9 ms·

Daring to Discuss Women in Science

38 points by d4ft 16y ago

jlm382 16y ago
This could be optimizing on the wrong thing... sure, we want more women in math and science, but instead of focusing on eliminating gender bias among researchers, we should be thinking more about increasing the number of women who want to learn math and science at a younger age - and that will do far more than any gender bias elimination ever will. Not to mention, as a woman in computer science, this workshop just seems like a waste of time. I wouldn't be happy if I were forced to go.
- miri 16y ago
  Bingo. I'm female, and a comp eng student. The problem might not be the gender bias among researchers so much, but the attitudes little girls face when learning. If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. "Encouraging workshops" sounds a bit condescending to me. If they'd treat people the same from the start and let it go on a bit so that even a parental generation has grown up with it, it'll probably even out the numbers a bit. Okay, so more boys than girls have good abilities in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't treat everyone the same.
  - DaniFong 16y ago
    Definitely. My bet is that the biggest issue is peer pressure which, honestly, is why I think top down efforts from parents and teachers and governments to boost girl's involvement in STEM are so ineffective. Most of the early development kids do in whatever field, be it sports or science, is driven by a need for approval (so are most other things at school). Unless you have a group of peers that you'd like to emulate and that you want to impress and engage with who are also doing science, you're probably not going to learn science. If the kids that are interested in science are otherwise not interested in anything you like (you like country, they like rock, you like comedies, they like sci-fi), then you're way less likely to end up studying what they do. A possible answer might be to make science clubs for girls, with awesome field-trips and awesome teachers. Physics can lead to, say, kinesiology and dancing, instead of making robots. Biology class can get outside of cell studies and into living animals. Chemistry can lead to molecular gastronomy, the development of organic hairdyes -- these kinds of things. These are the seeds from which the other studies can sprout: unless their planted, girls just won't be engaged. In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences"). Are women also worried that they are under-represented in autism figures, something which appears to closely related to the generalised male ability with mathematics and disability in respect of social aptitude. >If they'd treat people the same from the start [...] You mean ignore that people are different and want different things?
    - MichaelSalib 16y ago
      Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences"). My wife's AP Physics teacher told her that (1) "women are incapable of doing a good job in engineering and the hard sciences" and (2) "the only way you'll get a girl as captain of the science/engineering-technology team is over my dead body". The wonderful thing about (2) is that for many years, captaincy of said team was based on who got the highest scores on a technical exam. That year, my wife got the highest score. After she beat everyone else, said teacher explained that the captain would be selected based on a combination of technical proficiency (which my wife aced) and "leadership" (whatever the hell that means). This was not at some podunk school in the middle of nowhere; it was at a very well funded school which performed extremely well in national academic competitions. Now, I'm not saying this guy is representative of people in general. What I am saying is that you can't claim this bullshit never happens. It does. Within the last few years even. And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else.
      - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        >And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else. Oh so not having observed a claimed bias that is inherently unobservable - but still claimed as in the sibling comment (how can you tell that the teacher graded people lower rather than them simply attaining a lower level; people don't achieve equally in exams to their on going work) - not having made this observation makes me a misogynist?? "the way you treat women"? Excuse me, do you even know me. Perhaps my scientific wants mean that I require proof where others are willing to accept hearsay and anecdote. Approaching your anecdotal evidence as a crime, as what you claim surely is, one might ask what the motivation of the alleged offender was - why would it matter to a teacher what sex the student is. Are you sure that the teacher didn't just dislike your [now] wife; you're not yourself biased? What did her parents say, or were they complicit? Don't schools in your country care about abuse of power? Did she bother to say "like Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, ..." granted I can't think of too many examples in the upper-echelons but a clear proof that the teacher was wrong. Is it possible that the teacher was attempting to motivate her, this sort of thing does happen. What school was it, who was the teacher?
yafujifide 16y ago
The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale. And for that reason, therefore men are more common in science and engineering (STEM). But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM? Because I was under the impression that they don't; at least not more often than, say, Wall Street, or something else. What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level. And then how to we explain why there are fewer women than men go into STEM?
- camccann 16y ago
  The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale. At both ends, actually, but that's largely irrelevant to the argument. Actually, I think the idea is that males have higher variance on a variety of attributes, due to higher expected utility, in an evolutionary sense, from trying high-risk, high-reward strategies (standard disclaimer: do not anthropomorphize evolution, do not equate evolutionary goals with conscious goals). But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM? That's not necessary--only that success in STEM fields is more strongly correlated with intelligence than with unspecified other attributes. It doesn't matter what very smart people in general do; only that higher intelligence confers an advantage. Intra-field competition will take it from there. It is not, I think, controversial that intelligence correlates with success in STEM fields, seeing as it correlates with success (to some degree) in almost every area of life, but as always, the details are complicated. What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level. Not necessarily--that depends on the shape of all three intelligence distributions (both sexes, and STEM fields). That said, though, the whole article was basically fluff--lots of raising questions, not much in the way of relevant research, and virtually nothing in the way of concrete predictions or testable hypotheses. Now, as far as I know, there is some established research behind the "wider variance" idea... but to be honest the article raises all kinds of red flags; it feels like something written by picking a conclusion, then looking for science-y-sounding things to support it.
snikolov 16y ago
I have a feeling that the variability is at least partially modulated by factors such as (lack of) encouragement and gender bias. Imagine a spinning flywheel (this is a terrible analogy but I think it will illustrate my point) with particles on it that jump off the edge at random velocities. The added velocity of the flywheel eventually makes them end up at a certain radial distance on the ground. Regardless of the speed at which the flywheel spins, the average position of the particles on the ground will be at the center of the flywheel. But if the flywheel is spinning fast, the variability will be greater than if it is spinning slowly. I think in a similar way, encouragement and bias -- like the speed of the flywheel -- can account for this variability, rather than intrinsic differences in the capacity for mathematical reasoning. That said, it is interesting why the gap seemed to bottom out at 4 to 1 despite supposed programs to encourage young women to go into mathematics and science.
- Perceval 16y ago
  I can see why "encouragement and bias" might account for higher male achievement, but not why that would at the same time account for lower male achievement.
  - snikolov 16y ago
    That's a very good point. This seems to be a major point against an explanation based solely on encouragement/bias. In a solely encouragement/discouragement based theory, it might be that for some reason, males are encouraged as well as discouraged more strongly than females. I don't know of any (even anecdotal) evidence of this happening, so I wouldn't bet on it. In any case, the underlying origins of these statistics are no doubt complex, messy and controversial.
  - m-photonic 16y ago
    Males are not a homogenous group. There's no reason why some subgroups of males couldn't be negatively affected by social pressures just because other subgroups are positively affected.
    - 16y ago
pmccool 16y ago
One important issue the article doesn't address: do these scores have any meaningful correlation with success in the sciences? The ability to do research and the ability to do well in exams are two quite different things. On the face of it, a pretty shaky premise.
- sorbus 16y ago
  From the second page of the article: "Other studies have shown that these differences in extreme test scores correlate with later achievements in science and academia. Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university. "Of course, a high score on a test is hardly the only factor important for a successful career in science, and no one claims that the right-tail disparity is the sole reason for the relatively low number of female professors in math-oriented sciences. There are other potentially more important explanations, both biological and cultural, including possible social bias against women."
sliverstorm 16y ago
Feminists face an interesting challenge here; STEM seem to be their Waterloo (I believe that's the right phrase). They stand upon the claim that women are totally equal to men. This means that for their cause to survive, they have to prove that they are totally equal in every way, which means being proven wrong when it comes to STEM would be disastrous. Thus they can never acknowledge the possibility, and will likely do their best to tear down anyone who suggests it. This is, of course, not particularly any different from anything else political, though it seems to be more savage thus far. I personally wish someone would just figure out a truly unbiased test and get the answer already. I don't care what the answer is, I just want cold hard fact to back up them claims & decisions made in regards to all this. edit: cummon, if you're gonna downmod, please leave a reason. edit2: I use equal in the sense of 'the same', not 'superior'/'inferior'.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  I have a feeling that STEM isn't going to change anything, people want to believe whatever they want to believe and they are not going to let the facts stand in between them. Take Intelligent Design as an example. There is a shit ton of evidence that proves that it is all a bunch of bullshit, but it doesn't matter because a lot of people want to believe it, so that is what they do. So sure it would be nice to know the answer, but it isn't going to change anything.
- DaniFong 16y ago
  Problem 1: You're impute a rather radical belief onto all feminists. You are constructing a straw feminist. Problem 2: How is a person supposed to choose an unbiased test? What do you even mean? Problem 3: The most obvious fact should be that people are complicated, and aren't so easily reducible to a neat pile of normally distributed aptitudes dependent on a binary gender variable. The cold hard fact you should be aware of is that those who are trying to make this sound simple or concrete or objectively determined are deceiving themselves. The counterfactual you'd look for -- if everyone were gender blind, how would women fair in science and technology? -- hasn't come close to true. And as long as people continue to slam their fights and debate over whether women are innately unsuited to this kind of work, they won't be -- the nature of the stereotype threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat) will ensure it.
DaniFong 16y ago
I almost wrote yet another in a long series of posts bringing the evidence I encountered on the flip side to this discussion. I thought, once again, that doing so might have enabled a few more people to release that it's just too darned hard to disentangle cultural effects from innate attributes, talent and motivation, confidence and skill. I thought that I could detach the certainty from the minds of those who wished to propound stereotypic ordinals as if they were biological, scientific fact, and perhaps get parents to question what sort of encouragement -- in any sense -- their children get when their first experience upon birth is a pronouncement of their gender. And then I realized that I tried that before, and it went nowhere. Not gonna fan these flames.
- calibraxis 16y ago
  Evidence is always welcome by some people, even if you happen to get downvotes and indignant replies. A hacker would probably view sexism institutionally. Institutions generally have gatekeepers. When the gatekeepers believe that your race/gender is inferior or unsuited to their workplace, then it's even harder to enter the institution, through no fault of your own. (For example, if you're female, they may scrutinize you extra closely to find masculine traits like aggressiveness. Their reasoning may be that a certain "assertiveness" is important to survive in their masculine workplace.) This sets up a feedback loop: your teachers may be more active in dissuading you from studying technical subjects, because they predict that gatekeepers will require you to jump a higher bar of skill and attitudes. Even when many of the gatekeepers relax, the news of this doesn't propagate instantly through the system -- there may be a lag before other parts of the system catch up. I think this means there needs to be outreach to the public about how workplaces are wanting to improve. (If they are.)
MikeTaylor 16y ago
I am a publishing academic scientist. I observe that women in my particular field take one of two paths. A certain proportion invest a lot of their time blogging about how hard it is to be a Woman In Science. The rest get on with doing research, presenting at conferences, writing papers, and generally being scientists. In most aspects, women in science (at least in my field) no longer face significant discrimination. I am not saying it never happens, but it's much less common now than it used to be a few decades ago. We are now, happily, at a point where women in science can better advance their cause by doing science than by complaining about the status quo. It's simply a better way to invest time and energy towards making up whatever prestige gap may still exist. To summarise: shut up and write the damned paper. (This is good advice to all scientists, male or female, black or white.)
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  women in science (at least in my field) no longer face significant discrimination. I wouldn't be surprised if women in your field no longer faced outright prejudice. But discrimination involves systemic effects beyond just individual prejudice. Do the women in your field have wives? You know what a wife is I'm sure: the kind of spouse who spends more time with the children and doing all the drudgery of running a house so that their science-doing spouse can spend all their time at work doing exciting important science. Sometimes wives have jobs, but we all know that such jobs aren't really important and must be given up if the important science research has to move to get a better professorship. If your female colleagues don't have wives, do you think that might, in any way, be connected with societal expectations for how marriages should work? I mean, having an unpaid personal assistant is surely a boon to research productivity, so it seems that differential assignment of said assistants to scientists of different genders might bring about discriminatory effects. Even in the absence of individual prejudice by any scientist in your field.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    Downvoters: any particular reason for downvoting this comment?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
frossie 16y ago
Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university. This sentence is very important to the point he is trying to make but I can't find it in the research that he quotes earlier and I have no idea where it comes from. Moreover it is contradicted by my own personal experience; anybody who thinks the ability to obtain a doctorate is so tightly correlated with such fine variations in intelligence has not spent much time around PhDs.
- TheEzEzz 16y ago
  Getting tenure at a top university is orders of magnitude more difficult than simply getting a PhD.
  - frossie 16y ago
    Indeed tenure at a top university is much harder, and therefore small number statistics, and so I would be even more surprised to see it linked to a sub-one percentile spread in seventh grade scores.
    - DaniFong 16y ago
      The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth seems to uncover exactly this relationship. www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf In the bottom quartile of the SMPY cohort (99 percentile) less than 0.5% received tenure at a top 50 school. Of the top quartile, it was a bit over 3%. --- A throughout read of the SMPY literature should be required reading for discussions of this nature online. Also a good read: "Cross-Cultural Analysis of Students with Exceptional Talent in Mathematical Problem Solving." www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf
- dagw 16y ago
  Getting a PhD in science (or anything else really), has very little to do with being intelligent and everything to do with really really wanting it and being willing to put in the hard work. I know several very intelligent people who failed to get their PhD because they found it more work than they where willing to do, and I know several people with fairly mediocre grades who got PhDs because it was what they really wanted and they where willing to do the work and not give up.
random_guy 16y ago
I've collected and studied data from rubygems a while ago and I came to the exact same conclusion. (you can find the post here -> http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-rubygems/ http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-r... ) While at the time I wasn't so sure about my thoughts, since the amount of lynching i received in the comments, not I'm totally sure that this issue needs serious and unbiased scientific studies.

38 points by d4ft 16y ago

This could be optimizing on the wrong thing... sure, we want more women in math and science, but instead of focusing on eliminating gender bias among researchers, we should be thinking more about increasing the number of women who want to learn math and science at a younger age - and that will do far more than any gender bias elimination ever will. Not to mention, as a woman in computer science, this workshop just seems like a waste of time. I wouldn't be happy if I were forced to go.

miri 16y ago
Bingo. I'm female, and a comp eng student. The problem might not be the gender bias among researchers so much, but the attitudes little girls face when learning. If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. "Encouraging workshops" sounds a bit condescending to me. If they'd treat people the same from the start and let it go on a bit so that even a parental generation has grown up with it, it'll probably even out the numbers a bit. Okay, so more boys than girls have good abilities in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't treat everyone the same.
- DaniFong 16y ago
  Definitely. My bet is that the biggest issue is peer pressure which, honestly, is why I think top down efforts from parents and teachers and governments to boost girl's involvement in STEM are so ineffective. Most of the early development kids do in whatever field, be it sports or science, is driven by a need for approval (so are most other things at school). Unless you have a group of peers that you'd like to emulate and that you want to impress and engage with who are also doing science, you're probably not going to learn science. If the kids that are interested in science are otherwise not interested in anything you like (you like country, they like rock, you like comedies, they like sci-fi), then you're way less likely to end up studying what they do. A possible answer might be to make science clubs for girls, with awesome field-trips and awesome teachers. Physics can lead to, say, kinesiology and dancing, instead of making robots. Biology class can get outside of cell studies and into living animals. Chemistry can lead to molecular gastronomy, the development of organic hairdyes -- these kinds of things. These are the seeds from which the other studies can sprout: unless their planted, girls just won't be engaged. In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences"). Are women also worried that they are under-represented in autism figures, something which appears to closely related to the generalised male ability with mathematics and disability in respect of social aptitude. >If they'd treat people the same from the start [...] You mean ignore that people are different and want different things?
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences"). My wife's AP Physics teacher told her that (1) "women are incapable of doing a good job in engineering and the hard sciences" and (2) "the only way you'll get a girl as captain of the science/engineering-technology team is over my dead body". The wonderful thing about (2) is that for many years, captaincy of said team was based on who got the highest scores on a technical exam. That year, my wife got the highest score. After she beat everyone else, said teacher explained that the captain would be selected based on a combination of technical proficiency (which my wife aced) and "leadership" (whatever the hell that means). This was not at some podunk school in the middle of nowhere; it was at a very well funded school which performed extremely well in national academic competitions. Now, I'm not saying this guy is representative of people in general. What I am saying is that you can't claim this bullshit never happens. It does. Within the last few years even. And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else. Oh so not having observed a claimed bias that is inherently unobservable - but still claimed as in the sibling comment (how can you tell that the teacher graded people lower rather than them simply attaining a lower level; people don't achieve equally in exams to their on going work) - not having made this observation makes me a misogynist?? "the way you treat women"? Excuse me, do you even know me. Perhaps my scientific wants mean that I require proof where others are willing to accept hearsay and anecdote. Approaching your anecdotal evidence as a crime, as what you claim surely is, one might ask what the motivation of the alleged offender was - why would it matter to a teacher what sex the student is. Are you sure that the teacher didn't just dislike your [now] wife; you're not yourself biased? What did her parents say, or were they complicit? Don't schools in your country care about abuse of power? Did she bother to say "like Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, ..." granted I can't think of too many examples in the upper-echelons but a clear proof that the teacher was wrong. Is it possible that the teacher was attempting to motivate her, this sort of thing does happen. What school was it, who was the teacher?

yafujifide 16y ago

The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale. And for that reason, therefore men are more common in science and engineering (STEM). But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM? Because I was under the impression that they don't; at least not more often than, say, Wall Street, or something else. What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level. And then how to we explain why there are fewer women than men go into STEM?

camccann 16y ago
The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale. At both ends, actually, but that's largely irrelevant to the argument. Actually, I think the idea is that males have higher variance on a variety of attributes, due to higher expected utility, in an evolutionary sense, from trying high-risk, high-reward strategies (standard disclaimer: do not anthropomorphize evolution, do not equate evolutionary goals with conscious goals). But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM? That's not necessary--only that success in STEM fields is more strongly correlated with intelligence than with unspecified other attributes. It doesn't matter what very smart people in general do; only that higher intelligence confers an advantage. Intra-field competition will take it from there. It is not, I think, controversial that intelligence correlates with success in STEM fields, seeing as it correlates with success (to some degree) in almost every area of life, but as always, the details are complicated. What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level. Not necessarily--that depends on the shape of all three intelligence distributions (both sexes, and STEM fields). That said, though, the whole article was basically fluff--lots of raising questions, not much in the way of relevant research, and virtually nothing in the way of concrete predictions or testable hypotheses. Now, as far as I know, there is some established research behind the "wider variance" idea... but to be honest the article raises all kinds of red flags; it feels like something written by picking a conclusion, then looking for science-y-sounding things to support it.

snikolov 16y ago

I have a feeling that the variability is at least partially modulated by factors such as (lack of) encouragement and gender bias. Imagine a spinning flywheel (this is a terrible analogy but I think it will illustrate my point) with particles on it that jump off the edge at random velocities. The added velocity of the flywheel eventually makes them end up at a certain radial distance on the ground. Regardless of the speed at which the flywheel spins, the average position of the particles on the ground will be at the center of the flywheel. But if the flywheel is spinning fast, the variability will be greater than if it is spinning slowly. I think in a similar way, encouragement and bias -- like the speed of the flywheel -- can account for this variability, rather than intrinsic differences in the capacity for mathematical reasoning. That said, it is interesting why the gap seemed to bottom out at 4 to 1 despite supposed programs to encourage young women to go into mathematics and science.

Perceval 16y ago
I can see why "encouragement and bias" might account for higher male achievement, but not why that would at the same time account for lower male achievement.
- snikolov 16y ago
  That's a very good point. This seems to be a major point against an explanation based solely on encouragement/bias. In a solely encouragement/discouragement based theory, it might be that for some reason, males are encouraged as well as discouraged more strongly than females. I don't know of any (even anecdotal) evidence of this happening, so I wouldn't bet on it. In any case, the underlying origins of these statistics are no doubt complex, messy and controversial.
- m-photonic 16y ago
  Males are not a homogenous group. There's no reason why some subgroups of males couldn't be negatively affected by social pressures just because other subgroups are positively affected.
  - 16y ago

pmccool 16y ago

One important issue the article doesn't address: do these scores have any meaningful correlation with success in the sciences? The ability to do research and the ability to do well in exams are two quite different things. On the face of it, a pretty shaky premise.

sorbus 16y ago
From the second page of the article: "Other studies have shown that these differences in extreme test scores correlate with later achievements in science and academia. Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university. "Of course, a high score on a test is hardly the only factor important for a successful career in science, and no one claims that the right-tail disparity is the sole reason for the relatively low number of female professors in math-oriented sciences. There are other potentially more important explanations, both biological and cultural, including possible social bias against women."

sliverstorm 16y ago

Feminists face an interesting challenge here; STEM seem to be their Waterloo (I believe that's the right phrase). They stand upon the claim that women are totally equal to men. This means that for their cause to survive, they have to prove that they are totally equal in every way, which means being proven wrong when it comes to STEM would be disastrous. Thus they can never acknowledge the possibility, and will likely do their best to tear down anyone who suggests it. This is, of course, not particularly any different from anything else political, though it seems to be more savage thus far. I personally wish someone would just figure out a truly unbiased test and get the answer already. I don't care what the answer is, I just want cold hard fact to back up them claims & decisions made in regards to all this. edit: cummon, if you're gonna downmod, please leave a reason. edit2: I use equal in the sense of 'the same', not 'superior'/'inferior'.

tomjen3 16y ago
I have a feeling that STEM isn't going to change anything, people want to believe whatever they want to believe and they are not going to let the facts stand in between them. Take Intelligent Design as an example. There is a shit ton of evidence that proves that it is all a bunch of bullshit, but it doesn't matter because a lot of people want to believe it, so that is what they do. So sure it would be nice to know the answer, but it isn't going to change anything.
DaniFong 16y ago
Problem 1: You're impute a rather radical belief onto all feminists. You are constructing a straw feminist. Problem 2: How is a person supposed to choose an unbiased test? What do you even mean? Problem 3: The most obvious fact should be that people are complicated, and aren't so easily reducible to a neat pile of normally distributed aptitudes dependent on a binary gender variable. The cold hard fact you should be aware of is that those who are trying to make this sound simple or concrete or objectively determined are deceiving themselves. The counterfactual you'd look for -- if everyone were gender blind, how would women fair in science and technology? -- hasn't come close to true. And as long as people continue to slam their fights and debate over whether women are innately unsuited to this kind of work, they won't be -- the nature of the stereotype threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat) will ensure it.

DaniFong 16y ago

I almost wrote yet another in a long series of posts bringing the evidence I encountered on the flip side to this discussion. I thought, once again, that doing so might have enabled a few more people to release that it's just too darned hard to disentangle cultural effects from innate attributes, talent and motivation, confidence and skill. I thought that I could detach the certainty from the minds of those who wished to propound stereotypic ordinals as if they were biological, scientific fact, and perhaps get parents to question what sort of encouragement -- in any sense -- their children get when their first experience upon birth is a pronouncement of their gender. And then I realized that I tried that before, and it went nowhere. Not gonna fan these flames.

calibraxis 16y ago
Evidence is always welcome by some people, even if you happen to get downvotes and indignant replies. A hacker would probably view sexism institutionally. Institutions generally have gatekeepers. When the gatekeepers believe that your race/gender is inferior or unsuited to their workplace, then it's even harder to enter the institution, through no fault of your own. (For example, if you're female, they may scrutinize you extra closely to find masculine traits like aggressiveness. Their reasoning may be that a certain "assertiveness" is important to survive in their masculine workplace.) This sets up a feedback loop: your teachers may be more active in dissuading you from studying technical subjects, because they predict that gatekeepers will require you to jump a higher bar of skill and attitudes. Even when many of the gatekeepers relax, the news of this doesn't propagate instantly through the system -- there may be a lag before other parts of the system catch up. I think this means there needs to be outreach to the public about how workplaces are wanting to improve. (If they are.)

MikeTaylor 16y ago

I am a publishing academic scientist. I observe that women in my particular field take one of two paths. A certain proportion invest a lot of their time blogging about how hard it is to be a Woman In Science. The rest get on with doing research, presenting at conferences, writing papers, and generally being scientists. In most aspects, women in science (at least in my field) no longer face significant discrimination. I am not saying it never happens, but it's much less common now than it used to be a few decades ago. We are now, happily, at a point where women in science can better advance their cause by doing science than by complaining about the status quo. It's simply a better way to invest time and energy towards making up whatever prestige gap may still exist. To summarise: shut up and write the damned paper. (This is good advice to all scientists, male or female, black or white.)

MichaelSalib 16y ago
women in science (at least in my field) no longer face significant discrimination. I wouldn't be surprised if women in your field no longer faced outright prejudice. But discrimination involves systemic effects beyond just individual prejudice. Do the women in your field have wives? You know what a wife is I'm sure: the kind of spouse who spends more time with the children and doing all the drudgery of running a house so that their science-doing spouse can spend all their time at work doing exciting important science. Sometimes wives have jobs, but we all know that such jobs aren't really important and must be given up if the important science research has to move to get a better professorship. If your female colleagues don't have wives, do you think that might, in any way, be connected with societal expectations for how marriages should work? I mean, having an unpaid personal assistant is surely a boon to research productivity, so it seems that differential assignment of said assistants to scientists of different genders might bring about discriminatory effects. Even in the absence of individual prejudice by any scientist in your field.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  Downvoters: any particular reason for downvoting this comment?

deleted 16y ago

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frossie 16y ago

Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university. This sentence is very important to the point he is trying to make but I can't find it in the research that he quotes earlier and I have no idea where it comes from. Moreover it is contradicted by my own personal experience; anybody who thinks the ability to obtain a doctorate is so tightly correlated with such fine variations in intelligence has not spent much time around PhDs.

TheEzEzz 16y ago
Getting tenure at a top university is orders of magnitude more difficult than simply getting a PhD.
- frossie 16y ago
  Indeed tenure at a top university is much harder, and therefore small number statistics, and so I would be even more surprised to see it linked to a sub-one percentile spread in seventh grade scores.
  - DaniFong 16y ago
    The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth seems to uncover exactly this relationship. www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf In the bottom quartile of the SMPY cohort (99 percentile) less than 0.5% received tenure at a top 50 school. Of the top quartile, it was a bit over 3%. --- A throughout read of the SMPY literature should be required reading for discussions of this nature online. Also a good read: "Cross-Cultural Analysis of Students with Exceptional Talent in Mathematical Problem Solving." www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf
dagw 16y ago
Getting a PhD in science (or anything else really), has very little to do with being intelligent and everything to do with really really wanting it and being willing to put in the hard work. I know several very intelligent people who failed to get their PhD because they found it more work than they where willing to do, and I know several people with fairly mediocre grades who got PhDs because it was what they really wanted and they where willing to do the work and not give up.

random_guy 16y ago

I've collected and studied data from rubygems a while ago and I came to the exact same conclusion. (you can find the post here -> http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-rubygems/ http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-r... ) While at the time I wasn't so sure about my thoughts, since the amount of lynching i received in the comments, not I'm totally sure that this issue needs serious and unbiased scientific studies.