It’s always a pleasure to see former students doing well, and to that end, we invited one of my former thesis students, Mike Mastroianni, class of 2007, to give a colloquium talk last week in the department. Mike went to physics grad school for a couple of years after graduation, but decided he was more interested in education issues, and is now in the process of writing his dissertation (to be defended in a few weeks) in a Curriculum and Instruction program at the University at Albany.
He gave a really interesting talk on his thesis work, looking at the evolution of gender ratios in STEM fields in various historical periods. One of the most interesting stories he looked at concerned this graph of undergraduate degrees awarded in biological sciences over the last several decades:
Undergraduate degrees in biological science from 1970-2011.
It’s well known that the gender balance in biology has shifted dramatically over the years, and one of the most dramatic shifts is in the mid-to-late 1970’s, when the field went from massively male-dominated to near gender parity. Some of this is a general shift in the demographics of college, as more women went to college (leading to the significant increase of the pink line in the figure), but a huge part of the story is the dramatic crash in the number of degrees awarded to men during the period marked by the green box in the figure.
So, what’s the story there? Well, Mike argued that the root cause was the same thing that’s at the center of everything in the 1970’s: Vietnam.
Specifically, he pointed to the way draft deferments were used to “channel” men into particular majors, quoting at length from a planning document that was published in… I think it was Ramparts magazine (I can’t read the exact citation). This included the following remarkably blunt quotes (lifted from a PDF of the slides that Mike sent me):
Throughout his career as a student, the pressure—the threat of loss of deferment—continues. It continues with equal intensity after graduation. His local board requires periodic reports to find out what he is up to. He is impelled to pursue his skill rather than embark upon some less important enterprise and is encouraged to apply his skill in an essential activity in the national interest. The loss of deferred status is the consequence for the individual who has acquired the skill and either does not use it or uses it in a nonessential activity.
From the individual’s viewpoint, he is standing in a room which has been made uncomfortably warm.
Several doors are open, but they all lead to various forms of recognized, patriotic service to the Nation, Some accept the alternatives gladly—some with reluctance. The consequence is approximately the same.
One of the “essential activities” identified by this process was medicine– deferments continued to be provided for students going to medical school all the way to the end of the war, after many other subjects were dropped. And majoring in biological science is one of the obvious paths to a medical degree. The peak in degrees awarded to men around 1976, Mike argued, comes about 3-4 years after the end of the draft. This is about the time required for students who entered college planning to head to medical school as a way to stay out of Vietnam to finish their degrees; the subsequent drop reflects a return to “normal” after the specific incentive to go into biology went away.
This is basically a plausibility argument, but he showed similar patterns in a number of other areas. There was a sharp increase in birth rates a year or so after policy shifted from providing an automatic deferment on getting married to providing deferments only to new fathers. There’s a similar peak-and-decline in the number of education degrees earned by men in the late 60’s, the peak coming about 3-4 years after the automatic deferment for teachers was dropped. And there’s a similar pattern for Ph.D. degrees, with the peak around 5-6 years after the deferment for graduate school in general was dropped (but retained for medical school).
So, while it’s a somewhat circumstantial case, taken all together, it’s a pretty convincing argument that the historical pattern we see was massively influenced by Vietnam. And while Mike didn’t mention them, there are similar effects in grade inflation stats and the carefully selected starting point for the statistics used in bad defenses of “the humanities”.
As somebody in the audience pointed out, this is kind of remarkable given that the number of men actually drafted was a small fraction of the population compared to, say, WWII. But a couple of professors who clearly recall that era confirmed the disproportionate effect that fear of the draft had on setting people’s priorities.
So, anyway, a very cool talk from Mike (who also looked at other periods of the same graph, and other disciplines), and a good reminder of how complex and interconnected things are when you start dealing with social science.
