Women-Only STEM Programs Target the Gender Gap. Now the Education Dept. Is Investigating Them for Bias.

Update (8/26/2019, 5:10 p.m.): This article has been updated with a response from Kursat C. Pekgoz.

Women have long been underrepresented across science, technology, engineering, and math majors, leading colleges to start hundreds of programs — scholarships, summer camps, and societies — to draw them in.

But in recent years, a handful of activists have complained that those programs, and gender-specific programs more broadly, discriminate against men. And they’ve grabbed the attention of the U.S. Department of Education.

The department has started more than 24 investigations of colleges, including the Universities of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, Yale University, and many others, the Los Angeles Times reported this week, following complaints that their single-sex programs and scholarships discriminate against men.

Women earn less than a third of all degrees in STEM, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, and remain underrepresented in many of the fields after graduation.

Part of the movement against the programs originated with Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan at Flint. He has documented much of his fight against what he calls “gender apartheid” in online posts at the American Enterprise Institute.

Perry said he began filing complaints with civil-rights offices in 2016, when he noticed that Michigan State University had a women-only lounge. The university shut it down and reopened it to all genders (a move it said was already planned following other complaints from men, and concerns about welcoming transgender students).

Perry believes he is responsible for many of the Education Department’s outstanding investigations. His work has reportedly led Kursat C. Pekgoz, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California, to file complaints of his own. (Pekgoz had been the subject of a Title IX sexual-harassment investigation, but has denied the accusations and said the investigation was unrelated to his complaints. After publication of this article, Pekgoz disputed taking inspiration from Perry and said he is “highly critical” of Perry’s methods because they chill free speech.)

Perry, as well as the Maryland-based organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, argues that single-sex programs violate Title IX, which bars institutions that receive federal funds from discriminating based on gender. In a report released this week, the organization said that 57 percent of the more than 200 colleges it studied offer gender-specific scholarships in a way that is “facially discriminatory.”

“They enforce any kind of discrimination against women, but they allow discrimination against men, in violation of Title IX’s clear prohibition of sex discrimination,” Perry said.

An Education Department spokesman confirmed that the Office for Civil Rights is investigating colleges including Princeton, Rice, and Yale Universities, and the University of Southern California, for possible discrimination against males on the basis of sex, and declined to provide further details because the investigations are active.

Distorting Title IX

Experts and advocates have argued that pressuring these programs into closure would flout the Education Department’s own regulations and distort the purpose of Title IX protections. Department regulations allow for affirmative-action programs “to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limited participation” in the past.

The American Association of University Women has pointed out the need for Title IX protections in many areas, including STEM fields, where women remain underrepresented.

Advocates for the programs also say there are real consequences for dropping them.

“In states where affirmative-action bans have been implemented for race-conscious admissions, we’ve seen enrollment for people of color drop,” Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of educational equity at the National Women’s Law Center, told NBC News. “And so we’re really concerned that doing away with gender-inclusive programs would see the same thing for women across the board.” (The university women’s group and the women’s law center did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.)

When it comes to encouraging women to pursue STEM fields, the research is clearer in some areas than in others, said Shulamit B. Khan, a faculty member at Boston University who studies women and STEM.

Literature shows that having a role model who is knowledgeable in science or math, for instance, makes a young woman more likely to pursue those fields, Khan said. Data on single-sex programs are less clear. But she said they serve a valuable role in exposing women to fields they may not otherwise see themselves in.

“If your goal is to get more women in STEM, if you crack down on the programs, yes, you will harm it,” Khan said. “If they only have mixed-gender programs, it will probably end up with fewer women going into STEM.”

Women outnumber men in colleges over all, and in some undergraduate scientific fields like biology. But in most “math intensive” fields, Khan said, “there’s still a long way to go.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.