Last week I mentioned the imbalance between women and men in computer science. Some people attributed this to the bad experiences girls have in high school and before. This prompted me to chase down some rumors I had heard about lately, but I didn't want to post this until Mike's discussion was over.
The notion that girls have unfair experiences in school comes from a famous and influential 1992 report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), entitled How Schools Shortchange Girls.
Therein lies an interesting story. Dr. Judith Kleinfeld, Professor of Psychology, University of Alaska, was familiar with the report, believed it, and wanted to understand the causes of these problems more deeply. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding any causes. Digging deeper into the report and the available evidence, she discovered that the findings in the AAUW report were false, and worse, probably intentionally false.
The AAUW report relied, in part, on a research report by Sadker and Sadker. When Dr. Kleinfeld tried to obtain this report she couldn't find it, anywhere! It was never published. But even so, normally, research reports don't just disappear, especially ones as important as this one, so she called David Sadker and asked for a copy. Even he did not have a copy of the original report. Eventually, she located a microfilm copy of part of the original report in the Harvard University library. When she examined the original data guess what she found? Surprise, surprise! The data don't support the conclusions.
Anyway, this is only one-tenth of the story. Judith Kleinfeld has written a long, but very readable report called: The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception.
Please read it to find out who is really shortchanged.