentorNet