Crippled at the Starting Gate
The Graduate Schools Created and Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science and Engineering
By (author) Robert Leslie Fisher
Not available to order
Publication date:
25 November 2009Length of book:
226 pagesPublisher
UPAISBN-13: 9780761849735
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.
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.
Fisher's book supplies the reader with considerable food for thought about how to enhance STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] graduate program admission and retention by appealing to underrepresented groups who have much more to contribute to these fields. It provides some thought-provoking recommendations that could be adopted at all levels of the educational process, not just in graduate schools. It is this kind of out-of the-box thing thinking that is needed if our country is to reverse the alarming deficits in STEM students and employees that have become increasingly prevalent during the course of the last 2-3 decades.