Academia, Bizarre, Constitutional Law, Politics, Society

Where Do You Find Gender Discrimination? Professor Says It Is The National Geographic Bee

Minot State University professor emeritus Eric Clausen has filed his second federal complaint alleging that he was retaliated against by the National Geographic Society after he complained that the contest discriminated against girls because virtually no girls have won the national title.

Clausen believes that the National Geographic Society violates federal laws on gender equity and says that he was warned not to raise these concerns.

Clausen’s first lawsuit was dismissed in 2005 in Clausen v. National Geographic Society, 664 F. Supp. 2d 1038. In his first complaint, he recounted how he demanded a change to give girls a better chance or threatened to create his own competition:

Plaintiff then prepared for the [ND] Alliance board a draft grant application with a core program and budget identical to the program and budget in the 2005 grant application the [NGS] Foundation had deferred and addressed the New Guidelines requirements by offering to work with NGS to modify the Bee so girls would have [**8] an equal opportunity to win and so the Bee would better address the National Geography Standards, but that if NGS did not want to change the Bee, then the [ND] Alliance would design its own statewide student geography competition with the goals of entering into competition with the Bee and eventually replacing the Bee as North Dakota’s primary statewide student geography competition. . . .

Here is how U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland rejected the underlying claim:

The Court finds as a matter of law that an alleged failure by females to win the national geography bee as often as males neither establishes nor supports a Title IX violation. Title IX neither guarantees nor suggests that females must win as often as males. Clausen has failed to allege any facts to establish that he was engaged in a protected activity, nor has he presented any facts or legal authority to support the premise that males winning a national geography bee more often than females supports a Title IX violation.

The Eighth Circuit upheld the ruling.

Clausen insists that the “NGS knows and has known since the Bee competitions began that Bee competitions do not provide girls with an equal opportunity to participate in the higher-level competitions.” He notes that only 2 out of the 54 state winners in 2009 were girls and only one girl advanced in 2010.

I am not sure how the competition is supposed to correct this program other than having separate competitions for boys and girls to guarantee that one of the two finalists with always be a girl –even if there are boys who can answer more geography questions. If there are too few girls able to make the finals, the solution would appear to be found in programs to encourage girls to compete in greater numbers. However, that does not make the competition itself discriminatory or violative of IX which mandates that

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…”

There is no denial on the basis of gender when children are asked the same geographic questions.

Source: Jamestown Sun found on Reddit

Jonathan Turley

44 thoughts on “Where Do You Find Gender Discrimination? Professor Says It Is The National Geographic Bee”

  1. Isabel – it’s a bit more complex than that, but you’re basically correct.

    From what I’ve seen, the ratio of male to female engineers should be about 70/30, all other things being equal.

    They’re not though: actual ratio is more like 90:10.

    It’s also usual to have “male” thinking in some areas, “female” in others, and the degrees differ too, it’s not binary.

  2. Just remember that these tests of male and female brain proclivities are generalizations. I am a female but supposedly “think” like a male, according to the battery of psychological tests I and others were required to take by a former employer. I definitely have the spatial visualization capacity of males, not the landmark memory of females. I was told that 2% of females fall into this “male brain” category. Allegedly, this inability to visualize spatially is one reason why there are so few female engineers. That’s what I’ve been told anyway.

  6. I’m not having any problem with the Al Jazeera site at all but I’ve only been watching for about an hour. From MSNBC the pro-Mubarak civilian forces in the square are agents of the government, paid or associated with the security police and and one said he was a convict, recruited in jail. B******s. The army remains calm.

  7. The only equality I have ever observed is found by treating individuals as individuals and not as categories or members of categories.

    I, like everyone else, am an exactly 100.000 (repeating decimal) percent valid, exactly 100.000 (repeating decimal) unique person. Therefore the score I would get on a spelling bee would always be exactly 100.000 (repeating decimal) percent because I would correctly spell exactly 100.000 (repeating decimal) percent of the words I spelled correctly.

    I do not compete with people. And, except by definition, there is no way to test whether “the questions” are or are not neutral, as neutrality is impossible to measure without error.

  8. In the past, of there was an outrageous imbalance between groups that were deemed “suspect categories”, then there was a rebuttable presumption that the imbalance was due to bigotry.

    The solution has been in the past to engage in “positive” unfair discrimination. Quotas and the like.

    I don’t think the presumption of bigotry has been rebutted; the questions themselves are neutral, but it’s not clear that the teaching that would allow students to answer those questions has given equality of opportunity.

    Talking about how “women are good at this” and “men are good at that” is exactly as valid as saying “men are taller than women”. Statistically, they are: there is nothing sexist about this, there is an objective metric. The problem is that we have a situation analogous to letting a 5 ft male onto a mixed basketball team because he’s tall, and not letting a 6ft female on because she’s too short. We do not give equality of opportunity, nor do we treat individuals as individuals.

    Due to my almost unique circumstances, I’m quite aware of male privilege. Mine got revoked, and although my girlfriends and female colleagues had prepared me for that to some extent, I was still surprised by the extent of it.

  9. It’s been theorized that males developed spatial ability since they had to leave the caves to hunt and needed to find their way back and women developed language abilities because they had to stay behind with the children and needed to get along.

    Of course that would mean their brains evolved differently and that can’t be right, can it?

    This also explains why men still don’t think they need to ask for directions.

    Someone should write a book about all the wrong information given by map quest and gps units. I have one – by a friend trying to reach our Michigan home from Maine. He got within one road and luckily had 4 wheel drive because he was directed to a two track that dead ended in the forest in 2 ft. of snow.

  10. Blocked by Internet Explorer?

    Try Opera?

    Try Firefox?

    Try Safari?

    Try Flock?

    Try PhaseOut?

    There are a bunch more…

  11. As someone who has extensively studied, among many other things, testing theory, it is easy to end up with a test, using ordinary words, which appears biased.

    There is no way I can imagine to devise a test which is actually free of bias, as there is now way to generate a testing set for testing bias which can, a priori, be made free of bias.

    Why? How does one measure bias? How does one know that a coin is biased if, in a thousand coin tosses, it always comes up the same way?

    One can do a statistical evaluation and come up with a probability of bias, but how does one establish that the statistical evaluation is not biased?

  12. Jill and Elaine-

    I just took a look at Aljazeera and got a banner above the website that said, “To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this site from showing certain content.”

    That’s pretty blunt. Do you think that comes by order of the Department of Homeboy Security? I wouldn’t put it past them- or our President. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “We don’t do civil liberties.”

  16. Seems appropriate:

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k87N8K-nKLo&w=480&h=390]

  18. I am getting this from al jazeera when I try to read the live blog for Feb. 3. Is anyone else getting this same message?

    “Access denied
    You are not authorized to access this page.”

  19. HenMan,

    I have difficulty with depth perception and some spatial things. I can’t back into a parking spot along the sidewalk unless there’s room for two cars! I’m great at reading maps–but can get lost easily when I’m driving. I rarely drive into Boston alone unless I know exactly how to get to my destination. My husband is a patient man and will go along with me on trial drives into the city. That said, my husband is no Sacajawea.

  20. Wow….people agree with Tootie…I do too…it cannot be a trend I assure you….

Comments are closed.