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You're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of industrialized and
by etal 18y ago
You're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of industrialized and Western is so large. What do the numbers look like in Latin America, for instance? And Russia seems to have a lot of respect for scientists, in particular.
Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper hypothesis and testing it.
- astine 18y agoIt's totally possible that the countries are cherry picked. Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than explain the gap. Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case, we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and yet still have them exist subtly.
- timr 18y agoThe countries weren't cherry-picked for this analysis -- the article says that they were data sets published in Science for different purposes.