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Billionaire Investor: Babies ‘Kill’ A Woman’s Focus on the Job (VIDEO)

by College Fix Staff on May 24, 2013

More details emerged in a Washington Post story today about the controversial comments billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones made at an April symposium at the University of Virginia:

Paul Tudor Jones, the hedge fund billionaire, told an audience of University of Virginia students, alumni and others that it is difficult for mothers to be successful traders because connecting with a child is a focus “killer.” As long as women continue having children, he said, the industry is likely to be dominated by men.

“As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” Jones said, motioning to his chest during an April symposium. He was talking about two women who worked with him at a stock brokerage in the late 1970s — two women who married, had children and, according to his account, no longer had the laser focus needed for the intense world of macro trading.

“Every single investment idea . . . every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or go down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience . . . which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby,” Jones said, according to a video of his remarks The Washington Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. “And I’ve just seen it happen over and over.”


Feminists later attacked Jones, saying his comments were insensitive and would discourage women in the workplace.

Was Jones being sexist, or just realistic? What do you think?

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Data Show Women Falling Behind at Harvard Law School

by College Fix Staff on May 15, 2013

The Crimson reports:

Among the top students in their graduating classes, men and women entering Harvard Law School earn similar undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. But as soon as students step into Wasserstein Hall, a dramatic gender disparity emerges.

Indicators suggest that female students participate less and perform worse than their male counterparts over the course of their three years at the Law School.

“For better or worse, when women come to law school, they feel their gender more strongly than they may have in undergrad,” said third-year law student Stephanie E. Davidson, outgoing president of the Women’s Law Association. “I still barely have words to describe why that is or what that means. But you feel like a female lawyer instead of a lawyer.”

Davidson is not alone. Hundreds of students and faculty gathered this spring for Shatter the Ceiling, a new coalition whose goal is to address gender disparities at Harvard Law. The issue of imbalance in the classroom has emerged at the forefront of their discussions, prompting reactions across the campus and the nation over how women and men stack up.

IS SOCRATES SEXIST?

Harvard Law student Jessica R. Jensen hates the Socratic method. “It’s the worst thing in the world,” she said. “It forces you to talk like a man.”

“It made me feel really uncomfortable and incompetent at first, and it really impacted my performance in classes the first year,” Jensen said. “You feel like you don’t know the material really well because you feel like an idiot in class.”

Employed in some form across most classrooms at Harvard Law School, the Socratic method, a teaching style that relies on cold-calling, lies at the heart of the debate over gender issues and serves as a focal point for the Shatter coalition.

Today, many students and faculty have raised concerns over the teaching method, saying that men are more likely to participate voluntarily in Law School classes than women.

In a 2004 study on gender issues at Harvard Law School, a then-third-year law student Adam M. C. Neufeld found that men were 50 percent more likely than women to volunteer at least one comment during class, and 144 percent more likely to speak voluntarily at least three times. The study also showed that 10 percent of students accounted for nearly half of all volunteered comments in first-year law classrooms.

“I think the big point is that many men weren’t talking too,” Neufeld said. “There was a small number of people who account for most of the comments.”

More recently, according to a 2012 study at Yale Law School, men made 58 percent of comments in the classroom, while women made 42 percent.

Yet the root cause of this disparity remains contested, as professors, students, and administrators debate whether the Socratic method—the traditional form of legal pedagogy—needs to be adapted to account for gender disparities in the classroom.

For many in the Law School, the Socratic method is an outdated teaching style that reinforces gender imbalances in academia…

Read the full story here.

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Feminists Attack Billionaire For His Remarks about Women in Finance

by College Fix Staff on May 14, 2013

The Washington Post reports that billionaire investor Paul Tudor came under fire last week after explaining to a group of students why fewer women than men choose to work in the financial industry.

Paul Tudor Jones II, a 1976 U-Va. graduate and billionaire Greenwich-based hedge fund manager, took a stab at answering. According to those who attended, Jones explained how traders must have extraordinary focus and commitment, working long hours and forgoing personal time. A lot of women opt out of such a high-intensity career, he said, especially once they have children.

Carl P. Zeithaml, dean of the U-Va. McIntire School of Commerce, said that he immediately received complaints from alumni and faculty members who were concerned and, in some cases, appalled by the substance and framing of Jones’s comments. It seemed to be the opposite of the message that Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is pushing as she visits college campuses and urges young women not to limit themselves.

Jones declined to comment through a spokesman. Zeithaml defended Jones, saying that while the investor’s comments might have been poorly worded, they were an observation of the industry, not an endorsement of it.

Dean Zeithaml later forwarded students a letter from a female graduate. The letter harshly criticized Jones and instructed students not to listen to him.

Why Jones’s simple attempt to explain why fewer women choose careers in finance should ever be interpreted as him telling women not to choose careers in finance is beyond us. And it’s just one more example of how political correctness has made simple stating of the facts taboo on college campuses. And it was lousy of Dean Zeithaml to treat Jones’s remarks as if they were sexist when it is clear to any sane person that they weren’t.

For many feminists, there can only be one explanation for why there are fewer women in any “prestige” industry–SEXISM. Suggesting that women’s choices or natural inclinations have anything to do with it will get you instantly branded as a mysterious. In the academic world, facts are often politically contingent. And there are some opinions that you just aren’t allowed to share. Just ask former Harvard president Larry Summers.

Read the full story here.

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Women Outperforming Men in College

by College Fix Staff on February 21, 2013

Inside Higher Ed reports on new research that seeks to explain why women, on average, are outperforming men academically:

The facts of women being more likely than men to go to college, perform better academically, and major in fields other than science, technology, engineering and mathematics are mostly attributable to factors affecting students before – in some cases, long before – they enter the halls of academe. But that doesn’t mean colleges can’t do anything to mitigate the consequences.

Those are the conclusions of the authors of a new book, The Rise of Women (Russell Sage Foundation), about how and why female students continue to outpace their male counterparts in education (yet still can’t seem to earn a comparable paycheck).

“We’ve seen astonishing change over a very short historical period,” Thomas DiPrete, the book’s co-author and a sociology professor at Columbia University, said on a call with reporters Wednesday.

Starting with the people born around 1950, the rate of men’s bachelor’s degree completion stopped growing, and it stayed stagnant for years. In 1970, 20 percent of men and 14 percent of women finished college. By 2010, women’s graduation rates had “skyrocketed” to 36 percent, DiPrete said, while the rate among men grew only seven points, to 27 percent.

Today, women outpace men in college enrollment by a ratio of 1.4 to 1.

Beginning as early as kindergarten, the authors explained, girls have better average social and behavioral skills than boys, and that relates to girls’ higher average grades at each stage of school and why girls are more likely to earn a degree.

“The grade gap isn’t about ability,” said Claudia Buchmann, co-author and sociology professor at Ohio State University, “it’s really more about effort and engagement in school…”

“We really need schools that set high expectations, that treat students as individuals – not just as gendered groups – and also motivate students to invest in their education so that they can reach the big returns of a college degree that exist in today’s labor market,” Buchmann said.

Read the full story here.

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In Defense of the Muslim Headscarf

by Kristabel Stark - Westmont College on August 16, 2012

The freedom to dress as we wish is a right taken for granted on American campuses. But that’s not the case for students in every part of the world.

Last week criminal charges were filed against several women at the Karnataka College in India who had boycotted classes and organized a sit-in. Why? Because they wanted to wear a headscarf on campus, even though it has recently been banned from university classrooms. Protests have now been going on for several weeks, with students demanding freedom of dress. So far, college officials refuse to alter the policy.

What’s so threatening about wearing a headscarf? The headscarf has long been a symbol of the complex role of women in the Islamic world: Does it stand for religious conviction or oppression? For personal, independent faith, or for gender inequality? Whatever it represents, wearing a headscarf on campus is, in many parts of the world, a controversial political or religious symbol. In India, where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs have long been embroiled in violent political conflict, educators seem to have decided it’s best to prohibit these messages all together.

India isn’t the only nation where the headscarf has been banned on campus. I spent last semester studying at a university in Istanbul, Turkey. I was shocked to discover that only since the previous spring have female students been allowed to wear headscarves on campus. For a Muslim-majority country, that should make you scratch your head, covered or not.

“It is all about politics,” says Derviş Hoşça, a student at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. “In some periods these kind of freedoms are banned, but in some periods people can take their freedom back. These periods depend on which political party takes the government.” Ever since the 1920’s, Turkey has been trying to convince the world that it is as modern as any Western state, and has generally assumed it must “Westernize” in order to do so. According to some lawmakers, this means keeping symbols of traditional Islam out of the public sphere as much as possible.

But in the end, there exists no clear definition of “modern” or “the West,” much less what it looks like on a female body. In America, many women wear a headscarf every day, and take it for granted that they can wear it on college campuses without compromising either their patriotism or religion. Roger Clegg, President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, says, “It would be hard for a public university to ban a Muslim head scarf without running afoul of the First Amendment. And it is hard to argue that wearing a head scarf (or yarmulke, or crucifix, etc.) labels one as less than fully American.” The Turkish government, on the other hand, has at times concluded that publicly wearing a headscarf makes a woman less than fully Turkish.

So what does the presence of the headscarf represent on American campuses? Is it in any way a problematic imposition of Islam into American culture? Heather Keaney, professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at Westmont College, says it needn’t be viewed that way. “We all have to guard against reductionism regarding the headscarf, when, as we know, there are a million reasons why women wear one. I suspect many in America see the headscarf as a symbol of women’s oppression. But if a woman is choosing to wear a headscarf as an expression of her religious beliefs, then it embodies some of the core values of America.  If a college campus is about engaging with and appreciating diversity then certainly women who choose to wear a headscarf have a valued place.”

From hippies to hipsters, students have long understood the ability of fashion to speak strong messages. The headscarf is an article of clothing that carries a particularly strong message across the world, frequently igniting debate when it is worn—or banned. Thankfully, American students have the right to choose whether or not to wear it. It’s a freedom we should remember and protect.

Fix Contributor Kristabel Stark is a student at Westmont College–a private Christian liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, CA.

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