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He address that in the article "Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors" ... "I was totall
by Veelox 8y ago
He address that in the article
"Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors" ...
"I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.
Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school."
- tptacek 8y agoNo, the numbers hold up all the way to PhDs. Women aren't obtaining math PhD's to become "math teachers" (and, if you read my original comment, you can also predict that they aren't doing academic crypto research to go teach math either).
- chillee 8y agoCould you provide a citation on "the numbers hold up all the way to PhDs"? I found https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-phd.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p... Vs https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor... Over 40% undergraduate degrees go to women, while less than 30% of doctorates.
- tptacek 8y agohttps://imgur.com/a/nNHqwsP https://imgur.com/a/nNHqwsP Science Magazine, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", vertical axis is PhDs, 2011 numbers. If nothing else at this point I think we can put a bullet in the "they just want to be math teachers" hypothesis.
- aptwebapps 8y agoThat url works, but no image loads.