CSUF Course Aims to Close Science, Math Gender Gap

Cal State Fullerton is looking for a few good young women--good, at least, at everything except mathematics.

To help close a serious gender gap in science and math professions, college instructors will immerse about 35 girls from area high schools in an advanced summer school mathematics course at the campus.

Believed to be the first such program in Southern California to target only girls, it will also seek black, Latino, American Indian and girls of other ethnic minorities who are doubly under-represented among the shrinking number of science and math college graduates across the nation.

“As high school mathematics courses get tougher, people fall by the wayside,” said CSUF mathematics professor David Pagni, who will teach the course for four weeks this summer and next. “What we want to do is catch them before it’s too late.”

U.S. educators and industry leaders have declared a “national crisis” because of the dramatic decline in the numbers of students seeking science or math careers and the poor showing of U.S. students on standardized math and science tests. Such indicators, they warn, suggest that the nation’s economic competitiveness may be threatened in the next century.

The problem is even worse for women and minorities.

While women earn more than half the nation’s bachelor’s degrees, only 37% of their degrees are in math and sciences. In the decade since 1978, the number of women with careers in sciences and math has gone from 9.6% to 16%, according to the National Science Board. Yet in an increasingly diverse society, 65.5% of the people entering the labor force by the year 2000 will be women and minorities, according to the U.S. Task Force on Women, Minorities and the Handicapped in Science and Technology.

This two-year course, which will include careful tracking of selected girls through their senior year in high school and afterward, “is an attempt to overcome that, to change the balance of women and men, and maybe disprove the theory” that women are inherently inferior to men in mathematics, said Ina C. Katz, a CSUF administrator who developed the course proposal.

“There’s a lot of research to show that women have been subtly, maybe not so subtly, undermined when it comes to their prowess in math,” Katz said. “There is a lot of evidence to show that females are equal in math up to the sixth or seventh grade, but after that, tests show a real degeneration.”

The summer math course is aimed at girls who are completing their junior year of high school. Five days a week from July 8 to Aug. 3, they will get six hours of intensive mathematics instruction from Pagni and two high school instructors--preferably women to give the students reinforcing role models. Girls who apply also must commit to four weeks next summer.

The students will live in campus dormitories and receive a $100 weekly stipend, a bonus intended to attract those who otherwise might have to work to help their families.

“We don’t want this to be a hardship for them and their families, and there’s no way they can participate in jobs during the four weeks they will be here,” Katz explained.

The original plan was to draw students from four Orange County high schools: Fullerton, Tustin, Buena Park and Placentia’s Valencia High. Since word of the pilot program first surfaced in an alumni newsletter, however, Katz and her staff have been deluged with hundreds of telephone calls, many from parents who want their daughters in the program, Katz said. Officials from 10 other high schools have also called, hoping to participate.

For now, the plan is to enroll an equal number of girls from each of the four schools.

The students will not be chosen until after orientation programs on April 24 and May 1 at the Fullerton campus.

The ideal candidate is likely to get good grades in college prep courses, Pagni said. She has done well in first-year algebra and geometry but perhaps not so well in second-year algebra.

“It’s Algebra II that’s the killer course--there’s a lot of difficult concepts,” he said. “Usually people can get through Algebra I. . . . But if you come through that kind of weak, say with a C, then you go into Algebra II, you not only need all the skills from Algebra I, you have to be able to apply them. Then boom! You get hit with new material. It just overwhelms people.”

So far, interest in the program is keen at Fullerton High. Fifteen to 20 girls, mostly Asians, have taken applications, said Joan Johnson, who advises students at the high school’s Career Guidance Center.

Katz said one of the calls she got was from an engineer who wanted his daughter in the program. “He said his company was having to go out of the (United States) to recruit engineers because we don’t have enough people trained here.”

It was just that shortage that Katz hoped to tackle at Fullerton when she first learned of a coeducational math program aimed at minority youth last summer at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in Carson.

It was Francis P. Collea in the CSU chancellor’s office of academic affairs who backed that program, and who wanted to tailor Katz’s proposed Fullerton course for girls.

“If we don’t intervene and get these young women proficient in mathematics, between 70% and 80% of the majors will not open to them in college,” said Collea, who assisted Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds, herself a scientist and co-chairwoman of the U.S. task force.

“If these girls don’t take a year of calculus, they will be shut out of many disciplines,” Collea said. “If you don’t have enough mathematics, which is a language, you are handicapped in thinking critically and solving problems.”

Why do girls need help in mathematics?

Some researchers have long argued that there are physical and cognitive differences in the way men and women think. But the most recent studies suggest that boys and girls are virtually equal in math ability through elementary school and junior high school, leading many to conclude that social factors are behind the decline in girls’ interest and ability in higher grades.

One 10-year study by a psychologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded in 1989 that parents and teachers offer more encouragement to boys to learn science and mathematics.

To turn things around, experts agree that teachers in grades kindergarten through high school need to be better prepared to teach mathematics and sciences to boys as well as girls, and that parents must become more involved in their child’s education.

In the meantime, intervention--especially with girls--is needed, said Manuel Gomez, UC Irvine’s assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs for student affirmative action.

“In Southern California, in particular, this program (at Cal State Fullerton) is one of the unique efforts targeting minority women,” said Gomez, who has worked with Pagni on a special math enrichment program aimed at minority youth in the Santa Ana Unified School District.

“For some peculiar reason in our culture, mathematics is extremely dependent on formal education. And this program is doubly important for minority youngsters and perhaps triply important for minority women.”

Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb, a biologist who frequently speaks out about the dearth of women and minorities in the sciences, has high hopes for the program, the $75,000 cost of which is being shared by the Fullerton campus and the chancellor’s office.

“I’m hoping this program will break the (sex) barrier of anxiety associated with mathematics,” Cobb said.

“And by learning as a group of girls together, they will be less intimidated by the pressures of socialization,” she said.

The Changing Work Force As estimated 42.8 million people will enter the overall labor force between 1988 and the year 2000. Here is the breakdown: White women: 35.2% White men: 31.6% Black women: 6.9% Black men: 5.7% Latino women: 6.8% Latino men: 8.3% Asian and other (women): 2.6% Source: U.S. Task Force on Women, Minorities and the Handicapped in Science and Technology Federal Research and Development Dollars for Women and Minorities % Dollar Awards by Sex Men: 93% Women: 6% Source: National Science Foundation % Dollar Awards by Minority Group White: 88% Asian-American: 4% All others: 5%* *Includes Latinos, blacks and American Indians. Women in Mathematics, the Sciences In 1988, women made up 51% of the population and 45% of the total U.S. work force. But while they constituted 50% of all people in professional or related occupations, they represented only 16% of working scientists and engineers. Of those, only 17% were concentrated in the so-called “hard sciences” and 14% in engineering. The greatest number of women with science degrees had careers as computer specialists (25%), social scientists (19%) and psychologists (15%). Women’s salaries have lagged behind. Among scientists, women’s salaries averaged 76% of those for men; among engineers, women’s salaries averaged 84% of men’s, and in the fast-growing field ofcomputer sciences, women’s salaries averaged 86% of men’s. In 1985, women represented 13% of all college and university science faculty and 2% of the engineering faculty. They were also more than twice as likely as men to be in non-tenured positions. On the 1989 Scholastic Aptitude Test, girls scored an average of 59 points lower than boys, continuing a decade-long trend. But black and Latino girls scored about 50 points below the average female score. Critics contend that the SAT is biased against females and minorities. Among Orange County high school seniors, boys scored four points lower than girls (273/277) in reading on the California Assessment Program standardized test in 1988. In math, however, boys scored 40 points above girls in math (271/242). Sources: National Science Foundation; U.S. Task Force on Women, Minorities and the Handicapped in Science and Technology; the College Entrance Examination Board and the Chancellor’s Office of California State University; California Assessment Office, State Department of Education.