7 ms·
why is it shocking?
by wheresmyusern 9y ago
why is it shocking?
- Hasz 9y agoIf you accept the idea that a penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people, then the odds of 55/56 men winning by chance are very, very, very low.
- lambdaphagy 9y agoIf.
- notzorbo3 9y ago> If you accept the idea that a penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people That would seem rather detached from reality.
- bionsystems 9y agoMaybe he meant "Even if" ?
- cycrutchfield 9y agoAll it would require is just that the standard deviation for math ability in men (whether by nature or nurture, I am making no judgment either way) is only very slightly higher than for women. Since we are looking at the tail of the distribution, the result would not be surprising.
- tzs 9y agoAs Helena Cronin noted of men: "more dumbbells but more Nobels" [1]. [1] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/2008/response/10670 https://www.edge.org/annual-question/2008/response/10670
- 77pt77 9y agoThat hypothesis got Larry Summers in a lot of trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...
- yorwba 9y agoI once did some calculations to explore the expected effect of that difference in standard deviation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524 I'm on my phone right now and can't redo it for the gender ratio of Fields medalists, but I expect that the effect would cover most of the difference, since the cutoff for the award does seem quite high.
- sannee 9y ago> penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people Fields medals are not awarded based on "penchant for math" though. And it surely isn't exactly fault of the prize committee that there aren't very many female mathematicians to choose from. Note: I don't know if 55/56 is "correct" from the point of the actual numbers.
- Retric 9y agoFor the last 30 years over 40% of graduating math majors where where women. That drops to 15% of tenure track mathematicians being women, but again that's a long way to sub 2%.
- smallnamespace 9y agoThis is the exactly the pattern you would expect to see though if the variance of mathematical ability is higher in men than in women, even if mean ability is precisely identical. The sex ratio gets progressively more extreme as you go further out in the tails.
- Retric 9y agoNot really, you get a fat tail effect at extreme ability reducing the differences. A more likely cause are highly capable women bailing on the field. EX: Women live significantly longer on average and the oldest women lived 6 years longer than the oldest man. Yet, the 16th oldest person was a man and 6% of oldest 100 people where men. And 6% of the top 100 living people are men https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people
- smallnamespace 9y agoI'm not sure what you mean—why would you assume there is a fat tail expect in the first place, and not something approximating a normal distribution? And even if you presume something like a Pareto distribution, the likelihood ratio between two distributions grow through the tails if their variance is not identical. edit: I see you bring up longevity, but I don't see why this is relevant to a discussion about variance in mathematical ability or intelligence? See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886906000420 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188690...
- cc81 9y agoOne argument that some have is that men have a more extreme distribution of IQ and mathematical ability and when it comes to things like the Fields medal it is the few extreme ones that make an impact. I don't know how well done those studies are though. EDIT: I doubt it is that big though.
- majos 9y agoI used to believe this, but now I think a confounding factor here is that girls are socialized away from extremes in general.
- rimliu 9y agoOk, I can get you can somehow socialize a person to pretend be dumber than they are, but how do you socialize someone away from being dumb? And why does that not work for boys?
- majos 9y agoI think poor achool performance is more a function of behavioral issues than "being dumb" -- not because everyone is smart, but because the bar in your average American school is more about following directions than anything else. Boys lagging behind girls in social development is well-documented, right? And at the Fields medal level it's less about "pretend you're not smart" and more about "we just don't think it's a good idea for you to skip grades".
- ajkjk 9y agoThat gap also exists in the middle-school and high-school levels [0] (at least in the US), so it fully reduces to the simpler question of why that's true. We should be able to agree that by the time we're discussing professional mathematics there's no expectation that it would be randomly distributed among genders. [0] https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598 https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598 (admittedly a bit old; maybe a lot has changed in ~10 years?)
- zawerf 9y agoStill true globally at the high school level. Found some quora answers with perspectives on IOI(programming olympiad) and IMO(math olympiad) which both have low single digit percentage female participants: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-few-females-in-competitive-programming-aside-from-the-fact-that-there-are-fewer-women-doing-CS-degree-than-males https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-few-females-in-competiti... https://www.quora.com/Why-do-boys-outperform-girls-in-math-competitions-such-as-the-International-Mathematical-Olympiad https://www.quora.com/Why-do-boys-outperform-girls-in-math-c...
- ars 9y ago> a penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people As politically difficult as it is to say, intelligence is NOT distributed randomly among all people. Not by sex, not by race.
- vinchuco 9y agoCharacterizing something as "politically difficult" is no evidence for a claim.
- ars 9y agoThere's tons of evidence. You can google as easily as I can. The hard part is not the evidence, it's dealing with the social result. Do we as a culture decide "Yes, it might be true, but it's too harmful, so we will act as if it's false?" Give extra tutoring to those lower on the scale, and withhold it from those higher, to try to even the balance? Give special advantage to those lower? Is there a way to do that without disadvantaging others? What sort of advantage? Something else? Each of those options has pros and cons. It should be discussed, but like I said, it's politically difficult, so people try not to talk about it.
- vinchuco 9y ago> You can google as easily as I can. Unsure. But you're the one making the claim.
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- drb91 9y agoYou also need the assumption that the judges are unbiased and that people have equal opportunities. Lots of room for explanation from many angles here.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoIf you think about it, a 55/56 ratio (.98) is only commensurate with a distribution of mathematical talent by which the vast majority of women can't add 2 and 2 together. Like, it would not even justified by women being "somewhat" less good at maths at the high level than men. Women would have to be really, really bad at maths for that to be a natural result.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoNo, they just have to be vastly less likely to be top 0.001% at math. In any activity where you can distinguish the top 0.001% talents versus the top 0.01%, you're going to get way fewer women at the top. One of the reasons is, half their cells are using one X chromosome and half are using the other, so they're more likely to get their performance dragged down by deleterious mutations.
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- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago>> One of the reasons is, half their cells are using one X chromosome and half are using the other, so they're more likely to get their performance dragged down by deleterious mutations. That sounds like something has been severely misunderstood by someone, possibly even me. Are you a biologist?
- SamReidHughes 9y agoSee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoWith respect, this does not answer my question: are you a biologist?
- addicted 9y agoThe penchant for math is probably randomly distributed between men and women. But all that is overshadowed by the fact that culturally and societally women are heavily discouraged from entering and succeeding in fields like math. This begins right from childhood, where an abacus may make a good toy for a boy, while the appropriate toy for a girl would be a mini kitchen set. Fortunately a lot of this is changing, however, the benefits of no longer discouraging 50% of the population from entering science/engineering won't be felt for another couple of generations.
- rimliu 9y ago> The penchant for math is probably randomly distributed between men and women. Source? > But all that is overshadowed by the fact that culturally and > societally women are heavily discouraged from entering and succeeding > in fields like math. Source? > This begins right from childhood, where an abacus may make a good toy for a boy, > while the appropriate toy for a girl would be a mini kitchen set. This is often repeated, but I doubt that's true.
- Chris2048 9y ago> Source? You mis-quoted; the original comment said: > If you accept the idea that a penchant.. which was a response to: > why is it shocking? i.e. It answers the question, "Why might [someone] find this shocking?" - Note that user 'Hasz' was not the user that found it shocking.
- 77pt77 9y ago> If you accept the idea that a penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people Is there any experimental support for such an assumption?
- javiramos 9y agoI meant shocking as in causing dismay, not surprising. Women are vastly underrepresented in math.
- quickthrower2 9y ago50/56 is more likely. To get to 55/56 is quite an outlier.