Crippled at the Starting Gate

The Graduate Schools Created and Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science and Engineering

By (author) Robert Leslie Fisher

Not available to order

Publication date:

25 November 2009

Length of book:

226 pages

Publisher

UPA

ISBN-13: 9780761849735

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.

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

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.