Chemical Education Today
702 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 83 No. 5 May 2006 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org
One Chemistry Professor’s Misconceptionsabout Gender and Scientific Ability: WasIt Gender Bias or Gender-PopulationBias? W
Comments by Harvard’s President Lawrence Summersregarding the scientific prowess of females compared to malesprompted us, father and daughter educators, to address ourown impressions about the scientific abilities of the genders.The senior author of this letter looked back on 33 years as achemistry professor plus another 12 as a chemistry studentto find that his impressions had undergone a transformationfavoring male superiority in the early years and female supe-riority later. However, the junior author felt there was no gen-der-based explanation for scientific ability or academicsuccess.
Enrollment and performance data from 33 years of gen-eral chemistry grade books were treated statistically to deter-mine if either gender has exhibited academic superiority.Gender-based enrollments, GPAs, and attrition rates weretreated by linear regression to reveal that neither males nor
Letters
females can claim to be better chemistry students, now or inthe past. The only significant trend in the data is the popu-lation reversal. More females take general chemistry these daysthan do males. An interesting suggestion is that one tends toattribute superiority to the gender that is in numerical ma-jority. This explains why the impression of male superiorityis being dispelled and might be supplanted by the impres-sion of female superiority.
The results of this study are available as SupplementalMaterialW in this issue of JCE Online.
Fred H. Watson
Department of ChemistryUniversity of Louisiana at MonroeMonroe, LA [email protected]
Stephanie F. Watson
Department of AccountingUniversity of Central ArkansasConway, AR [email protected]
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