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The beleaguered federal office that oversees family planning
services just got another boss hostile
to birth control.
Among the depressing details: Susan
Orr, the new appointee, was formerly a Senior Director at the Family Research
Council, a group that disparages condom use and claims that abstinence is the
only healthy choice to make about sex prior to marriage. In 2001, when the Bush
administration wanted to stop requiring health plans for federal employees to
pay for a broad range of contraceptives, Orr told the Washington Post: “We’re
quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity
that you have it.”
Orr is not as floridly insane as Eric Keroack, whom the Bush
administration appointed in 2006 to head the same office (and who left in March
to address allegations against his private practice.). Keroack championed the
bizarre idea that premarital sex wreaks havoc on brain chemistry, creating a
physiological barrier to love and commitment later on. Orr won’t inspire
mocking editorials long after her appointment. She’s likely to slip from public view. Which to me makes her a whole lot scarier.
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At today's confirmaton hearing for Michael Mukasey, Bush's pick for attorney general, Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked questions about a disturbing ruling Mukasey made as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. Here are the facts (I just looked them up): In 1983, a woman police officer was sexually assaulted. She later testified that the attack took place over six hours and was by a fellow officer. But when she initially reported the assault, she said she'd been attacked by a man she'd met at a laundromat instead of naming her assailant. A few days later, she named the male officer. He denied the accusation and passed a lie dectector test. So did she. Still, she was charged criminally for having falsely stated that she didn't know the man who'd attacked her. She was also suspended from the NYPD without pay, and eventually fired. Her alleged rapist retired with his police pension intact.
Two years later, the woman brought a sex discrimination suit. Judge Mukasey ruled that she couldn't bring her case to a jury because there wasn't enough evidence to support it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, saying that it was the jury's job to decide whether the allegations were true and "whether the discipline meted out to [the woman officer] was unlawfully disparate to that received by her male fellow officer." A trial followed. The jury ruled for the woman and awarded her more than $260,000 in damages. (Her name is in the record, but somehow I don't feel right about publishing it here--a whole different issue.) For a second time, Mukasey thwarted the woman's claim, this time by setting aside the jury's verdict. Mukasey said that "no reasonable jury could infer an unconstituional pattern or practice of gender discrimination" from the facts. (I'm quoting the Second Circuit again.) And he ordered a new trial. Also for a second time, the Second Circuit reversed. It held that Mukasey's grant of a new trial was an abuse of discretion.
Feinstein wanted to know if Mukasey considered this an "unusual" case. Mukasey said that to call it unusual was "a stark euphemism." And then he talked about all the women law clerks he has hired--"each of them hired on the merits, on the merits." He also talked about his effort to get a woman admitted to an all-male club he used to belong to, and leaving the club when he failed.
But his handling of the sex discrimination case seems awfully rigid, doesn't it? He got knocked down by the Second Circuit, and he insisted he was right, at this woman's expense. Trial judges aren't often that stubborn. I wonder what was going on here.
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Women may be underrepresented in the sciences at the highest academic levels, but through high school, female students perform much better than their male counterparts. Ironically, one of the first journalists to draw attention to this fact is Hoff Sommers, who wrote an article titled The War Against Boys for the Atlantic in May 2000 (subscription required).
Boys are about a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing, and are less likely to go to college. The Department of Education reported recently that 57 percent of college students are female, and that college student bodies will be 60-40 female by 2010.
When boys performed better – about a generation ago – many journalists, scientists, and casual observers argued that boys were naturally more intelligent. And as Meghan noted, people are quick to suggest that brain differences account for women’s under-representation in college science departments. Of course now that the tables have turned, educators talk of cultural or behavioral differences between the sexes rather than genetic predispositions.
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College kids, I would say, are pretty thrilled to have controversial speakers, like Summers, who get useful debates going (and Dahlia, as you say, little kids love daddy playmates, and ignore puttering mothers). But at the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm—hey, this is the XX Factor—I’d like to tsk tsk about school reform for a minute. I can’t help feeling sometimes when I read about NCLB that educational reformers should ask themselves now and then, What kind of message does our flailing send to students? Of course, the most important currency of school reform is concrete results: better schools for kids. But the Bush administration’s overhaul is also aimed at changing cultural attitudes toward education, specifically transforming an insidious, fatalistic ethos of low expectations. A dispiriting story in the New York Times on Tuesday about failing LA schools is a reminder that impossibly high expectations, and unrealistic consequences, can be, if anything, even more pernicious.
The No Child Left Behind legislation names 2014 as the deadline by which suddenly schools across the U.S. are supposed to boast universal proficiency in reading and math, and it stipulates a set of increasingly severe penalties for chronically failing schools, culminating in state takeover or radical restructuring. But the 2014 goal is surreal: Universal proficiency is an obvious pipedream. And there’s scant sign, as Diane Ravitch has pointed out, that state takeovers are effective and little evidence as to which massive overhauls work.
Hence California, which finds itself overwhelmed with chronically failing schools and at sea, unable simply to close schools and unsure who might fix them, or how. As one person put it, it “taxes the whole school change industry.” As a model for kids—who are supposed to be in the student change industry, right?--it’s exactly the wrong one, as any decent teacher would tell them. And it doesn’t seem merely rhetorical to point that out. Kids may blow off homework, but they tend to keep a sharp eye out for the hypocrisy and delinquency of their elders.
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Speaking of speaking out loud about gender differences, I wanted to post briefly on Emily’s terrific piece last week about playing with our kids. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon ‘round here: My husband can easily spend 90 straight minutes on the floor with our boys, building with Leggo. Whereas in the same situation, I tend to sit on the floor next to them, folding laundry, separating broken crayons from their paper wrappers, and tidying the playroom. (Is this what’s known as parallel play Ann???) I sometimes fear that if I truly forced myself to build with Leggo in that time, I might produce a teensy little ironing board and travel steamer.
Emily your story reminded me of one of my central parenting theories: I may not refer to it as “my kitchen,” but I have definitely observed anecdotally that the husbands somehow manage to sit down, eat their breakfasts and read the papers each morning while the moms tend to make pancakes, slice pears, pack lunches, and wipe spills. Maybe this is my corollary to the Tickle Monster theory: Our husbands are better at focused play because they are better at focused everything, when it comes to parenting. They certainly can and do pack lunches and wipe spills. But when they are eating they eat and when they are playing they play. They somehow find time to take care of their own stuff and they don’t maniacally multitask while doing it. Not sure what this has to do with our math performance in college. But last week my 4 year old observed, as I sat down next to him at breakfast with a piece of toast, “But mamma you don’t eat breakfast. You eat coffee.”
If our kids think we exist on air and live only to fold small t-shirts, I’m not all that surprised they don’t want to vote for the girls.
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I agree that it’s foolish for UC Davis to rescind its invitation to Summers to speak—even if his comments were foolish and ill-informed, as I argued two years ago.
But the problem with Christina Hoff Sommers’ piece—and the reason I don’t find it all that interesting—is that it does what has become a by now familiar two-step: First, it paints those who criticize Summers as suppressors of free speech, and invites us to think, erroneously, that it’s somehow taboo to talk in the sciences about biological basis for difference. In fact, Simon Baron-Cohen is quite well-regarded. (And if I recall correctly, at least one of the original scientists criticizing Summers’ comments herself studied the biological basis for sex differences.) Second, Hoff Sommers goes on to invoke a common-sense look at the world around us as evidence that OF COURSE brain differences explain the fact that women are nurses and men are pilots. What could we have been thinking all this time!
In doing so, Hoff Sommers gives no credence to the fact that the project of disentangling nature and nurture is extremely complicated. What makes these issues so hard to sort out is that the project of gender socialization begins almost the day a baby is born. I don’t say that to whitewash any “deeper” truths; I completely believe in the reality of biological differences, and I acknowledge that there are different distribution curves by gender. I just think we don’t know all that much about how they work yet—and yet we’re awfully quick to point to hard-wired biology as the underlying reason for all sorts of social discrepancies that can also be explained, at least in part, by discrimination and how we construct gender. (Megan McArdle had a good post a while back on this.) And there is plenty of contradictory evidence about just what “innate” might mean. If biology explains why our world is the way it is, as Hoff Sommers suggests, then why are women almost six times as likely today to get PhDs in physics than they were in the 1970s? Is it just that now all discrimination is gone? France has more female physicists than America does; are French women more “innately” interested in physics?