9 ms·

I am reminded of Larry Summers, then the head of Harvard, who said something similar: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.gende

I am reminded of Larry Summers, then the head of Harvard, who said something similar: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsge... I think that previously there was a distinct issue with not enough women going through the degree programs. If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar. I think that just because the sample size for women is smaller, it will appear that the variance is smaller as there are less samples to spread it out. Thus it is possible that this will address itself if women equalize with men or exceed them in terms of graduation numbers in the relevant fields. Given that women have actually come to dominant a lot of previously male dominated fields, fields where prominent men said women would never succeed at, I think that mathematics and physics could fall as well. It may take longer, but it is very possible. If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it, and I wouldn't be surprised if while statistically women are different there are unforseen benefits to that. I feel like he has found one statistical difference between men and women and believe that this defines forever men and women performance in the very complex field of physics. This is over simplifying everything and I'd never bet on such an oversimplified prediction based on cherry picking by an amateur. I think that when some people discover there are third rail/hot button issues that "can not be talked about in polite company", they take stronger positions on those issues in a reactionary way than are actually warranted by the evidence. EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted?

dang 8y ago
> EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? That breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." It also leads directly to off-topic dreck like this subthread, which I detached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310. (The rest of your comment is fine.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tptacek 8y ago
Last September, Professor Strumia stated that “physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation" at a presentation at the Cern the workshop. He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts. Did Larry Summers do anything as overt as this? CERN had to apologize after his presentation, which now includes a note: Alessandro Strumia applied to give a presentation on “Bibiliometrics data about gender issues in fundamental theory”. The committee was skeptical of his motivations but decided to allow him to give a scientific presentation on data analysis. The committee is deeply disappointed that the presentation, which had not been shared prior to its delivery, included attacks on individuals and was contrary to CERN’s values, as set out in the CERN Code of Conduct. CERN’s official statement on the matter can be found here: https://press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/updated-statement-cern-stands-diversity* https://press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/updated-statement-...
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Click the link below and have a look at the cartoon in question. Though I can realize how some might be offended, it's not an offensive cartoon. Or rather - the 'offensiveness of the cartoon' is only a function of one's sensitivity to intersectional issues. So any cartoon/animation that is 'against' the intersectional view will be regarded as 'offensive'. The very fact that this cartoon could be regarded as 'offensive' is ironically at the heart of this debate. We all have a right to be offended, but we also have a right to express ourselves within reason. The cartoon I guess was a needless poke in the eye but it's really not that bad.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Your rebuttal is tautological; you're essentially saying "this presentation was only offensive to people who were offended by it". Well, sure. A gauge for how offended people were by it: CERN immediately apologized and ultimately fired Strumia for it. I don't know how "offensive" I find it, and I'm not a physicist, but I try to put myself in the shoes of a physicist attending a workshop at CERN when someone gets up on stage with a presentation titled "Experimental test of a new global discrete symmetry" and it turns out to be a lecture about "Cultural Marxism", and I assume I'd have been pissed too.
jmole 8y ago
I've been reading recently about a structural/sociocultural/technological phenomenon that's actually holding women back in a field where women tend to dominate in representation at the academic level, but are regularly outcompeted by men at the professional level. Piano playing. It all comes down to the shape of the instrument, and hand-span, which is unquestionably (and uncontroversially) larger in men than in women: http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/right-hand-span-results-with-dots-dec-2016_1_orig.jpg http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/... (from http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html) The interesting thing is that there is a solution to the problem, the 7/8 piano, which has an octave spacing of 5.5" as opposed to the 6.5" on a typical piano. The thing is, no one really takes it seriously outside of a few universities and a dedicated group that's trying to advance this cause. Even women who learned to play long ago grouse that "I can play a regular piano, you just have to use different technique!", but won't admit to themselves or to others that the technique they're required to use is a detriment to playing the instrument with ease. The other issue is that these pianos are hard to come by, since almost every manufacturer makes pianos of the same keyboard size, and pianists are one of the few musicians expected to play on whatever instrument they're given. The other interesting thing is that the majority of men would actually play better on these pianos, because they would suddenly have "rachmaninoff hands", but the legacy of having hundreds of thousands of existing pianos just sitting around prevents progress from being made toward this goal. P.S. if anyone wants to make a startup company for building 7/8 digital pianos (of which there are none currently on the market), hit me up.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > The other issue is that these pianos are hard to come by, since almost every manufacturer makes pianos of the same keyboard size, and pianists are one of the few musicians expected to play on whatever instrument they're given. This is a good point, but it seems to be determined by the fundamentals of pianos. Moving a piano is difficult enough that I wouldn't expect this to change. We could all switch to keyboards...
  - jmole 8y ago
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it Yes, but the general concept is that the benefits and the downsides occur in different people. A single person doesn't illustrate "the benefits and the downsides" of greater variability any more than a single person can illustrate variability. WRT issues of pure sample size, you can see one of the standard supports for GMVH in the SAT Total Group Report for 2018 here: https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2018-total-group-sat-suite-assessments-annual-report.pdf https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2018-total-group-sat-su... Of the 2,135,788 students who took the SAT during high school, graduated (high school) in 2018, and had a gender, 1,117,329 were female and 1,018,459 were male. (751 had no gender.) 7% of the females, or ~78,000, scored 700 or above on the math section. 12% of the males, or ~120,000, did the same. So at the 91st percentile males are already outnumbering females by more than two to one after being pulled from similarly sized samples. The greater-male-variability hypothesis says that males should equally outnumber females among low achievers. These tables don't support that -- 1% of females score below 300 in math, compared to 1% of males; 12% of females score below 400 compared to 11% of males. The usual response to this is that we assume the SAT comprehensively samples high-ability students -- if you'll get a good score, you are strongly encouraged to take the test -- while mostly overlooking low-ability students, who may see no reason to bother.
- motohagiography 8y ago
  Would the drop out rate of men (assuming higher) provide an additional control? If low achieving men selected out of the data set before it was collected at the SAT level, there could be a long tail of underachieving men. This would certainly effect averaging, and if number of dropouts were greater than the 90th percentile, there could be some selection/survivor bias in play on how males appear as a group.
  - iguy 8y ago
    From some quick googling, it sounds like less than half of high-school students take the SAT. In which case the bottom end of the scores will probably tell you nothing about the population. "3.8 million students took the PSAT -- the practice version of the SATs ... 1.7 million students from the class of 2015 took the SAT"
dominotw 8y ago
> EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? Perhaps because its not at all like summers's case. Strumia didn't suggest women are not suited for physics or anything like that.
obrisintor 8y ago
Your response makes a lot of sense. It is a shame that after people like Summers (or that Google guy) talk about these issues, the talks about how to attack whoever wrote the piece drowns out attacks on the idea. It may vary well be that your theory is right. In that case I would hope that the discourse would go as follows. Summers submits an article about how variance is the reasons for difference between men and women in careers. Then someone like you submits an article explaining why the first theory is incorrect. Then Summers explains why your critic is incorrect. After enough back and forth, other scientists in the field start to join the conversation, some agreeing with Summers other with you. After enough time the scientific consensus gravitates to one side. However currently whenever someone talks about this, the response is not "let's argue your conclusion" but rather "burn the witch".
TheOperator 8y ago
>What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? Well > If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar. This would predict 20% of outliers would be women. However this is not the case. A reasonable hypothesis to account for the gap in yoyr reasoning is that higher male variance in intelligence drives more male outliers in physics. I find your explanation for the lack of representiation of women to be comparatively unsatisying. Now there is a better counterargument from the world of Chess. Chess has similar controversies about Men saying things about women having lower potential. Well a father didn't buy the nature based arguments decided to prove child rearing played a huge role in success and taught his daughters how to play chess. One of his daughters became arguably the greatest women player of all time although she wasn't ever considered world champion material. Essentially though thia case may indicates its differences in early childhood rearing that causes the differentials. It's not participation in a specific educational stream that's the issue its girls being brought up in a fundamentally different way from how boys are in general. Yet I see much of the comtemporary political discussion focus on higher educational and workforce equity. Really groundbreaking physics tends to be discovered by younger physicists so if education is truly the problem this is waiting too long to address any potential childrearing problem.

dang 8y ago

> EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? That breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." It also leads directly to off-topic dreck like this subthread, which I detached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310. (The rest of your comment is fine.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tptacek 8y ago

Last September, Professor Strumia stated that “physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation" at a presentation at the Cern the workshop. He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts. Did Larry Summers do anything as overt as this? CERN had to apologize after his presentation, which now includes a note: Alessandro Strumia applied to give a presentation on “Bibiliometrics data about gender issues in fundamental theory”. The committee was skeptical of his motivations but decided to allow him to give a scientific presentation on data analysis. The committee is deeply disappointed that the presentation, which had not been shared prior to its delivery, included attacks on individuals and was contrary to CERN’s values, as set out in the CERN Code of Conduct. CERN’s official statement on the matter can be found here: https://press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/updated-statement-cern-stands-diversity* https://press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/updated-statement-...

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Click the link below and have a look at the cartoon in question. Though I can realize how some might be offended, it's not an offensive cartoon. Or rather - the 'offensiveness of the cartoon' is only a function of one's sensitivity to intersectional issues. So any cartoon/animation that is 'against' the intersectional view will be regarded as 'offensive'. The very fact that this cartoon could be regarded as 'offensive' is ironically at the heart of this debate. We all have a right to be offended, but we also have a right to express ourselves within reason. The cartoon I guess was a needless poke in the eye but it's really not that bad.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Your rebuttal is tautological; you're essentially saying "this presentation was only offensive to people who were offended by it". Well, sure. A gauge for how offended people were by it: CERN immediately apologized and ultimately fired Strumia for it. I don't know how "offensive" I find it, and I'm not a physicist, but I try to put myself in the shoes of a physicist attending a workshop at CERN when someone gets up on stage with a presentation titled "Experimental test of a new global discrete symmetry" and it turns out to be a lecture about "Cultural Marxism", and I assume I'd have been pissed too.

jmole 8y ago

I've been reading recently about a structural/sociocultural/technological phenomenon that's actually holding women back in a field where women tend to dominate in representation at the academic level, but are regularly outcompeted by men at the professional level. Piano playing. It all comes down to the shape of the instrument, and hand-span, which is unquestionably (and uncontroversially) larger in men than in women: http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/right-hand-span-results-with-dots-dec-2016_1_orig.jpg http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/... (from http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html) The interesting thing is that there is a solution to the problem, the 7/8 piano, which has an octave spacing of 5.5" as opposed to the 6.5" on a typical piano. The thing is, no one really takes it seriously outside of a few universities and a dedicated group that's trying to advance this cause. Even women who learned to play long ago grouse that "I can play a regular piano, you just have to use different technique!", but won't admit to themselves or to others that the technique they're required to use is a detriment to playing the instrument with ease. The other issue is that these pianos are hard to come by, since almost every manufacturer makes pianos of the same keyboard size, and pianists are one of the few musicians expected to play on whatever instrument they're given. The other interesting thing is that the majority of men would actually play better on these pianos, because they would suddenly have "rachmaninoff hands", but the legacy of having hundreds of thousands of existing pianos just sitting around prevents progress from being made toward this goal. P.S. if anyone wants to make a startup company for building 7/8 digital pianos (of which there are none currently on the market), hit me up.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> The other issue is that these pianos are hard to come by, since almost every manufacturer makes pianos of the same keyboard size, and pianists are one of the few musicians expected to play on whatever instrument they're given. This is a good point, but it seems to be determined by the fundamentals of pianos. Moving a piano is difficult enough that I wouldn't expect this to change. We could all switch to keyboards...
- jmole 8y ago

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it Yes, but the general concept is that the benefits and the downsides occur in different people. A single person doesn't illustrate "the benefits and the downsides" of greater variability any more than a single person can illustrate variability. WRT issues of pure sample size, you can see one of the standard supports for GMVH in the SAT Total Group Report for 2018 here: https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2018-total-group-sat-suite-assessments-annual-report.pdf https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2018-total-group-sat-su... Of the 2,135,788 students who took the SAT during high school, graduated (high school) in 2018, and had a gender, 1,117,329 were female and 1,018,459 were male. (751 had no gender.) 7% of the females, or ~78,000, scored 700 or above on the math section. 12% of the males, or ~120,000, did the same. So at the 91st percentile males are already outnumbering females by more than two to one after being pulled from similarly sized samples. The greater-male-variability hypothesis says that males should equally outnumber females among low achievers. These tables don't support that -- 1% of females score below 300 in math, compared to 1% of males; 12% of females score below 400 compared to 11% of males. The usual response to this is that we assume the SAT comprehensively samples high-ability students -- if you'll get a good score, you are strongly encouraged to take the test -- while mostly overlooking low-ability students, who may see no reason to bother.

motohagiography 8y ago
Would the drop out rate of men (assuming higher) provide an additional control? If low achieving men selected out of the data set before it was collected at the SAT level, there could be a long tail of underachieving men. This would certainly effect averaging, and if number of dropouts were greater than the 90th percentile, there could be some selection/survivor bias in play on how males appear as a group.
- iguy 8y ago
  From some quick googling, it sounds like less than half of high-school students take the SAT. In which case the bottom end of the scores will probably tell you nothing about the population. "3.8 million students took the PSAT -- the practice version of the SATs ... 1.7 million students from the class of 2015 took the SAT"

dominotw 8y ago

> EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? Perhaps because its not at all like summers's case. Strumia didn't suggest women are not suited for physics or anything like that.

obrisintor 8y ago

Your response makes a lot of sense. It is a shame that after people like Summers (or that Google guy) talk about these issues, the talks about how to attack whoever wrote the piece drowns out attacks on the idea. It may vary well be that your theory is right. In that case I would hope that the discourse would go as follows. Summers submits an article about how variance is the reasons for difference between men and women in careers. Then someone like you submits an article explaining why the first theory is incorrect. Then Summers explains why your critic is incorrect. After enough back and forth, other scientists in the field start to join the conversation, some agreeing with Summers other with you. After enough time the scientific consensus gravitates to one side. However currently whenever someone talks about this, the response is not "let's argue your conclusion" but rather "burn the witch".

TheOperator 8y ago

>What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? Well > If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar. This would predict 20% of outliers would be women. However this is not the case. A reasonable hypothesis to account for the gap in yoyr reasoning is that higher male variance in intelligence drives more male outliers in physics. I find your explanation for the lack of representiation of women to be comparatively unsatisying. Now there is a better counterargument from the world of Chess. Chess has similar controversies about Men saying things about women having lower potential. Well a father didn't buy the nature based arguments decided to prove child rearing played a huge role in success and taught his daughters how to play chess. One of his daughters became arguably the greatest women player of all time although she wasn't ever considered world champion material. Essentially though thia case may indicates its differences in early childhood rearing that causes the differentials. It's not participation in a specific educational stream that's the issue its girls being brought up in a fundamentally different way from how boys are in general. Yet I see much of the comtemporary political discussion focus on higher educational and workforce equity. Really groundbreaking physics tends to be discovered by younger physicists so if education is truly the problem this is waiting too long to address any potential childrearing problem.