Crippled at the Starting Gate: The Graduate Schools Created and Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science and Engineering

by Robert Leslie Fisher

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761849124
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	11/16/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	226
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert Leslie Fisher was educated in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, a special school for science oriented students, and has degrees in sociology from City College of New York (B.A. cum laude) and Columbia University (M. philosophy). Mr. Fisher had a varied career as a criminal justice planner, research contracts officer, and program evaluator in New York State government prior to his retirement in 2003. He is now an author and a director of a nonprofit consulting organization in the Capital District of New York. Mr. Fisher is also the author of two previous nonfiction books (The Research Productivity of Scientists and Making Science Fair both published by University Press of America); and a mystery novel Vanilla Republic (AuthorHouse, 2009).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 List of Tables
Chapter 2 Preface
Chapter 3 Acknowledgements
Chapter 4 Introduction
Chapter 5 Chapter One: Hypotheses and Study Plan
Chapter 6 Chapter Two: Cosseted White Male Students
Chapter 7 Chapter Three: The Less Favored Graduate Students
Chapter 8 Chapter Four: What Do Women and Asian Students Need and Want (And May Not Be Getting) from Their Graduate School?
Chapter 9 Chapter Five: Schools and School Atmosphere
Chapter 10 Chapter Six: Summary and Conclusions
Chapter 11 Appendix One: Questionnaire
Chapter 12 Appendix Two: Additional Tables
Chapter 13 Bibliography
Chapter 14 Index

Editorial Reviews

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.

Dr. Edward Hannan