The NAS Report on Women in ScienceMike Rappaport

When this report was issued by a committee chaired by Donna Shalala, I made fun of it, as so obviously political.  But I didn’t read the report or analyze its reasoning.  Gary Becker and Richard Posner have done that, and their conclusions fully support my criticisms of the report.  Here is a brief excerpt of Posner’s critique:

Of the 18 members of the authorial committee, only one was a man, andonly five were members of the National Academy of Sciences and only onewas a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The one man,Robert J. Birgenau, although a distinguished physicist, happens to bethe Chancellor of the University of California; for him to havedissented from the report would have condemned him to the same fate asLawrence Summers, and swiftly too. The composition of the committeeshows remarkable insensitivity. The theme of the report is theimportance of unconscious bias with respect to issues of gender; did itnot occur to the members and to the NAS and NAE that women might haveunconscious biases regarding the reasons for the underperformance ofwomen in science and engineering relative to men?