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> girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they ar
by rocqua 9y ago
> girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure.
This does not quite jive with enrollment at my university. I am thinking specifically of maths as compared to other STEM fields. Of all seriously theoretical courses, maths has the most women, last time I checked, it was pretty close to 50/50.
Yet, math is much less collaborative than physics, that is the understanding has to be your own. If there is a people part to either, I'd argue its physics because it is closer to an application. I suppose one might say that maths has more of a people part, because much of math in practice is communication. That feels like stretching a definition though.
When looking at the enrollment numbers, what is most striking is the difference between CS and maths. Whereas maths is about 50/50, CS seems to be below 10% female. As far as subject manner is concerned, I'd say these two studies are very close. And yet, maths is way more popular.
Based on this, I'd argue that the low enrollment in CS has nothing to do with the subject matter, and much more to do with how comfortable women feel in either group.
- marktangotango 9y agoMy understanding is you get a lot secondary ed math majors, which tends to skew female. In my area at least.
- searealist 9y agoMost math majors are there to become math teachers, which is very people oriented. If you consider only PhD programs for math then it becomes very male dominated.
- michaelt 9y agoIf the near-50-50 gender ratio in math is explained by math teachers, wouldn't we expect a similar ratio in physics?
- searealist 9y agoI'm not sure what you are claiming.
- cocoablazing 9y agoThink about the market for those teachers. Anecdotally, I took one physics course in my secondary education, and about eight math courses.
- ecshafer 9y agoMost physics students become engineers, scientists or programmers in my experience.
- rocqua 9y agoThat does not seem to be the case for my year of math students. Though it seems the ratio does become worse at the PhD level (I'd guess not as much, but I don't move in those circles much).
- jibe 9y agojibe, not jive http://americanenglishdoctor.com/wordpress/jive-and-jibe/ http://americanenglishdoctor.com/wordpress/jive-and-jibe/
- rocqua 9y agoI finally get to terms with sailing terms in english, and then jibing starts having different meanings :|