Profs: 'white male privilege' to blame for STEM gender gap

Article here. Excerpt:

'Two Seattle Pacific University professors contend that “white male privilege” is the primary reason that few women choose to study physics in college.

Rachel Scherr and Amy Robertson, both physics professors at Seattle Pacific, argue in the October issue of Race and Physics Teaching that physics instruction is currently unfair to women because “white male privilege pervades the discipline of physics as well as the classrooms in which physics is taught and learned.”

“Physics strongly values male-socialized traits such as independence, competition, and individual victories,” they write, adding that “objectivity and rationality themselves, the foundations of scientific ideology, are also male-socialized traits.”

The authors also assert that science has been used as a tool of racial oppression and colonization, which further hurts minorities in STEM and physics classrooms.'