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Harvard Pres Says Females Naturally Bad at Math
Man_Holmes writes "Harvard president says that women lack natural ability in math and science and this explains why fewer women succeed in math and science.
Lawrence H. Summers later said that he was discussing hypotheses based on scholarly work and that it did not necessarily represent his private views."
Bah with the research and the studies, I could have told you that in one second.
Le français vous intéresse?
Why shouldn't you buy a woman a watch?
There's a clock on the stove! ba-dum-kssh
More of a "You can't say that." than "That isn't correct.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Now we just need them to study why they are so bad at driving too! ;)
It doesn't matter if you have facts to back up an assertion like that, you're still going to pay a price in suffering that makes it far better to just shut the hell up.
You'd think the president of freaking Harvard would know better.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'd be interested to see what peer-reviewed, repeatable research there exists on actual gender differences.
I remember hearing in a developmental psych class that only 5-10% of the 'standard' gender differences have any biological basis; and the NY Times article on this topic quotes a woman who was angry because, if I remember right, the entire morning of the symposium had been spent dispelling those same myths.
The trouble with this kind of research seems to be that there's too much political intrigue - every scientist is going to be accused of (or possess) some kind of bias in American gender-polarized society, and that is difficult to filter out even if you're aware of it.
Maybe we should just move to Sweden.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
... Math is hard ;-)
If someone got up on stage and claimed that men were innately bad at having babies.
It would be an ugly, ugly scene.
On other news today:
Harvard Presidents compete in IQ with American Presidents!
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
economists bad at genetics.
Take your pick. I know which I think is more likely.
Phil
Simon Baron-Cohen, a psych prof. at Cambridge has a book:
:)
The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain.
From the beginning of the book: "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems."
Has anyone read it?
P.S. This guy is a cousin of Ali G. Don't know what that ought to signify
Being an economist, he wouldn't even know what real science is. What he practices is a pseudo-science, at best.
STFU about slashdot bias.
I'd like to see some 'scholarly' work that shows the same for logic.
I think i can hack his job... the guy draws his research from the way his kid plays with toys truck.... friggen great.
It's because women don't stay in the technical fields due to the sexist and condecending culture found there.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
I just wanted to chime in by saying that "have less aptitude for" does not automatically mean "all suck at".
Machine9dotNet
The NYTimes has been running this story on their main page for the past day. Story is here.
Apparently, he made these remarks in an effort to provoke discussion more than to express his beliefs. Or at least that's the spin on it.
What, exactly, did Summers (yes, it's "Summers", not "Somers", as anyone who had clicked through to the article would know) say? The article did not have a quote; Summers could or would not provide a tape.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Wife: "Honey, you know women are bad at math..."
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I'm sure the female slashdot member will be upset by such a statement.
I think the subject says it all. Guys like this make me feel shame for being a man.
Whether the decline in job offers to women under his benevolent rule is wrong depends on how things were before it.
And who cares if the reasons are biological or social? In every school I ever went to, about 80 percent of the best math students were boys. If women chose to slack off in math, that's their damn choice. Isn't that what women are supposed to want? Women in general can't really come out looking good if you look at this issue. Because either it's their fault, or it's their genes' fault.
If I'm sounding a little mysoginistic it's because I don't think anyone should be humoring delusions...mass or individual.
including this one....
Bad "science" can come from anywhere, including some guy at Harvard.
Wow, I wonder if it's a rare thing to have 2 female friends that are both proficient at math. I have two female friends, and they're both under 20, and are in Calculus classes, and make A's.
...sticking their foot in their mouth.
Film at 11!
It doesn't matter if you have facts to back up an assertion like that, you're still going to pay a price in suffering that makes it far better to just shut the hell up.
So it is "Safer" and "easier" to "shut the hell up" about something that is politically incorect if the price is a large amount of suffering? I wonder what would have happened to the Civil Rights movement and Womens Sufferage (among other movements) if people thought that way in the 20's and 50's/60's.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
He just said the right thing the wrong way... he was apparently trying to "be provocative" according to the same AP article on CNN.
He also gave an example of what he intended (emphasis mine):That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.
A front-page story, where a local TV news station is the only source? And the article doesn't even actually have a quote?
Is slashdot turning into FARK?
BTW, he was reportedly speaking at a conference on women and minorities in engineering.
You must be thinking of some other country, because here we never use crap science to prop up political ideology or stereotypes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
One of the problems with any claim like this is that almost no one will fund or publish studies like this. It's pretty tough to find someone willing to stand up and say "look, our research indicated that these differences are there." Unless you are publishing results that reinforce the "everyone is the same" stereotype, you are going to have a very difficult time.
Here was this economist lecturing pompously (to) this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day
The scholarly work was not his. It was that which he says was assembled for the conference. His 'scholarly work' on the subject was summed up in an example he gave about observing his daughter playing with toy trucks as if they were dolls. What a dork.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
Lawrence Summers graduated from MIT in economics in 1975, but spent grad school and academic career at Harvard. His uncle is the famous economist Paul Samuelson. Larry has been promoting stronger math and science requirements at Harvard. An "educated person" needs to know these subjects. Harvard recently created a School of Engineering. Not to compete with MIT but to fill in the gaps with Harvard's specialties.
ok, I didn't RTFA. But just wondering if it takes into account how both men and women handle stress, likelyhood of enjoying tackling problems, how each sex concentrate and how long both studies.
I do agree men are better in logics, and maybe thats the reason being better in maths? But women could as well concentrate better than men, so why would men be better in maths?
I just think it is hard to define which sex is better in maths. Please correct me if I am wrong
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
I seem to recall plenty of psycological studies showing that the intelligence of women was evenly distributed i.e. more evenly distributed along a density graph. As opposed to males, who seems to have rather large extremes, both at the low end of the scale, and the high end of the scale. I.e. both more male morons, and more male geniuses. So, the question is, is the observation that women seem to lack natural ability for science, the cause or the effect of this psycological fact. Ohh, and som female mathematicians.
Antoine LeBlanc, Ada Lovelace, Sonja Kovelevsky.
Statistically, he is correct, women on avergae do worse in math. It's the variability that shoots him down though. Individual women can and do excell in math. Just as there are both male and female math illiterates, there are female and male math geniuses.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
... why tenure can be a bad thing.
And why shouldn't it be it's slashdot.
He said something to the effect of innate differences might play a significant role in why women generally don't excel in careers in math and science. One, duh. I haven't been to a "Maintain the Phalocracy" meeting in what? ever. Two he didn't say it was because math was hard. And Three, he didn't say it was because all women are born with a mint called a vagina some girls are born with the ability to mint a few singles day, and other hundreds by the truckload. Men are not so blessed. They have to be good at something or they starve to death and disappear from the statistics about people who aren't good at something.
The next big contraversial revalation will be that women are more emotional.
women lack natural ability in math and science
This might be a fact. But what does it mean? Should women now be encouraged or discouraged in math and science? IMHO both encouraging and discouraging have very bad side effects. Encouraging leads to disillusions and discouraging is generally bad and may deprive society from brilliant women.
IMHO women are better suited for management positions. Most women I met are more socially engaged and far better at multi tasking. The politics that come at higher management levels require deviousness that is not uncommonly found in women. Again, this doesn't mean anything specific.
In case you wonder, I'm a man.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
There's no way men can be smarter then women in any area. Look at all these men in tv ads that can't even do anything and need the help of those smarter, more mature female version of ourselves.
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to dress myself in the morning and get to work, since my chromosomes make me so dumb.
"Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues." That's BS, and he knows it. If they weren't his own views, he wouldn't be presenting them. If he believes this research to be true, then it would be his own view.
It doesn't matter if you have facts to back up an assertion like that, you're still going to pay a price in suffering that makes it far better to just shut the hell up.
Married life teaches this very lesson.
-kgj
-kgj
What college? You beat me to the hs.o troll ;) [And what have you been doing since may?]
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
There are a few questions to ask.
First, while it is possible that there are differences between sexes, are the differences larger or smaller than the differences between individuals in each group? Statistically significant doesn't mean significantly larger.
Second, are the differences detrimental to the scientific process? It is possible women think differently, but it doesn't mean necessarily worse. In my undergraduate studies, there was a female student who could see symmetry in crystals looking at it from any directions, none of the other students and the TAs could do that.
Process required to do science is very far removed from the goal, relying on superstitions and intuition. Right now, the process is (historically) biased toward males. But there is no evidence that this is the best way to go.
Mr. Summers criticized some of the Black Studies professors at Harvard as not being rigorous scholarship (with good cause in my opinion). Two of them left, decimating Harvard's formerly top program.
Now, who's substantiating his comments and who isn't?
Harvard pres says females naturally bad at math. In other news, the president of Harvard has said that while females naturally bad at math indeed, males on the other hand often demonstrate serious linguistic deficiencies, especially while composing article headlines. "I say males naturally bad at language," she added, seeing a puzzled expression on the Slashdot editor's face.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Her basic premise (backed up by various studies) is that pre-historically, the tasks of men and women drove the evolution of their brains and chemistry (hormones). For example, because men did the hunting, they had to understand spacial relationships better. Because a group of women in a tribe took care of the children together, women had to work better with others and multi-task.
I can't recall specifically, but I think she makes the point that the male mind is (on average, of course) better suited for engineering because of the spacial relationship thing. But, her basic premise is that the directions the world, and even corporate culture, are heading benefit women and we should expect them to lead much more in the future.
Sounds like something like this could have very well started out with, "Even in fairly recent times, many psychologists believed that..."
Quotes out of context are pretty dangerous.
During his tenure at Harvard, there has been a decrease each year in the number of women offered professor jobs.
At Universities across this country, there are departments with no women faculty. This is appalling and I hope this guy gets fired for his comments and his lack of leadership at the supposedly flagship American institution.
He makes a grandiose statement about gender differences without relying on any actual studies
Economics and mathematics are totally different subjects.
How a child plays with her toys has no bearing at all on how good she will beat mathematics.
Too bad Yale's a safety school.
I think it's a largely environmental difference, personally.
/choose/ to persure that capability.
I've known plenty of women who were capable of being good at math and science, but few who actually
Let's face it, from an early age, little girls are given dolls to play with, while little boys are given building blocks. Might this have something to do with the common belief that women are bad at space relations? One wonders.
And it's a perpetuating cycle in terms of career/degree choice. Girls in school don't see a whole lot of women who are mathematicians, engineers, or scientists that they can apire to -- sure they're out there, but not in significant numbers. They are, however, starting to see a decent number of women in professions like business and law, where the gender ratios in colleges are starting to balance out much more so than technical fields.
And traditionally female jobs still remain that way, for example, teachers and nurses. Not to say that it "should" be that way, but it is. Probably 80% of elementary school teachers are women, and probably 80% of Education majors in most colleges are women. I'm sure many of those women could be good at math, but for some reason they have *chosen* not to be.
Just a thought...
The problem with generalizations such as this is that while it may be generally true that on average, men are better at math than women, there will almost certainly be some women who are better than almost all men at math. So if you take any one man and woman at random and automatically assume that the man is better at math (during a hiring interview, for example), then you could be making a serious mistake.
It's when generalizations such as this are applied to individuals without accounting for the enormous variation of individuals from the "average" that you get into trouble. This is why making such generalizations is "politically incorrect." On a personal level, I wouldn't want one of my daughters to read such a study and automatically assume, "Oh, I better not even try at math and science since this study proves that women aren't good at it."
Even if women ON AVERAGE are less good in science and math then men...so what? Thats no reason to discourage women who ARE good at science and math.
Tell that to the female Japanese foreign exchange student that we had in my 9th grade class that used to mop the class with us because she was doing the equivalent of Calc III in Japan while we were rockin Algebra I in the US. :)
You can be successful and an idiot all at the same time.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
As a woman that majored in mathematics (pure math, not applied) I must say that he has dug himself into a bit of a hole. Even if he doesn't release his speech, I would find it professional of him to at least release the specific sources and studies he was "discussing":
Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views.
If he was discussing work for the conference, he certainly must have twisted some of the evidence because "Five other participants in the National Bureau of Economic Research conference...also said they were offended by the comments."
Personally, math education before the college level in the united states has suffered greatly in the past ten years. Some teachers don't know how to teach basic proof-based logic for any gender let alone girls. Luckily I had a slew of fantastic teachers who encouraged me even when I was doubling in classical music performance and had half as much time to devote to mathematics at university.
~f
The current doctrine that is present in most schools and society will not allow a view to exist even if it could be backed with fact.
We are too concerned with feelings compared to facts. We are willing to ingore an obvious issue simply because it might offend someone.
Fortunately this issue is relatively harmless but other issues which offend people based on the conclusions of studies are being hushed all in the name of sensitivity and political correctness.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
with facts, that is the only thing we should be concerned about. Not about whether his views shatter our pre-conceived notions about how the world should work.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
This entire discussion is ridiculous. Women are just as good as men at absolutely everything a man can do.
Larry Summers was not only the guy who waived tuition at Harvard for underprivileged students. He was the only guy in the Clinton administration who knew just how bad the end of the dot.com bubble would be. IIRC, the New Yorker quoted him as comparing the 90s with the 20s: exuberant times leading into steep crises.
In short, he's a prescient guy who just screwed up his legacy. Damn shame.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Well, I am very good at what I do... but to the best of my knowledge when I was five years old I did not have any kind of 'natural' ability. I learnt what I know and know what I've learnt.
It has also been my experience that women are at least just as competent as men when it comes to both areas and especially with maths women often do better.
I believe this kind of thing is misguided rubbish spread by those too ignorant to say otherwise and rather baseless within its supporting evidence.
If I was to be asked why I think there aren't so many women in science and maths, I would put it down to two things - A. Social Gender Roles / Attitudes and B. Opportunities / Encouragement.
(Yes! A and B are linked)
Notice that these things have NOTHING to do with 'natural ability' at all (whatever that is) and more to do with the society as we live.
Here in the UK you will find MORE women in science and maths.
This reminds me of the late Vincent Hanna, who told his wife that there is no such thing as a good woman golfer. "What about Laura Davies?", she asks. "Laura Davies is an excellent golfer, and hence a man," is his reply.
Here's an interesting thing. I am a female physics PhD student. What I noticed in my university and from discussions with other PhD students and scientists, this is fairly common in other universities, is that the ratio of female to male students, in physics and maths at least is about 50/50 through undergraduate. And they do well in it. They get As and first-class honours. The most obvious exception to this is engineering. That's still very male dominated. But as you start going up to PhD level and then further you start losing girls. However the situation today is still much better than in the past. As you look at the older scientists in your department you will generally see that as the age goes up, the more likely that they are male.
This is Australia, so maybe things are different in the US. But what I understand talking with other scientists (including male ones) is that first of all the PhD itself is a slog. Secondly after you finish you go through a long period where you get 1-2 year postdocs here and there and you are likely to be constantly moving. It is much easier for a guy to tell his wife that they are moving and that she should quit her job and pack and for the guy to spend years working late at night and expecting his wife to hold the fort at home with the kids and housework than for a woman to do the same thing. Also then you want to have a baby and you have to take at least a year off, sometimes even more, and well you can see how things go. Oh, and also as my (male) supervisor once warned me, some of the older guys are just biased against women. They won't say it outright but it affects how they select people for jobs.
I can't believe that people just can't accept that different people have different abilities, and that a lot of it has to do with sex. Lets face it. Pygmy's from the amazon will never be professional basketball players, and seven foot tall people will never be good gymnasts. I don't have any problem if you are a woman and good at math, and choose to pursue a career in math. All I'm saying is that I'm happy that someone decided to finally point out what the scientific facts were telling him and not what society told him he should say. This guy is a modern day Copernicus.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
- Only geeks take real math classes at Harvard College:
2004 QRR
- Most geeks are male.
- Therefore, most females are bad at math.
QEDsigned, Harvard math graduate
Courts will take a child away from a father who's being a good citizen and return it to a mother with a history of drug use, and a DUI conviction where the child was in the car.
It's not funny, and it has killed some children. But that's what a subscription to dogma gets you.
Exactly, you stupid asshole. Genes play a large part in the way we do things. Take blacks, for example. Are you saying it is that fat white professors fault that blacks are 1) leaving their children behind, or 2) have turned their living areas into SHITHOLES, or 3) enjoy the highest crime rates (even though they compose about 18% of the population) and they also enjoy the highest populations in prison?
Or is it just coincidence that Arabs 1) blow themselves up because someone told them there are virgins waiting on the other side, or 2) are statistically more likely to be involved in hijacking a plane, or 3) up until about 70 years ago lived a nomadic lifestyle?
NATURE bitch!
What he said may be true, but he lacks natural ability in diplomacy and the art of seduction of females, not to mention his lack of self-control when it comes to staying away from donuts! And do not even try to use the "Yes, but he can always lose the extra weight, but women can't" argument because you know he would have lost that extra weight a long time ago if he could.
that if you add a man, subtract, divide the legs, they can multiply
so they can't be that bad at math...
Remember children, all generalizations are wrong.
What will stop the PC nuts from picketing would be to ensure that they get at least one class each covering logic, statistics and basic scientific method.
But then again, some may find it more comfortable going through the world without thinking. Modern society has largely made the brain irrelevant to basic survival and reproduction, why take on an unneccessary burden?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Now seriously, let's be fair. While women may be naturally bad at math, there are other things they are good at, like semiconductor physics.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
condecending culture
;)
Not that Slashdot would know anything about that, of course.
The coolest voice ever.
I disagree with you in that you seem to be saying it isn't because women lack sufficient talent, but that they lack the backbone to pioneer where there isn't already a copacetic culture.
The short of it is that you refute the aptitude argument and explain the phenomenon with a preference argument, and then you proceed to speak to those preferences. The preferences you suggest are that an affirmative (or at least neutral) environment is more important to these female scientists than advancing science. I'm going to need to see some data to back that up.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Gosh, sir, how do you explain my 760 in math on the SATs? (Sorry. I did get a 780 verbal, so maybe I am feminine after all.)
Was I exposed to too much testosterone in my mother's womb? Does this explain why I was a perfect milch cow for my children?
Or is my niece, who's in 10th grade, and has finished honors level Diff Eq at the local university, totally unfeminine?
The theories I believe he's quoting don't have much biochemical or brain-based research to back them up.
Just ever-so-remotely-and-unthinkable-possibly, our brains and bodies are different enough that men and women might have different inherent abilities in different areas, math being one men excel more in. There is no shortage of fields that women are typically better at, yet there is no taboo against openly admitting that. The societal hangup on preconceived notions of 'sexist and condescending' attitudes against groups is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well, it's about time we can all admit this openly. We have all seen it - much more male then female in the comp sci classes, math, physics, etc. I am *NOT* saying women cant do these things, I am sure there are incredibly talented women in these fields. However, for whatever reason, they are male dominated. I have yet to meet a "great" female programmer, although I am sure some exist. There is nothing wrong with this, women are better then men are certain things. John Stossel once had a TV special explaining this basically saying that "C'mon, its OK to admit we are different. We are! And we complement each other". I mean, do you want a little girl carrying a 200 lbs fire house when your house is burning? Who got the job because of female quotas? Give me a break and sign me up for some harvard classes!
Because men keep telling them that 4 inches is 7, 30 seconds is 15 minutes, and that the scientific method would be shot to hell if they stopped for directions.
My wife said I should post that...that's for the ladies.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I once saw a documentary about turn of the century basketball.
Apparently, around the turn of the century, Jews dominated Basketball. Seriously. Not making this up. And in the press, and in the common opinion of the time, it was held that Jews had certain attributes, which were (not lying) quickness and sneakyness. which made them unbeatable on the court.
Today that seems totally ridiculous to us. We don't hold those stereotypes anymore.
Now we believe that black people have this huge innate physical sports advantage. It's not that they're statistically poorer than white people, and have few ways of going to college besides sports scholarships. It's not that, culturally, they see the easiest routes to success coming from entertainment and athletics.
It's just that black people tend to be athletic, funny, and rappers. It's genetic. No really. It is. Really.
Don't you see how stupid that is?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Many studies have repeatedly shown that women are just as good at math as men are when they are very young. The problem lies in the fact that women aren't encouraged to study math as much as men are. From a young age they routinely get less teacher attention in school than the boys, especially in 'hard science' subjects.
This naturaly makes women less inclined to study math (and other sciences) as they grow up, resulting in women have a worse 'base knowledge' than the men thus making them worse at math when grown up.
So in other words: yes, there is a difference, but it has nothing to do with biology.
So who can explain why Elementary Education is overwhelmingly female and Electrical Engineering is overwhelmingly male?
Why are we asking why women don't do well in math? Why not ask why men don't have anywhere near the verbal skills of women?
Why do men do better on the SAT and similar tests, yet the college population is about 56% female?
There are more male CEO's than female CEO's. There are also more men than women in maximum security prisons. There are more male geniuses and more men are profoundly retarded. Why is this?
Why can't we ask these questions?
Girls are so pampered today by our public education system that most of them are terribly thin-skinned. One of the girls in my CS program used to go into a crying temper tantrum everytime someone more than very, very gently criticized something she said or did. Most of the guys I see are supportive of the girls.
Here's a novel idea though. If you want a man to respect you as a colleague, ladies, then do a man's work and do it LIKE a man. That means you meet or exceed the level of work that a man would in your position. No excuses ladies, just fucking take it like a man.
The girls that I know who make it do that. They don't make excuses, they just compete. They don't whine about sexism, in fact the most successful of them as a "bring it on, fuckers" attitude toward sexism.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
First off I did not RTFA and will not RTFA because there is emphasis on the FUCKING in RTFA of this particular article. I am male and was in accelerated math class since 7th grade. I found there were roughly the equal ratio of male to female students in the classes with slightly more males but the females had higher average scores. If my extremely limited samle is the norm it would prove that men (as a group) are better at math than women (as a group) but women that are good at math are normally better at math than men who are good at math. I know the the age at which women mature versus men has more to do with this than anything else in middle and high school (at least in US public schools) by looking statistics that show higher grade average and more female validictorians. I look froward towards peer review like another responder and agree econmics professors can be dumb...I took 3 econ classes in college all with the same professor that added 2+2=5 on the black board one day. We he woke me up to answer a question, I questioned his math and his reply was that he is not a math professor. This, my firends, is where polticians find fuzzy math.
"It is not my intent to offend, but if offense is taken, the fault lies with the audience." attributed to Patrick Henry
I used to be a science teacher long ago, so let's see if I can grab some statistics for you.
As I recall, girls perform about the same as boys through adolescence, though their percepetion is that they don't do as well. In later years, the girls who think of math as "a boy thing" tend to do even more poorly.
Still, remember that these differences are small and are much smaller than other differences (by race, private/public school, geography). If there are biology based differences between the genders, they're likely to be small and a poor predictor of how any particular woman will do in math or science.
There's a fairly statistic-free article here (pdf) you can look at.
Maybe it was all those Barbies claiming that math is hard.
Science has concluded that humans with higher IQs answer questions on tests better than humans with lower IQs.
Amazingly they've even figured out that humans with higher spacial-relationship reasoning perform better at spacial-relationship tasks.
Is it impossible that what he said was correct? Men and women are obviously different. Why couldn't men simply be better at abstract thought? After all, women are probably better at nurturing offspring.
This may not be what you want to hear, but, quite frankly, reality doesn't care what you want to hear.
As I scanned through the posts, I didn't see any comments relating to the above subject so forgive me if this is redundant but:
I can't recall the names of the studies and/or books right now but I have heard that it is very likely that there is a fairly good correlation between ability at music and talent with math. Given this link Prof. Summers would be wrong as there are of course many, many top notch female musicians.
Can anyone point me to research into this idea?
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Straight men are innately bad at hairdressing, interior decoration and dancing... and at growing breasts.
The out going dean of an engineering college is upset because her vast minority isn't considered the standard? There are three possibilities. Either women are overly emotional to the point where it impedes rational thinking, or she failed Statistics for Scientists and Engineers or both.
Even if it is the case that women as a group have inferior inate ability in math -- and that seems like a big claim to make given social factors -- that doesn't mean that there aren't millions of individual women who are better at math than you (be you male or female).
But the point is that you cannot do good research on a topic like this. Every woman (and every man and every whathaveyou) alive today grew up in the modern world, affected by social pressure just like you and me. There is no way to conduct an experiment that even addresses the issue of whether women tend to get worse grades in math because of genetic or social circumstance.
In the mean time, I think it's important to just assume that everybody's equally likely to be good at anything until the individual proves otherwise. Assigning a trait to all women with no means to prove it only guarantees that women will tend to have that trait. (self-fulfilling...what, now?)
This isn't about Political Correctness, it's about what you can and cannot tell through emperical study.
I was on chess team in H.S.
There were girls on the team too, but they were all lower boards. Out of 40 upper boards at a major chess meet, you'd find 3-4 girls, tops. I have a hard time believing that this is due to social factors which prevent women from excelling at chess.
If there's one thing that can be said about using chess as a measure of certain mental abilities, it's that it's very good at eliminating 'social bias' from the equation.
Fischer has said that there will never be a female grand master. While I don't know if that's true, he's been right so far. And I'm sure the proportions will always be male heavy.
Not to say that men are smarter. Girls are better at other things. But the notion that intelligence types are not influenced by sex just doesn't seem to hold water.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Why does it need to be studied?
What benefit will it give us? I would suspect that your average female mathematics graduate has better mathematical knowledge than a man of average ability.
Has anyone noticed a correlation between eye colour and ability? height and ability? There may well be a realationship. Doesn't seem to affect anyone. Why should we care about gender? Fewer women succeed in maths and science careers because fewer women enter those careers. It's that simple. This is not a problem. The women who don't go into these fields become skilled in other areas instead.
...my wife SWEARS that I can't add/subtract/count for shit.
She says I can't tell the REAL difference between a $1500 HDTV and $700 CRT TV. I see no difference there mathematically -- it's all in the quality of the picture, right? Right? Come on guys, back me up.
Guys?
IronChefMorimoto
1000+ comment thread coming your way.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I admit that there was a very serious problem with discrimination against women in the workplace 20+ years ago but I am not so convinced that is the case now. I know that there are still some men out there that think a woman's place is in the home but, in my experience, there are just as many man hating women in top jobs now so in the end it evens itself out. Note: I am not in any way supporting discrimination such as this I am just trying to point out that nature seems to find a balance.
Now that we have pretty much eliminated gender discrimination I think it is probably time to start letting women choose for themselves what they want to be. If they don't want to be scientists or mathematicians fair enough. So what?
Again this is just in my experience but, women make much better managers (oh the irony - should it be personagers now?) than men. Where as men seem to make better scientists, engineers, etc. Now whether that is gender typing from birth I don't know. I know that studies have shown that men have better spatial awareness so perhaps they are more likely to become engineers because they find it easier.
Whatever the case is, be it discrimination, gender typing or natural difference I would say the research required to tell is probably impossible. If a man does it he will be discriminating if he finds a difference and a woman will be labelled an over zealous feminist. It's a no win situation so perhaps we should just leave well alone. The worst thing that can happen though is that we allow our fears and prejudices get in the way of honest, correct science.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
#1) Your post is titled, "4 reasons this guy is wrong". You list 3.
#2) "Economics and mathematics are totally different subjects". Calculus and Physics are totally different subjects, yet they both heavily rely upon math. Perhaps you have not taken enough economics courses to understand how much math is involved...
#3) Did you even RTFA? The president was referring to data prepared for the conference. His statement was not founded upon his child's preference of playtoys.
...innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.
True.
Summers...also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.
He is correctly skeptical.
He also said more research needs to be done on the issues.
Correct. Except that when ignoramuses, like Bible Belt Baptists on Darwin, attack anyone explaining the science of gender differences, it makes scientists decide to avoid the field. The current highest rated comment on Slashdot says that Summers is correct but should never talk about such things because it's wrong.
He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.
Well, yeah. A quick antidote to anyone who believes that gender differences are mostly social can be found in the studies of XY males whose genders were surgically reassigned at birth during the 1970s. This was an accepted treatment for a certain uncorrectable genital deformation. (A study of transsexualism, The Man Who Would be Queen, available online, has a good discussion of it.)
Thanks for telling the truth, Summers.
Summers already faced criticism because the number of senior job offers to women has dropped each year of his three-year presidency.
Rewrite: "Summers has faced criticism because fewer underqualified women are being highered to positions over more qualified males." Gotta have that affirmative action.
Sorority sisters unite in a koumbayah chant and have a sit-in on the president's lawn. However, they failed to notice the u-haul truck driving the old president's furniture out....
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
If you are able to find a husband, and use his credit card, why would you care the theories and the science thing. I'm pretty sure that most men, specially those scientists better than womem, is satisfied with the fact that women would like to spend their money because they know that having a wife is better than dying as lonely nerd.
I just don't think it matters. We all know that individual women are good at science. They win a Nobel every now and then, which is usually a good sign. A lot of women are bad at science though.
We also know that a lot of men are bad at science, but that some men are good at science.
So, what it boils down to is that, some men and some women are good at science, and most men and most women are bad at science.
Why do we need a study for that? If you're doing science, hire people who are good at science. Speaking as a science guy, I'd love to have more women around. Unlike science guys, many of them bathe.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That said, it's rather clear that these are his personal views and I don't buy his denial of it for a second.
Bitter?/ 15/144224 6&tid=146&tid=187&tid=1
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Not even remotely the same thing, it is a fact that male and female brains do differ from one another in various ways. I believe there is a lot of evidence to suggest that boys brought up as girls are generally not very happy and vice a versa.
I don't see anything wrong with acknowledging differences between the sexes, where things start to go wrong is when people are abusing the fact there are differences, e.g. men are generally bigger and stronger and can easily abuse that by beating up women fairly easily ( women are better at nagging and can abuse that power ) or misrepresenting the general differences in specific instances to damage people.
I am an instructor at a technical college; my specialties are programming, networking, and UNIX. We teach a 2-year degree.
I have found that the ratio of females/males in the UNIX class is about 40/60. In programming, about 45/55. But in networking (we teach the CCNA cirriculum) the first semester starts at about 40/60 but ends up about 10/90 by the fourth term. The women just drop out.
I believe anyone can discipline their minds to do just about anything. But I also believe females are wired differently than males. This is not to say that females are worse (or better) than males; just different. Males seem to want to tackle problems, while females watch and observe and learn. Perhaps it is the curriculum that is oriented for the male student, Idunno.
that there is a greater variation in a number of traits among males than females. For example, there are more males at the very top end of the IQ scale than females -- but also many more males at the bottom, as well. The result is that male and female IQ scores end up averaging out.
That said, what Dr. Summers said is neither new nor controversial. Pinker wrote about it in Blank Slate almost 10 years ago, if I recall, and studies showing that females have much better language skills than males have been around for some time. As we're all exposed to language, I find it hard to argue that females are better at using it than males because they are socially channelled into doing so.
Incidentally, studies on gay men and lesbians found that they tend to have aptitudes more like those of the opposite sex than is normal for their genders (males better with words than straight men, lesbians better with math, spacial relationships than the average straight woman).
Always a godfather; never a god. -Gore Vidal
It is obvious that men and women in general have different brain development and a different way of looking at the world.
But in our politically correct culture it seems that it is only ok to highlight the differences that paint men in a negative light and women in a positive light.
So there is no uproar to say that men are more prone to violence or women or more nurturing.
But saying men are better suited to understanding spacial relationships. That would be a no-no....
Xcott
This guy is on crack! This may be one of the most stupid statements i've heard in the last ten years. And we wonder why this country is so messed up.
The speakers statement is patently false not worthy of any consideration. I would instead consider the speakers general lack of knowledge and gender bias.
In short, the man is a dolt.
read THE BELL CURVE you fools!
its a fact,
at IQ 124, the chance a a person being female is a staggering 800% (yes eight HUNDRED) less likely than a male!!
age of puberty is the main causal factor to diverge from mean IQ.
females and blacks go through puberty earlier, asians, and geeky nerds go last.
I dont get why people always get blamed for being sexist when making such a statement.. its a fact that the male brain is better suited to dealing certain things while the female brain is better suited to other things, this however does NOT exclude either side from doing what the other side does, as with everything else there are always exeptions. Why its so hard for some people to accept that we are diffrent and that that isnt neccesarily bad, is beyond me. The woman IS better suited to carry a child and the man IS better suited to run around and get women pregnant.. Is anyone gonna refute that on the ground that its sexist? I dont think so... so why is it so bad when its got to do with the brain?
Man vs Woman, they are diffrent, GET OVER IT!
They rarely coincide.
I think it has been long established that unless other factors play into it, women are driven by different drives than men. I don't pretend to understand whether it's a cultural matter or a genetic one, but there are a variety of biological reasons for women to be less capable of maintaining abilities in math and logic (which are devoid of emotion). Women have a lot of games that their bodies, for better or worse, play on them that men do not suffer or experience.
Now I have seen other studies among toddlers showing that on the large, boys are more successful at getting around obstacles (read as stubborn if it helps you to think so) than the girls who were prone to simply giving up in frustration. The notion is that as a toddler, there is less chance of a child being tainted by learned roles and behavior although there will still be some of that.
But frankly, I am a little annoyed when studies are criticised for reasons that have little to nothing to do with evidence to the contrary and more about a conflict of opinion or ideals. We don't want to hear that men and women are not equals -- that would mean all sorts of problems in our future because after all, look how far we've come by legislating that women are equal to men:
We have an unprecedented number of single-parent families and all of the dysfunctional children that accompany those numbers. We have an unprecedented divorce rate that never stops climbing. (Studies have shown that 80% of all marriages start where men ask the women, but it is in the 90% range where women initiate divorce.) Women in the workplace are supposed to be equal but statistically, they spend less time at work than men do for the same job.
Before women start bashing me on this because it doesn't fit "you" or some smaller group of people -- this is about the country of the U.S. at large. And if you think there aren't cases to the opposite, it would be wrong for me not to acknowledge it.... so here's your bone. I read in a black woman's magazine about some refreshing statistics that the decline of black single mothers collecting welfare is increasing at an almost unexplainable rate. They are becoming far more educated than their white counterparts, and are earning more money than their black male counterparts. I can only attribute that to cultural adjustments within those circles but it does illustrate an important point I'd like to close with.
Natural ability or talent alone do not determine potential for success or limitations. There are thousands of other factors that can come into play when determining these things which can even include the direction of the wind at the moment of determination. So then what would be the purpose of such studies?
It's about understanding ourselves; who we are -- our strengths and our weaknesses. And the sooner we embrace whatever the "facts du jour" are, the sooner we can begin from a proper perspective rather than the basis of some political agenda.
Without getting into the argument whether he's right or no, I'd like to point out that the public outbreak that followed his comments is incredibly stupid, and completely unnecessary. Paul Graham has a very interesting article on this subject: What you can't say
Pretty soon the male gender will be obsolete. Of course, it's a race to determine whether the current system will completely decimate the world first, rendering it unlivable for the females who remain. Don't forget, you can always be replaced by a petri dish and a vibrator.
Better yet, don't read the Bell Curve. Hernstein and Murray were lambasted to hell and back in the scientific community for that particular peice of work, AND WITH GOOD REASON!
If you MUST read it, follow it with the ultimate criticism thereof--The Mismeasure of Man.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
In my intro to social psych class my final semester we had a section on stereotypes and how perceived disadvantages actually affect performance. A quick google search turned up a article dealing with this type of thing.
Quote from page 4:
In this study, we found that when men and women were told to take a standardized math test--a test that was quite difficult for them--women scored lower and were less able to formulate any strategy on more problems in comparison to men. However, when this same test was portrayed as gender fair, men and women scored equally on the test, and women were just as able to formulate strategies as men. We believe that this small change in the testing situation changed the meaning of the situation for the participants. Although women were taking the same difficult test, when they experienced frustration, they no longer had to be concerned about their ability being judged by the stereotype.
I think that Chinese people are better at math, black people are better at sports, and women are better at organizing..
What does being "better at math" mean?
Better at knowing times tables? Better at the intuitive leaps that define higher math? Better at the years of effort to solve some complex issue? Better at competing in a fairly agressive battle over ideas at the academic level for attention?
What is Math? There are dozens of different types of mathematics, each with different kinds of thinking. In some, visualization is critical. In some, pure mechanics wins the day.
My wife sure does manage the checkbook better. Does that mean anything other than that I should let her do it?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
the ability to make such judgement about our own intelligence.
:-)
I think environmental factors with females are still high to dissuade them from such geeky pursuits.
The problem is, even in the west of west civilisations, if a woman isn't married by 30 she is a liability unto herself.
Now, give that kind of social pressure to anyone, and see how much they like to grow a beard in a lab instead of settle to nesting.
Is this bourne out of control groups? if not, then I would say that the president of harvard has a natural tendancy for not being able to research anything properly.
he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference
Summers already faced criticism because the number of senior job offers to women has dropped each year of his three-year presidency.
He has promised to work on the problem.
yeah, like hire some freshman lasses into his office, oh yeah baby, come to poppp... pa... oops.
Seriously, who/why/what for are people trying to study such stupidity?
it is like someone with a intel 4 billion gigaherz, and an athlon 4billion+ (3.4billion ghz) running a spectrum emulator written in uberl33t compact assembler code with all the optimization flags, and then talking about how female thermal compound is better than male thermal compound.
i.e. we all use our brains as much as our asses (about once a day regular hopefully) so why fuss over it.
In other news, after reading this, the sexist dude from harvard says more research needs to be done into womens asses.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Please everyone, read THE BELL CURVE, and read up on some published papers!
its a fact,
at IQ 124, the chance a a person being female is a staggering 800% (yes eight HUNDRED) less likely than a male!!
age of puberty is the main causal factor to diverge from mean IQ.
females and blacks go through puberty earlier, asians, and geeky nerds go last.
just because a few flat-chested ugly women (probably androgen-insensitive psuedo-males) can major in math, does not mean that the well founded statistics in The Bell Curve book are invalid!
Tufts university studied breast size vs IQ and was vilified.
But its a fact. Female puberty prevents high IQ.
What if women are 3% more likely to be bad at science than men. Hell, what if they're 50% more likely? Many studies link Left brain (logic) with men and Right brain (creativity) with women, so it's sorta plausible.
What do you do with that knowledge? Do you dissuade women from trying to go into science even more than now? Such a small percentage of people go for science anyway, why not let the work weed out the good from the bad? It's not like we don't know which of our coworkers are just kinda squeaking by.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm not kidding. You'll see them both in your spouse, yourself, your child, and see them reflected in anecdotes from other parents about them, their spouses and children.
I'm willing to say that some are socialization driven, but not all of them. Some of them HAVE to be based on physical differences, whether its neurological, hormone-driven psychological changes, or something originating in physical differences.
Plus, there's the cross-cultural differences in gender. How to account for $remote_tribal_people having gender differences and specilializations if there's not some physical basis for it?
Not his personal views, my ass.
It's all in the phrasing of the slur.
If I were to say, "Some black men are criminals," it'd be one thing; were I to say, "black men are criminals" it's another thing entirely.
Same goes for this situation. If I say, "Women are bad at math," it implies that I think they're all inferior logically to all men. It's entirely different than saying, "A statistical sampling of women shows that they are, on average, bad at math compared to a similar sampling of men." Now, while I'm not bad at mathematics myself, my wife is likely better - or at least enjoys it more - and I'm not too shabby on the topic myself, "on the average".
Aside from the fact that the absolute word "bad" is used, it's just a poor choice of language for a supposedly-educated man. Either that, or he said what he'd initially intended, it was taken in context, and he's a sexist. It wouldn't surprise me.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This kind of research becomes a non-starter once it's publicized because of an inability of people to differentiate between "women" and "that woman over there", and because a huge political force believes that anything even approaching an excuse for sexism or racism must be stopped for the good of society.
"It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," Hopkins said later.
THAT is sexist. The idea that the women in these roles are fragile and need the approval of the man in charge, not even approval of them but of their general classification. It's an attitude of: "lack of women in science is a problem, and if we don't like a potential reason for it then the only way to fix the problem is to not discuss it".
Promote civility: mod down any post starting with 'ummm'.
It actually reminds of the studies that showed blacks were dumber than whites because they were poorer. Also blacks cause more violent crime. While blacks as a general rule are arrested more and are poorer than whites the cause of this is hardly genetics but instead caused by a racially biased society. Same goes for anything you can conclude about women based on looking at societal trends. Its a sexist society of course women are going to be underrepresented in these careers and fields. The way we are raising them doesn't prepare them properly to excel in those fields.
Perhaps the president of Harvard is in cahoots with Henry Makow (Ph.D.!). See for yourself:
Frigid Women Are Usually Feminists
http://www.savethemales.ca/000441.html
The Male Fallout from Feminism
http://www.savethemales.ca/000329.html
The Dawn of the Feminist Police State
http://www.savethemales.ca/000202.html
Playboy and the (Homo) Sexual Revolution
http://savethemales.ca/091101.html
Heterosexual Society is Under Siege
http://www.savethemales.ca/000168.html
One thing's for sure - the ol' fella may need some help to cope with the scorn of all those riled, if not innumerate, Harvard bunnies, and Henry provides just the ticket: http://www.celibacy.org/
Disclaimer: The information referenced in this post may or may not express the views of the poster... Please sic your rhetorical dogs on the the message, not the messenger.
Not a bad rule of life to live by in general.
...but I'm far more interested in whether it's true, and whether the reaction would have been different if a woman had said it. It may not be politically correct to say some things, but we shouldn't shy away from facts. I remember when Jimmy the Greek was fired from his sportscaster job for being "racially insensitive", when he suggested that blacks typically excelled at athletics because slaves were bred like livestock for strength and stamina. The huge outcry that followed sealed his fate, despite the protests from his colleague Ahmad Rashad, who insisted that he was not a racist, and the incontrovertible historical fact that slaves were bred like livestock. One need only check the many slave breeding records that still exist. It is fact that prized male slaves were, not just encouraged, but coerced, into getting as many women as possible pregnant.
As an interesting side note, here in Jamaica, it has been suggested by several eminent academics that it is this ingrained pattern of behaviour that accounts for the notorious predilection of Jamaican men to scatter their seed far and wide. The general public reaction was not to lynch them, but a collective "A-ha! So that explains it!" I certainly can't comment on whether or not it is true, but it is telling that the public reaction was probably far different than it would have been if the persons stating such a thing were white. The fact that they were black perhaps suggested to the public that they weren't pushing a racial agenda. Why is it we can make racist jokes and comments about ourselves but become outraged when others say them? For example, it's commonly held here that Jamaican sprinters are so fast because they're used to running from the police, but God help a non-Jamaican who dares say it. Why the hypocrisy about race and gender?
No matter how painful and repugnant the facts may be, if they are incontrovertible, we cannot negate the truth by averting our eyes. If they are plausible, we should investigate, without being hobbled by "political correctness".
But any research that is specifically about women in science is going to be biased. It's too loaded.
Do a gender blind study about all people in science, and study the quality of their work and comparitive grades and test scores, etc, etc, etc. And then when you're done with that, go back and divide the groups by sexes, and then you may have some real data.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Men think with their heads and women think with their hearts.
Think about that for a second. Have you ever had an argument with your spouse/girlfriend, and no matter how hard you tried to explain your side of the story things just got worse?
The problem is that you are trying to explain something in a logical way (that's how men think), but your woman just wants to feel emotionally better. I am convinced that in this situation it is better to:
a) give her a hug and tell her everything is going to be alright
or, depending on the circumstances
b) make love to her (my fav)
Both of these options will serve you better than trying to win an argument with a woman.
The point of my post is that maybe men being "logical" thinkers helps them in the math department.
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
This is true for both gender and racial differences. It is usually the fact that the variation between the two groups is LESS than the variation within the groups.
In plain English, this means that the standard deviation (look it up, this is news for nerds) of math ability in females is greater than the difference in means between males and females (loosely speaking), such that the mean of math ability in males falls within one standard deviation of the mean of math ability for females. This means that although there is a statistically significant difference between the means, that difference is so small that it makes little, if any, difference in the grand scheme of things, and could easily be explained by other factors.
As a note, there was some absolute *genius* that claimed that there was no way to tell if math ability was due to differences in gender or socialization. Geniusboy, you are so wrong. What about taking a cross-cultural sample (just a simple two second idea)? There are expiremental methods, and statistical methods to tease that type of information out. It is difficult, to be sure, and maybe no one has ever done it, but it is NOT impossible. (There is the possibility that it would be unethical, but that's a different ballgame).
Just another point--there is a REAL and statistically significant difference in performance on IQ tests between blacks and whites. This difference is close to 1/2 to 1 standard deviation, depending on the area and exact test. This difference is dissappearing, slowly, as certain things happen, but it is still there. But that difference is small enough that you cannot make the assumption that any individual member of the opposite race from you will be smarter or dumber, especially if you are an average intelligence white person. To do so would be STUPID!
The same is true of males v. females and math ability. Sure, there may be a difference, but I wouldn't say that I am better than any given female at math until I had seen evidence of that.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Lawrence H. Summers later said that he was discussing hypotheses based on scholarly work and that it did not necessarily represent his private views.
Which are: Women should be seen and not heard. He later said that he was discussing his cultural bias and that it did not necessarily represent his primitive views.
Which are: A woman's place is in the home and real woman should seek marriage as their ultimate life fulfilment. He later said that he was discussing his gutteral feelings and that it did not necessarily represent his primordial views.
Which are: Women should stay barefoot and pregnant, as much as possible. He later said he was planning to move to either Texas or Utah and run for President, in 2008, on the Republican ticket.
I can't decide if this is a sarcastic spoof or a real Southern Baptist nutjob. Either way, it's perfect.
Thank you sir, for making my point.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
When I first read about this, I was ready to give the guy a pass, thinking "Well, we all say stupid things once in a while, maybe he phrased what he meant wrong way, etc." Then, I read this at the end of the article I read (link):
Summers already faced criticism because the number of senior job offers to women has dropped each year of his three-year presidency.
It's one thing to say that differences between men and women need to be studied. But in light of the above fact, I've become rather suspicious.
"Righteous speed demon and trust fund party darling of justice"
Emily Noether Try doing physics without her work.
As for the Jewish issue, funniness, and ability to rap, well those obviously fit the rest of your post quite well.
LIAR - the refutation was totally discredited.
plus i am talking about BIOLOGICAL issues.
puberty - not discusse in the Bell Curve but instead in over 100 research papers.
the Blacks went nuts at the Bell Curve, but the Bell Curve is solid facts.
its nothing more than a collection of studies.
to attack the Bell curve you would have to attack MILLIONs (yes MILLIONS) of IQ tests that the book is based upon!!
women are les likely to be smart thatn men.
IQ 124 is almost unreachable to a woman, adn thats not even a staggeringly high IQ.
Could it be that women simply are clever enough not to pay for stupid, meaningless IQ tests?
Just a thought...
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
The strip had a clueless young man coming in and saying he was Dilbert's new manager. He had almost no work experience. Why then ? Well he got the job because he came out of a top MBA program. And he got into a top MBA school because he scored well in the GMAT (~SAT etc). So... "You are a manager because you know math ?"
The irony is that math skills are deterministic for lots of things where it shouldn't. Fot at least one reason: math skills are easily quantified.
So *if* it happens that women (the better half of mankind) score lower on math, we could be discounting their ability to contribute to society (emotional intelligence, etc) too much.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
I've taught programming at a major university for several years, and in that time, there have only ever been one or two female students whose programming skills I would rate as "good", compared to a large number of males. Conversley, I would say that a much higher percentage of female students demonstrated rather poor logical and programming ability than males did.
Having said that, when it comes to web site design and social issues in computing, the females invariably do much better than the males.
Different sexes have different skills in different areas.
Someone's going to be looking for a job real soon.
Yeah because fewer women are so arrogant as to test their IQ.
Anyone intelligent *enough* knows that a test - even scaled against ones 'peers' - is not going to be accurate. Even if it is - anyone intelligent enough would still be able to see that the results of such can do no good (either depression or overactive ego).
My IQ is $X. I know how smart I am, it can stay that way.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Hey, guess what -- there ARE natural differences between the genders. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Should this keep a qualified woman from getting a job? Never. It also shouldn't keep a qualified man from getting a job that most people think a woman should be better at.
Nobody here is claiming male superiority in general. Flip around the tube, especially during the day, and you'll see countless shows talking about the things that men aren't as good at. There's even the ridiculous (in my opinion) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, implying that straight guys have no taste, but gay guys do.
For every rule there are exceptions. As a rule, men naturally make better firefighters than women. But there are perfectly capable female firefighters. That doesn't make it wrong to suggest that women in general lack the attributes of good effective firefighters, especially as a matter of physiology. By the same token, when studying human behavior and aptitude, it would be irresponsible to ignore natural differences between genders.
Don't pretend that you can't tell when the clumsily-driven SUV in front of you is being piloted by a woman. Now go back and read that sentence -- notice that I didn't suggest that no women can drive large automobiles. I didn't say that at all. But generally, there seems to be a real difference in the way men and women perceive their spatial environment.
We don't have X-Ray vision that allows us to see through the hood and the fender and know that we have clearance to make the turn without nicking the car in front of us. We can't SEE any more than women, but somehow we KNOW more about what's out there. We understand what we see more than most women do, based on the same visual input.
Don't pretend this isn't interesting and worthy of study. At the same time, no women should be denied drivers licenses simply because they're women. They should be evaluated by the same standards as men, and they are.
I continue to anxiously await the day when we can speak honestly about these issues without fear of offending the easily-offended.
RP
God forbid that someone in America have their own opinion on something.
This type of thing only makes it more likely for women not to succeed in science or math. It's all in the self-fulfilling prophecy or Pygmalion theory devloped by Stumpt and Pfungst, which says the more you are told something, the more you believe it. Therefore, by telling women all the time they can't be good in science or math, they won't be.
-- Nic
Now, once we've all been reminded to stop thinking with our hind-brains, let's try and see if we can agree on some preliminary conclusions...
1) There are women who perform outstandingly well in areas of math and science. In my experience I've known women who are as amazing prodigies in things like physics as any men I've met. I'm a scientist in a field of physics, and I've met my fair share of geniuses, Nobel prize winners, child prodigies, idiot savants, and just plain freaks. Of both genders.
2) There are fewer women than men in general in the mathematical/physical sciences.
3) There are definite societal pressures against women doing well in math and science, starting from an early age and continuing all the way into tenure-level academic selection. This includes of course the pressure to raise children, but also includes social pressure in high school and college.
4) There are obvious (and wonderful) physical differences between men and women. It is possible that there are similar psychological gender differences, but in all truth, there is no hard scientific evidence for this, and some evidence against it.
5) In the past, many people have used strikingly similar arguments to defend blatantly racist claims. The obvious examples are things like claimed IQ differences between "white", "black" and "yellow" races; or claims about differences in "sexual restraint", or other equally repugnant things. I think most reasonable people see such claims as the bigotry it is, and there is ample societal evidence to disprove such claims.
Based on my personal experience, and on discussions with friends and colleagues, I think that the explanaition for why there are fewer women in the matheatical sciences has more to do with inherent societal biases and the way that the job market works than any inherent gender differences. It is blindingly obvious to anyone in physics these days that the system was set up in a day and age when a professor was expected to have a wife at home who would take care of everything, including raising children. It is almost impossible for a dual-career couple to balance having a family with having successful careers at an elite institution. Something has to give, and that is often the wifes career (although among my friends it is oddly enough more often the other way around. Statistical anomaly, or recent trend?)
So, I think a) Summers is betraying his own mind-set, which is gender-biased. b) he's missing the larger issue, which is a career ladder that demands total sacrifice of everything including family life.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
"Will not" is contracted as won't.
Wont means accustomed or used as in
Hmmm, a single morning to rigorously explain away a persistent discrepancy in performance, observed in every society in the world, and which the president of Harvard says need to be studied. I bet not. I think it's more likely that what we did in the first half of the day was make it clear that we have a lot of theories that might explain the problem that are much more to our liking than saying women aren't as good at math as men.
Personally, as the father of three girls and one boy, I found the two-trucks story very familiar. We still have three of the kids living with us. They're eight years old; they've always had access to the exact same toys, sports equipment, books, and television shows; their parents are very keen to make sure that no interest goes unpursued and no talent undeveloped--but we are well on our way to raising two typical women and one typical man (except that one of the girls loves computer games). We could try harder to change that, I guess, but my wife and I really don't see the point in trying to pound a peg into the wrong hole. As long as the opportunity is there for women who want to work in math or science, I don't see why it matters if the numbers come out even.
Seriously. I'm not a PC guy, but when I see crap like this, I can only really see one reason for it. He's making a case that Harvard needen't worry about having a balanced enrollment in math or science,
Should they have to balance out who enrolls in their schoools? Seriously, if every math major is an Asian Male because they are the most qualified to do so then should certain qualified Asians be left out in the name of diversity? (I only picked asian male because I am not asian...)
because females are too stupid to be in those courses of study. He doesn't cite any studies, he doesn't seem to have any facts except for crap about his freaking 5 year old.
Uhh, it doesn't make one group "stupid" if they don't excel at something. While females may score below males in standardized mathmatical tests, I believe they do outscore males at english.
Trying to find out why different races and different sexes excel in some fields isn't racist or sexist, it's science. I hope our quest of l earning more about ourselves isn't derailed by PC flag wavers like yourself.
Read a book you fool.
Puberty onset is a measurable non-subjective trait, as are language-neutral pure IQ tests.
and PUBERTY and IQ are highly related!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Women wil find IQ 124 extremely hard to reach, as would a negro.
asians, on the other hand, have very little sexual hormones and in fact also go through puberty LAST and have highest IQs
i am white, male and have an open mind. something you seem to lack
fuck jesus. religion has no role in scientific debate.
You lost me completely there. Why Sweden?
It's possible that people in Wisconsin are better in sports than people in Kansas. In fact, I am sure that either this is the case, or the opposite is the case, because if you have a fine enough measurement tool you will find a difference in the averages. However, going from there to say that "people in Wisconsin are better in sports that people in Kansas" (or the opposite) is redundant, misleading and ridiculous.
An average of this kind has no practical meaning what so ever.
Women's advocacy groups pick and choose sex differences to be outraged over:
Women:
1. live longer
2. are less likely to be victimized by violent crime
3. are less likely to be killed in war
4. are less likely to suffer birth defects
5. are less likely to go to jail
6. are less likely to be substance abusers (alcohol, smoking, illegal drugs)
7. are more likely to go to, and complete, college
8. are less likely to be high-school drop-outs
Raise the possibility that some things that women are not as good at, such as abstract reasoning, however, and you'll be slaughtered in public.
GF
Lots of petrified grits
a lot of the comments I've heard seem to be based on this being automatically sexist as opposed to people showing good studies that demonstrate the this isn't at all correct
That's the real problem with talking about a sensitive issue. It's such an issue that we really have to dig deeper, past the literal meaning of the comments, to see the type of person making them, and the context in which they were made. Then we can assess whether this is a sexist comment, or a serious attempt at trying to understand the sexes better.
He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls
Children know if they are boys or girls and that it's permanent - this child was old enough to speak, she had probably been copying her mother for years, learning facial expressions and body language.
Besides, it's complete irrelevant. What place does such absurd anecdotal evidence have in the differences in Maths ability between men and women?
IMHO, they were sexist comments because of the point of view of the person making them.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
That's the real difference ... far more guys I know just like talking and thinking about math (ok, not many like talking about pure math per se, but more are open to the ideas of mathematics)and science than girls.
This is just conversational experience talking. I've met very few girls who think anything I talk about is interesting in the least, but many guys who jump right in and we have a great chat.
If you could work it out genetically, sure. Figure out all the genetic attributes you need to be successful in science. If you got 'em, you're in. Otherwise, go flip burgers.
But otherwise, how do you know? I say, if they want to try, give them a shot. If they make it, they deserved to make it, they were born to make it, and they had the ability to make it. If they don't they don't. Why try and guess based off percentages?
Hell, most people don't make it in science anyway. I know that just from college. 100 level courses, 10,000 students. 200 level courses 2500. 300 level, 1500. 400? Maybe a thousand.
Why try and guess in advance? If it was decided for you what you could do, Einstein would never have made it to college in science. His math skills were off.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Are you saying that there are innate psychological differences between men and women?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In places with only a few insurance companies, thie divergence might become significant. If the entry barrier is low, then costs will be actually less for the company that follows the true statistics -- and they'll have every incentive to undercut the other companies. If company A is charging population P too much (compated to their actual rates of claims), then company B will come in and charge P less. Meanwhile, if company A is artificially charging population Q too little (for whatever reason), then A loses money on every Q customer; whereas B, following the true stats, does not.
So the answer here, of course, is to make sure that entry into the insurance market is not artificially difficult.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Some years ago Murray and Herrnstein published the book "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" in which they inferred from their data that blacks naturally had a lower IQ than whites. Their data certainly seemed to support this claim. However, they were suspect to Simpson's Paradox, in that if they had further stratified their data by social class, then their data may very well have suggested their claim was false. So since many minorities live in poverty or near-poverty, the IQ scores for their races were subsequently lowered. I am naturally very skeptical of studies such as these for the very same reason. As for the study in this post, they would have to have raised children from birth in uniform conditions in order to avoid any biases that culture might induce. Since this is not likely to be the case for this study, I have a hard time believing their conclusions. I would be much more prone to believe that children who are raised in a similar manner as girls in the US are worse at math --- whatever that means --- than those who are raised like boys. Barbie dolls or Legos, which one helps a child develop spacial reasoning? Which one is traditional given to boys, to girls? Now if you'll excuse me, I am late. I am meeting my friends and we are going to play that wonderful game "Jump to Conclusions".
Get real he said that the reason could be due to the innate differences not "men are better than women." It is a sad sad world when such a benign point of view draws such criticism.
I'm still not sure.
A negro? Who the hell uses that terminology anymore?
Gotta be a spoof.
Oh yea, on the off chance it's not: Marilyn Vos Savant...IQ 218. Smartest person alive. Woman. You sir, are full of it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Man, I thought we'd heard the last of this, the most Neanderthal of empiricist views. While we're at it, we may as well resucitate Darwin's view that homo sapiens can be further divided into subspecies according to skin color!
JoloK
What was actually said involved a lot of disclaimers and careful language. Summerizing the remarks as "females naturally bad at math" is just plain wrong.
One of the specific things he pointed out was the way that the work of high level math and science contributors in academia is organized requires a steep committment in time and effort that many women are unwilling to spend. In the corporate world positions have been modified to allow for multiple people to hold onto an important responsibility. There are other kinds of changes that can also be made. Part of the implication here is that the flaws are not with the women who are not reaching the top in these contexts, but with the way the offices and responsibilities themselves are structured and executed.
There is a popular article in the New York Times about this with the title "Harvard Chief Defends His Talk On Women" that goes into significant detail.According to the BBC, The difference in male vs. female brain size (about 10%) in humans and higher order primates is directly attributable to in increase is the size of the areas of the brain responsible for geo-spatial mapping and visualization. Natural selection is the culprit in this instance. It seems that if you couldn't find your way home after the day's hunt, you got less of an opportunity to pass on your genes!
When you think about it, (and be honest now) in your experience, exactly what is the ratio of male to female Unix admins?
Got 'cha!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Harvard used to be one of the great Universities of the world. Used to be being the key words. This asshat needs to resign his position immediatly.
The sad part of our world today is that even if this is PROVEN to be true, political correctness will squash the results into oblivion.
I am a double major in Chem and physics with a minor in math. No-one disourages anyone from doing the sciences. The departments go out of their way to get female students. However the more mathematical/analytical (ie sheer logic) the subject the fewer the females. In my math classes its about 60 - 70 %% male. In physics its 80 - 90% male. The less analytical/logical the more female. Thus chemistry is about equal. Biochem is 55-60% female. Bio is about 75 % female. Psych is about 85 % female. These figures speak for themselves. Its quite frequent that I see female students dispraportionately struggle in math and physics. Also if you want more evidence as to genetic differences see this study: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003390.html Look, the bottom line is that anyone in the trenches such as myself sees overwheleming evidence of what females excell in and what males excell in. To be, or to have been in an accademic environment and to deny this is IMHO just denying the obvious because it conflicts with ones own political beliefs. I could imagine that 100 studies could be done in 100 different ways and they would all show genetic differences and still people would deny it. If you are determined to believe the earth is flat I cant 'force' you to believe it is round!
The amount of guys here willing to believe Mr. Summers claim, despite the fact that the article explains that he himself admitted "these are things that need to be studied" and that a distinguished professor says that his statements were "things we had refuted in the first half of the day," is fairly disturbing, in a way.
Critical reading and reasoning skills still need to be applied even if the assertion strokes your ego, guys.
Fight for something better: www.socialistalternative.org
The way that "brain structure" is used to make claims like this just makes me shake my head. The brain is a dynamic machine that self organizes as we develop based in no small part on the stimulus we give it.
Saying that more men go further in the fields of math and science and then pointing to the brain structure of these particular people versus the not-so-mathy and scientific people really shows nothing other than what a math-and-science wired brain tends to look like. I bet if you look at the brain structure of a highly mathematically/scientifically inclined woman, the same people would say "she's good at this stuff because her brain is structured like a man's".
It's not worth my time at the moment to go off on a "nature v nuture" tangent -- but the whole "brain structure" logic just always annoys the hell out of me because they seem to always look at a brains current structure without considering (or just making assumptions about) how a particular brain came to have that particular structure. In many cases the overlooked how-the-brain-got-this-way question is much more relevant to the case at hand, but doesn't seem to get studied (or referenced) as much.
this guy never met my sister, she is one of those nerdy book worm chics that is always reading something or doing a crossword puzzle, the kind of chic that looks like a librarian in charactor, you know the type that has lots of book smarts and academic prowness but a total nerd/geek...
So many logical fallacies, so little time. One of the logical fallacies you have made in your argument is called ignoratio elenchi or irrelevant conclusion. You purport to establish a particular conclusion with an argument that has nothing to do with the argument at hand. -Three times removed at that. Do women have different abilities than do men? That I believe was the issue. Not Jewish basketball players or black entertainers, rappers and athletes.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
look how far we've come by legislating that women are equal to men: We have an unprecedented number of single-parent families and all of the dysfunctional children that accompany those numbers. We have an unprecedented divorce rate that never stops climbing. (Studies have shown that 80% of all marriages start where men ask the women, but it is in the 90% range where women initiate divorce.)
Yes, and there you haven't even touched the subject of what happens after that divorce; the woman gets away with the kids and your money. Hell, I know men where the woman, right after they decided to divorce, robbed the entire house clean of all their mutual belongings (with the help of friends), in addition to taking a way too large lump of his future income, and taking all his rights away to see his kids. Judges won't punish this sort of outright criminal behaviour and the woman's part, undoubtedly for a variety of reasons, but justice is not one of them. Feminism is, I suspect. There's a reason for the fact that organisations like Fathers for Justice exist. This happens in Europe, mind you!Feminism destroyed America, the whole western world for that matter. And still there are people (the variery that needs to sit down to pee, that is) claiming that feminism hasn't come far enough yet. Excuse me?! What do they want men to be? Men are more than a monthly income, and a means for women to be able to shit out these godawful screaming shitting smelling monsters they call babies!
On the other hand, there is a difference between what women say (or think) they want, and what they actually want; they claim that they want men and women to be equal, and that they want a man with feminine qualities. Bullshit! What they want, is a man; someone who has the traditional male qualities like confidence, and not being afraid to set limits, etc. Until women see the flaw in their own logic here, the divorce rate will not get better. On the other hand, once you understand this as a man, it's time to get a woman that doesn't think in such a feministic way. Really, they exist :)
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
Your entirely true story of your father stirred a memory.
When I was little, I used to think "breech babies" were babies that came out of your ass.
Which is what I suspect your father must have had.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
You tend to get a lot more women proportionately in medicine and biology. I don't know why that would be. The math requirement for bio is much higher than that for Comp Sci, yet I personally knew more female bio majors than there were total girls in my whole year for CS.
I think, personally, it's considered more acceptable for women to go into biosciences and medicine, than physics, computers, and engineering, so they end up getting shunted toward one set of sciences and away from the other.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
In the US, physics classes are predominantly male even in high school. While only 28% of men have taken high school physics, the percentage of women is even lower: 21%. However, the big differences appear in the undergraduate years, where over 80% of physics majors in US universities are men. According to a 1996 survey by the American Institute of Physics, 17% of physics bachelor's and master's degree recipients in 1995 were women, while 12% of physics PhD recipients were women.
I'm curious to know what the difference in Australian educational systems or culture is that makes such a difference in number of women physics undergraduates. Does anyone have any ideas, or knowledge of any studies done on such differences?
Insightful replies can be found at the blog of PZ Myers.
Some MAN needs to calculate the rotational velocity of MLK's corpse, immediately!
More on academic sexism
OK, putting aside the standard 'IQ? Who cares!' rant, if this was a genuine study then just because the 'results' have been munged into IQ scores doesn't mean this wasn't controlled and done correctly.
Imagine, instead, the guy had said that 8/9 of 750+ math SATs in a given year are male. (Or whatever SAT score is at the same curve point you'd peg IQ 124.)
Let's say all I know of this story is:
- some guy got up to a podium and said "I believe that Proposition X is true."
- as his sole evidence to support Proposition X, he cites a single anecdotal behavior of his 5-year-old progeny.
My conclusion would be exactly the same as it is knowing the full story: I don't care WHAT "Proposition X" is, whether it's PC, non-PC, anti-PC, or PQRSTUV. The speaker is absolutely ignorant as to how to apply scientific method to test a proposition - one of the central tenets being that you NEVER rely on a single anecdotal observation (these more often lead to grave errors than right conclusions), and further that you never rely on evidence where the subject (the daughter) could be influenced by the intended premise, or the observer could be similarly influenced.
Such a person has no business speaking to any educated audience about science, and certainly has no business heading up a university purporting to educate scientists. I don't care whether his proposition/conclusion was "girls are bad at science" or "girls are good at science." Everything about his reasoning is BAD SCIENCE.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
I hope I live to see the day when we laugh at the quaint squeemishness of our age to admit what every other age and people have plainly known.
It's just that not every age has known this. In fact, possibly NO age has known this. Most societies have been either male or female dominated (usually male) and in many cases the "weaker" sex is considered completely inferior - presumably to preserve the status-quo.
Equality between the sexes is breaking new ground, but first it must survive the principle that there ARE real differences in the abilities of each sex.
That means we need equality WITH the understanding of slightly unequal abilities. The playing field must be equal, and everybody appreciated for their individual strengths, and not ashamed of their individual weaknesses.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Okay lets say all this was right an females were infact naturally not as good at maths and science. Why is this a bad thing? Who says that the only way forward for the world is through maths and science? Obviously they are important to an extent but they aren't everything.
I'll bet anything that females are better at the arts, literature, and things like social work. All these things are just as imporant as maths and science, if not more.
If you tell someone who looks up to you that they can't do something, it is highly likely they, in fact, won't do it. Further, when someone else pushes them to try, they become emotionally stressed ( in one form or another ), further reducing their ability in the "thing". Now, "telling" someone that they can't do something could be as simple as not encouraging them.
The mother of my child is terrible at math. Can barely do simple addition and subtraction. She gets incredibly stressed even attempting it. turns out, her father told her ( when she was in school still ) that she should focus on what she was good at and just leave math alone. When i see a study like this, I have to wonder how many other women suffered the same idiotic parenting as she did.
For the record, when she isn't paying attention, she can do complex algebra on the fly. It's a damn shame her father stuck that block in her head, and if I thought it'd help, I'd smack him around a bit. As it stands, I don't let him anywhere near our daughter, and I have to be content with that.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The funny thing is, you would think an economist of all people would recognize how important the kind of factors you describe can be. I think you hit the nail on the head when you say "some of the older guys are just biased against women". All of the evidence points to this being the case here.
Summers should be dismissed as president of Harvard, if only because of the sheer intellectual incompetence he demonstrated in describing an anecdote about his own daughter as though it had any relevance to the issue.
If he attempted a "gender-neutral upbringing", does that mean he isolated his daughter from outside sources of gender roles? Obviously not, since such sources include him and his poor wife (assuming she's still with him). So what conclusion can be drawn from this anecdote?
The obvious conclusion, considering the context, is that the current president of Harvard is intellectually unsuited for the position. This is what happens when a society prefers a particular group, such as white males - even the weakest ones can rise to the top, at the expense of the whole society, as has clearly happened here.
(For the record, I'm a white male, but I don't require the kind of unspoken societal affirmative action the Harvard president obviously received on his way up.)
The conclusion is: sterotypes are meaningless, and the enemy of rational discourse.
I'm sorry I didn't spell it out at your level. Do you see how it follows now?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
is what people are concerned about when such things are brought up.
We're all taught that everyone is equal, and overall, we are. However genetically certain races may be stronger in some respects than others.
This might seem like things are unequal, but overall it all works out. One race may have raw strength but might lack in coordination.
The only problem that arises in all of this is these things are of different importance to different people, like valuing intelligence over physical strength, and they may start thinking that one race is "better" than another.
The information I have is from the ideas that there is a general consensus on in the field of Psychology. Among the following, it is not known how much is culture vs. innate factors, but these are based on tests administered to very large numbers of people in many separate studies.
1. On average, men are slightly better at spacial reasoning than women. This slight difference is so small as to be absolutely dwarfed by the variation between members of the same sex.
2. Women may be slightly better at simple computation than men. Again, the difference is miniscule, requiring a huge sample size to be detectable.
3. In general, there is a bit more variation in ability among men: there are less moderate performing individuals, and more that are very good or very bad. Note that this effect is not large enough to substantially affect the proportion of men to women at any level except possibly a small fraction of the top percentile. (Interestingly, men tend to display a little more variation not only in math skills, but in a wide variety of qualities.)
Practically speaking, even assuming all differences are innate and not cultural, the they are so small that making policy decisions based on the assumption that men are much better as a whole doesn't make sense.
In my opinion, this man was simply trying to come up with an excuse for his poor performance at helping to change the "good ole boys" climate of higher-level science and engineering departments.
(no sig)
Ah, but such is the toxicity of the current environment. If you proposed that women have a genetic disposition to be more empathic, you would not be roasted like this guy is. And yet what he actually said is: There are persistent gaps between male and female representation in sicence and math. We've worked pretty hard for several decades now to reduce that gap. It is fair, at least, to wonder where it originates -- and a candidate is in the genes. He wasn't saying it is so ... he was saying, we should study to see if it is so.
... they already have The Truth in their possession. Investigation could, at best, confirm The Truth and might just call it into question, so inquiry is dangerous and must be avoided -- and those seeking to inquire must be shouted down and silenced.
Hmmm. That's called science.
The critics have all begun with their "truth" firmly in mind: There are no genetic origins to the gender discrepancy. They're not interested in knowing if this is so or in showing that it is so. They don't have to
That's not science. That's religion.
Put a different way: For a moment, imagine that there is a genetic origin for the gender discrepancy. Isn't that the sort of thing we should know and face? Or is it racist for us to know that African Americans have a genetic predisposition for sickle-cell anemia?
The truth cannot be racist. Facts cannot be racist. How they are used can be -- but when has a free society ever benefitted from an a priori decision to close down a line of inquiry?
It strikes me that everyone who has raised the arm seems not to believe in the scientific method or, in fact, the Enlightenment. We all want to fruits of scientific endeavour but we don't want to respect its fundaments.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Even if women were "bad" at math (not going to even start with the broad generalizations... not to mention, the lines of gender are *very* blurry) in general, that doesn't mean individual women can't be geniuses at it or very good. And it certainly doesn't mean that if, on average, women perform statistically worse at math, they shouldn't be given equal consideration and opportunities as men to try their hands at it.
The problem comes when you take a (hypothetical, non-existent) statistic and automatically assume "Well since women in general aren't as good as men at math, then THIS woman here must not be as good as THIS man there--therefore I will hire him."
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
How did she compare to other students from the same school?
We already know that the average math ability of Japanese students is higher than the average ability of American students, so your argument is less a refutation of Mr. Harvard Guy than it is a beautiful example of the failure of the American education system.
Clear, Dark Skies
Seriously, some people just may have genetic traits that just make them better suited for one thing or the other. This world is just getting too politically correct, not that we need to go back to being racist/sexist etc. But lets not swing too far in the opposite direction either.
Um, no. It's a collection of (some discredited, some not) studies with extensive commentary that explains the studies as seen by the authors of the book - to present it as a dispassionate collection of peer-reviewed journal entries is fraud.
Among other things, the authors several times implicitly use the idea that studies on certain African tribes (who may have almost no descendants in the US) are accurate guides for the US black population. Unless you believe that melanin affects brain development (a bizarre biochemical theory if ever I heard one), there's no reason to suppose that studying African tribesmen gives you any more insight into a US population than studying a tribe of Tuvan goatherders on the Asian steppe - the genetic diversity of Americans, even those who are all lumped into one "race", is simply much too large.
The authors also present the idea that a single underlying factor can be constructed which correlates positively with a wide variety of test scores as evidence of innate immuteable intelligence. Now, while there may well be such a thing as innate intelligence, the fact that such an underlying measure can be constructed shows you nothing; you can construct an underlying factor to "demonstrate" that there is one innate trait that links hair color and femur length. The correlation won't be strong, but it will be there - and the g factor the authors demonstrate is rather weakly correlated with the outcomes they wish to explain by it.
(I haven't even gotten into the bit that speculates about dysgenic pressure on the US black population caused by promiscuous black men with unusually large genitals - and yes, that's in there too, and no, there is no study cited on cross-racial penis size)
Too bad cosmo.com doesn't have a forum.....
Now that is in fact a sexist statement in that you assume men are better at abstract reasoning.
... so consequently if we were talking about something like geometry it would stand to reason women would should be better at geometry.
And this is coming from a man, because, actually research suggests women are better at "abstract" reasoning.
As for them being better at child rearing, I would probably agree.
Anyway to move on, to blanketly say men are better at math is kind of stupid, because they're are many many many different types of math.
The guys is correct in some ways, but he's totally off in others men and women are different, yes their brains are wired differently as well, but there is not a part of your brain that constitues to the "math" portion. Math requires many different aspects of the brain, the guy should have said there are differences in reasoning skills not "subjects".
Example, women have better "spacial reasoning skills than men"
Anyway, the bottom line as the guy stated we need study more about the inate differences in how mens and womens brains wire themselves. Then we can talk about how this will manifest itself on an educational level.
"the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." -- the "Summers Memo"
I'll tell you why. It's because they were both really fucking fast. Faster than all the other competitors. Including the black competitors.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
if I've ever seen one. Not the new, but the actual Harvard Pres sayings =)
DON'T PANIC
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Married life teaches this very lesson.
-kgj
Kevin,
Is that you? You're gonna WISH you had just shut up when you get home. You can sleep on the couch again tonight!
- Your wife
I believe (but don't have any solid research to refer) that because men and women hava had different roles during the evolution there might exist small differences (which may not be significant).
Men have been hunters so their 3d visualization and planning skills (and therefore math skills) may be better and because women have taken care of children their social skills are likely to be better.
... those college girls are Going Wild all the time. They need to work out their frustration at this kind of institutional resistance to their superiority in differential calculus and quantum physics. So they fly down to Cozumel at Spring Break, drink all the free beer that that the Anheuser Busch reps are willing to give them, and then oil-wrestle each other. It's really just transferring their natural competitive instinct to a more socially accepted field of endeavor.
Math is hard and science is icky..... tee-hee....
I've read the story on the BBC News web site and now I've read it here. That means at least three sites are questioning my ability at math.
I took Psychology as a prt of my CS degree in the UK. Thankfully, not all parts of the world are so blinded by PC morality to deny actual experimental results.
We were taught, and validated by experimentation, that there are indeed differences between women and men. It turns out that women are better communicators than men, and and men have better spatial awareness (i.e. ability to model spatial problems in their mind).
I'd guess mental modeling of spatial problems has a lot of similarity with mental modeling of math problems.
I also find it interesting that these skills coincide with the traditional gender roles of man= hunter, woman=cavewife, that have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years compared to the relatively recent social equalisation of women.
Completely wrong IMHO, but a good statement none the less.
Empathy isn't "understanding" the human brain. It's about using the "non-clever" side of your mind to appreciate the people in your life. This is completely different to the "clever" side of the mind, which can understand relativity, bride building, social structures, gender roles and other "systems".
The empathic mind can appreciate what Taoists would call the "uncarved block", which points to the inability of clever-mind to really see and understand.
The difference is profound. It is like a guitar playing being so in touch with his music, that he losses his clever mind, and "emapthically" joins with the music. It is what the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" are about.
It is because of this natural (cultural or genetic) bias women have toward empathy, that I believe, on average, women find meaning in their lives earlier than men. Men do have this ability, if they choose to use it...
IMHO, I believe that empathy and cleverness (understanding systems) are two completely different tools that we have, each suited to different situations.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
because simply stating something is true isn't the same as providing referances and hard data to back it up. But if you'd like to read a bit up on the subject, maybe you can decide for yourself.
Looking around for a decent site related to this I pulled up a page full of links to related topics and studies. Some of that material should at least let someone decide if there's enough information to draw a hypothesis from.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
The issue this guy raises is a serious issue in evolutionary psychology - the field looking at how evolution (and thus, our genes) shapes our behaviour. There really are good reasons why men and women's minds might be innately different in some ways, because of the different roles and lifestyles that they had for the million or so years before civilisation.
But people discussing this stuff need to be a bit more wary about what they say. Instead of saying "women have less innate ability at science", you need to say something like "fewer women are interested in science (and the reason is genetic)", which, if true, at least doesn't imply that those women who are interested will necessarily be bad at it. It wouldn't imply that an admissions supervisor could rule someone out as a prospective scientist just because she was female.
People making this argument need to make clear that people are individuals and that using any sort of average measure of a population to judge the person you have in front of you right now is morally abhorrent.
Grr! Arg!
The more I read some of the comments here I am reminded of why I don't spend more time on slashdot. All the sudo intellectuals that govern their morals through emotion rather than rational thought. Why is it so disheartening for people to hear that there are differences between men and women? Does it really boil down to something as simple as jealously of men that can pee standing up and the sympathizers of those who can't? Get real there are differences between men and women ignoring them won't make them go away, chastising people for recognizing those are differences won't do it, and turning the world gay won't make it any easier.
So what if this professor theorizes that the innate differences between men and women might be an explanation for the fact there are more men in science & math than women. Has this theory been proven one way or the other? It comes down to a question of intent and I am surprised so many think ill of his intent. Was he saying this to illustrate male superiority? I doubt it. It makes more sense that he was merely using it as an example to explain a phenomenon that has not been vigorously studied from that angle.
It seems to me that the ideas of open mindedness and tolerance are lost on those who preach it most. For them your mind is not open until your brain has fallen out. You are not tolerant unless you believe what they do.
This story to me is just another illustration of the fact that the media in the US in controlled by lunatics and socialist.
Selwyn Duke | January 7 2005
One curious thing about scientific pronouncements is that they often seem to accord more with the spirit of the age than fact and reason. Thus, a Nazi researcher in 1930's Germany would analyze data from only one angle and state, "You see, this vindicates our assertion that the Aryans are the master race." Now, lest you think that such provincial thinking doesn't plague our enlightened age, I can assure you, it's alive and well - only the ends have changed.
Many agendas exist in the world of "objective" science, but none does more violence to science's search for and relation of truth than the feminist one. And the effect of feminism goes far and deep but, needless to say, its filters are most employed in the area of sex differences.
Not too long ago feminists were deathly afraid of such study, fearing that the differences found would indicate that men were superior, thwarting their agenda and providing a justification for discrimination. So a doctrine was developed stating that the sexes were the same, except for the superficial physical differences, and that differences in behavior between them were solely the result of upbringing.
This was a fact. It was palpably obvious. It was unarguable, unassailable and undeniable. Suggesting otherwise became a third rail of American discourse, constituted sacrilege and visited upon the offender scorn, pillorying and a branding with the label "sexist"
But then came the 1990's and research demonstrating conclusively that the sexes were different in everything but their souls, from the womb to the tomb. The feminists had been wrong - unarguably, unassailably, undeniably. Not that a collective admission of this and commensurate contrition would be forthcoming. Oh, the latter especially was most certainly in order, given the fact that child-rearing prescriptions based on their misconception had greatly contributed to the destruction of American parenting. But the feminist response would be quite different.
Seemingly without missing a beat, the feminists changed their tack. Yes, most assuredly these differences exist and surprised not are we. For, you see, they prove that women are superior! I am woman, hear me crow. In fact, it spawned a whole new, albeit obscure, branch of feminism: "Femaleism." Although, don't think I'm laying all the blame for this at the ladies' doorstep. For, this chorus of soprano voices is joined by the tenor ones of men whose psyches are clad in black rubber suits, and who seem to revel in what they fancy to be their newfound subordinate status.
The area where the feminist spin is most operational is that of brain research. I've read numerous articles on the subject over the last decade or so and, every time I do, I know I can expect two things. The first is the casting of men as inferior if not irrevocably flawed beings. The second is specious reasoning and tendentious conclusions that lend that claim credence.
For instance, there's a type of brain research called functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]. A fMRI can measure brain activity by creating multidimensional images of blood flow to various parts of the brain. In other words, the device produces a map of the brain and designates different levels of blood flow with different colors. Consequently, scientists can determine what part or parts of a subject's brain are involved in the performance of a given task. If a part of the brain becomes a certain color, bingo, it's as busy as a bee.
So, one day I was reading a piece on just such research. In it was stated that when performing various tasks many areas of women's brains would be active, whereas only one area of men's brains would. The conclusion was, not surprisingly, that the female brain may be able to tackle a problem more effectively because a woman "uses more of her brain." It seems like a tenable theory. Very convincing indeed.
But some moons later it just so happened that I was reading another article on the subject and I came upon a
There are three distinct changes in-between what you've snipped from the AP article you've read and the article as I now see it. They are:
1) Nancy Hopkins' initial quote is dropped in the updated version.
2) The statistics of Harvard's tenured jobs are dropped as well
3) You state "mommy truck" and "daddy truck" instead of "baby truck" and "daddy truck" also in the current version of the AP.
Ah... yes more of the subtlety you mentioned. Kind of 'defanging' the article to make the Harvard seem less sexist, but the third change is a mystery. Which is the real quote? 'mommy truck' or 'baby truck' -- who knows.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
All three of these women (and others on the referenced list) contributed something fundamental in mathematics. In the case of Hopper and Lovelace, those contributions were absolutely fundamental to the way all of our computers work. Yes, those computers that we spend all this time working and playing on, the computers that take orders, show us the news, allow us to discuss things, save lives, make the 21st-Century economy possible.
If you're a man, tell me how much better you'd have been than Ada Lovelace at translating a treatise on the Analytical Engine in the 1830's and adding annotations that run to ten times the length of the original document. While she was at it, she raised and discussed the idea of (and what's now one of the standard objections to) Artificial Intelligence, the universality of computers, the fact that the study of algorithms and procedural mathematics, deserved to be recognized as a new and distinct field, the possibility of computer-generated music, and a couple of algorithms that are recognized as amongst the first "computer programs." Yeah, that girl didn't know math at all.
If you're a man, tell me how much faster you could have invented FLO-MATIC or COBOL than Grace Hopper did, or how much money you made explaining computers to white-haired businessmen with a "nanosecond" of fiber optic cable in one hand and a "microsecond" of cable coiled in the other. Hopper didn't understand math at all, that's why they named a giant Navy boat bristling with computers and weapons in her honor.
And I'm not even a mathematician or an academic. I'm sure Slashdot readers could fill in their favorites that I don't even know about.
The fact is that there are and have always been talented men in this field, but these women took interest and initiative, and did something wonderful, before a man did it.
Is there a geek among us, male or female, who hasn't enjoyed explaining math to a non-geek, male or female, and then seeing the light of understanding dawn in that other person? This takes patience and time as all teaching does, and one of the hardest hurdles is convincing your "student" (perhaps a friend, using a pen and some bar napkins) that they really are capable of grasping this thing.
What a rush, and from my standpoint that economist would have made better use of his time perhaps speaking from his own mathematical expertise than declaiming who can and can't understand mathematics.
Math is for everybody and anybody who's interested. People that make generalizations about who can and can't understand math or anything else really piss me off. Feynman had a phrase (I think it's from the Preface to the Lectures on Physics), here adapted from its original meaning, "Respect for our subject did not permit this."
A little respect please, for the math and the women who can excel in it just like men.
yes you're right about girls getting attention at a young age in the social realms. luckily (or unluckily?) i was not interested in my peers or even adults really and much prefered the library and playing classical music to social interaction. my sis on the other hand was popular all through junior high and high school and had a tough time with math...at first. but now she's finishing her undergrad in architecture at calpoly (lots of engineering classes and such). so isn't all of this awfully anecdotal?
anyone can learn with the right teachers and the time...
~f
I think that while as a whole women aren't wired for math, that doesn't mean all women are bad at math. I think there are a both biological and social issues at work here. I've watched as the women physics and computer engineering majors suddenly switch to chemistry, biology and information systems when the math requirements go past basic calculus. That does not mean that all women fail. Several do quite well and are at or near the top of the class. Nobody discourages women at my alma matter, it was other way around, women were highly encouraged. A group statistic is not an excuse for an individual to be excluded or to not attempt to enter engineering or physics. Math in itself is not the end all be all of engineering. There is the natural ability to see a result as whole. One of Albert Einstein's greatest strength was his ability to see the consequences of the formulas. He was not considered a great mathematician in the vein of Newton or Maxwell. But he intuitively could see beyond the equations. He often had help later with the mathematics needed for some of the later quantum theory.
I appreciate your comment, and it may be true for some women, however, before you make such a statement you should:
- Close your eyes
- Breath deeply
- Appreciate the people you are talking about are people
- You'll be all dead in 500 years (that gives you perspective)
Isn't such a comment only going to make the situation worse? Surely there's a better way to get your point across.Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Asking this in the US is almost meaningless when so few American women are interested in learning about math or science in the first place. As a math and computer science major at a Big Ten University, I can say I've had more female TAs in my major classes. Every one of them was foreign. My comp sci classes are overwhelmingly male, and the number of foreign women in those classes rivals the number of American women (the math courses have a couple more women, but are pretty similar in proportions). Not suprisingly, the foreign women (and the one or two interested American women) are often some of the highest achievers in the course.
That's pretty anecdotial, but honestly, geeky American girls are hard to find. Most American girls seem to convince themselves that they can't understand computers or math and refuse to try and listen or understand at all. My last girlfriend did exactly this. I'd start talking to her about fixing my computer in a typical how did your day go conversation, and before I could even start, she'd be screaming about how she couldn't understand any of it. This was bullshit, of course - I knew she knew the difference between hardware and software, and so I could tell her that I spent all morning screwing in power supplies or some random part and she'd know the difference between that and reinstalling programs/the OS - but she wouldn't even let me finish the sentence. There may be a difference in our underlying ways of thinking between the genders, but you couldn't even find out until the majority of American women get over their aversion to technology and math.
Some might react strongly to that suggestion, but any college aged person here knows there's a mindset among American women that teaches them to look upon math and science unfavorably (this is doubly bad coupled with the typical American anti-intellectual mindset). Try looking like a geek and asking women out (my glasses cause wildly different dating reactions). When you're chatting someone up for a date, tell them you're interested in science and math, and you spend your free time reading about those subjects. The next night, try telling other women that you enjoy football and getting drunk or barhopping. I guarantee the 2nd will get you more dates.
It's what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy. In regards to this topic, perhaps study of the gender differences of academic subjects is important, but I feel it is a good idea to not publicize the findings beyond the scientific/education community, where it could help teachers to help female/male students cope with the subject matter. For more reference on this subject, you can google for psychology self fulfilling prophecy, or go to these links.
All you really gotta do is look at the facts. Another view of the facts. You can say this, with no fear of anything: women tend not to do as well in math and science. Furthermore, you can also say without much fear of anything that many minorities tend to not do as well in our educational system in general.
... in other words - there is momentum. If you are used to getting A's, that gets expected of you and you can breeze through without anyone so much as having even the slighest doubt you will get another A. If you fall behind somewhere in this process, this core process of getting good grades on exams, this momentum starts working against you. In this ultra-competitive environment, teachers and peers will begin to have doubts about the likelihood of your success, about your coming out on top, and the expectation becomes that you will not do that well. This can also rub off on you, and YOU begin to feel that you aren't going to do so well. This creates a chain cycle, and students fall behind, and get pushed out to the periphery of the educational system, the only criteria essentially being bad grades on exams.
The problem is with the educational system. Advancing through the educational system has to do with getting good grades on exams, more or less. It's all based on grades, and it is, in a sense, a dog-eat-dog, or a "groove"
It has to do with grades. Get rid of grades. Get rid of exams. Basing it all on grades and exams, and the figuring out some way of moving the periphery of the students, the students that don't do so well, into the core of the system. Change the core of the system so that you don't have students hanging out on the periphery of it simply because they don't get good grades on exams. It's just as likely that any "group" of individuals with a specific determining characteristic (let's say green eyes) that hasn't done well in a particular subject (let's say botany) may have a harder time developing that momentum, developing that trust, that confidence that those individuals who are expected to do well in a particular subject have.
So let's say that if people with green eyes haven't done very well in botany in the past, any individual with green eyes is going to have less confidence when they try to do well in botany. Combine that with the pressure of tests, exams, and grades, and any individual, green eyes or not, that hasn't done well in botany is at a disadvantage because they aren't expected to do well.
It could have much to do with the way the tests are written. It could have much to do with the way that the "core" of the educational system is set up. It could have much to do with, perhaps, that female students feel more comfortable with female teachers, and male students feel more comfortable with male teachers, and if math and science tend to be male-dominated fields, perhaps there are more male teachers. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
But in any case, I think the solution is to change the "core" of the educational system. The "core" concepts of how one "does well in school". It's really the only way to do it. It's sort of like what FreeBSD 5.x is being accused of - awkward fixes after awkard fix (i.e. "laying on hacks") when the real solution is just to do a cleaner re-write - get down into the "core" of the system, in this case the educational system, and upgrade it to be more effective in our modern, diverse world. Stop using the band-aids to try to get the periphery of the students who don't do so well incorporated into a messed-up core, change the core.
Even if what this individual said were true, it doesn't solve the problem, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are many other "groups", if you will, of individuals with distinguishing characteristics that don't do well, not only in math and science, but the educational system as a whole. The are entire sections of society that are having the rug swept out from beneath their feet by the competitive nature of our current educational system. Competition is
As long as one underscores that it is limited to some fields, that men have equal fields in which they are less good at, and that the diversity of genetically based skills does not mean women (or men) CAN NOT do it, nor that the difference between individuals are less then those between the sexes. Actually, the last one is my own hypothesis, but I'm willing to bet on it: the individual differences in capability between people will be greater, statisctically more significant, then those between the sexes as a whole.
Yet, it I do believe their are *some* differences to which one can say that it is gender-related. There have actual scientific studies that have indicated that already. Ofcourse, it does not mean the social surroundings and edcutional enverronment one has had is any less important then the slight advantage (in some areas) or disadvantage (in others), on the contrary.
Many of these claims of 'women can't do that' are clearly biased and sexist. Yet, it is also true there IS an observable difference, and it's not too farfetched to ponder about how much this is genetically induced. With sports, this becomes more obvious, and few will deny that...so why all that outrage if it's about a particular intellectual endeavour? For instance, take chess: wile there are very good female chessplayers, the best are all men. and the relative percentage of female-male chessplayers is about 1 to 5, at best, regardless of the country. Now, don't say chessclubs are sexist: they don't care one bit if their members are female or male, and it's not about making promotion or having ambition and all those other traits that often gets attributed with male attitude.
Chessclubs are open to everyone, and are happy with any member. Modern parents will not obstruct their daghters if they want to play chess, nor will they push their sons to do it (as one might with physical sports)....yet, quantitavily as well as qualitatively, women do not score all that good, as a whole, wompared to men, in this field. Am I a sexist for having observed this fact? I don't think so.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
And zero: the first post mentions having seen a lot of complaining about inferred implications - so I doubt it's referring to Slashdot in this story. Though Slashdot is a place for wild, innumerate, illiterate, impossible speculations, as your own post demonstrates.
--
make install -not war
Can't be true. Their 'sample' must have been just a bit too small. :)
Required reading for internet skeptics
I stand, well actually sit, corrected.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Is it just me, or is Harvard filling up with complete assholes?
First Gregory Mankiew, the *brilliant* Harvard economics professor who suggested that fast food should be reclassified as "manufacturing" and who asserted that outsourcing is good for the US economy, because we can now sell office supplies to India.
Now this asshole, also from Harvard.
There are sociological reasons for women being generally inferior in math - namely, a culture that insists that girls aren't good at math, and an education system that stacks the odds against girls in primary education.
Innate ability? Bullshit. Every person does have different innate abilities - but if you take a child with a 140 IQ, shove him in a room with the developmentally disabled, you'll end up with a person who believes they too are below average. Likewise, if you give a person with a 100 IQ the educational facilities only normally available to the wealthy, you'll end up with a pompous ass.
Education has more to do with sociology than biology.
Taking your post at face value, I'd say that dreaming that impossible dream is what is doing all the damage. Taking your post as satire, it's not that funny, or insightful, especially when it's exactly what many Americans, of either gender, are walking around saying these days.
--
make install -not war
Trashy joke for all to see...
You plus me, subtract our clothes, divide your legs and let's multiply baby!
Nowhere did he say that men were more likely to be good at math and science. He said that perhaps innate differences (not lack of intellectual ability) may be a factor that women do not advance or succeed in certain fields. Okay. Let's see. What are some innate differences? People keep mentioning the vagina, but let's remember a couple of other things that women have that men do not: ovaries and a uterus. While a baby is in the oven, the father can continue working, a mother often cannot. While a child is small, it is more often women than men who sacrifice work time to care for them, especially if the parents decide that breastfeeding is important to them. The first is an innate difference. The second is largely cultural (how many offices want a small child in them? How many allow breastfeeding?) Mr. Summers said his remarks were misconstrued as suggesting that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of math and science, and that he "did not say that, nor do I believe it" (RTFA)
As a woman who is on the cusp of receiving her PhD and looking for a teaching position, I am faced with the reality that my potential employers are very concerned about my marital status, whether I have children now, and whether I plan to have them in the next few years, or ever. (Legal or not, that's how it is; I have been at staff meetings where someone brings it up in relation to a prospective faculty member, and the department chair had to say "it is illegal for us to consider that factor." Do you think it's not on people's minds, even after that?) I am also faced with the reality of an ad I saw recently: "Egg donors needed. Waited too long for tenure." From my perspective, poignant. Will I have to choose between a family and a career? My intellectual capacity and the body of research reflected in my CV rival that of any man I will be competing with for junior faculty positions. But I know that I want to have children. I will be getting my PhD at the age of 30, and starting a career when most of my friends have small children. Should I put off kids? Should I have them and then look for a job? Should I land a job with maternity leave and hope that I still get tenure if I use maternity leave within the first few years I am working there?
"Innate differences." Are the concerns I have due to innate, physical differences? Or our society's inability to cope with a workforce that is actively involved in reproduction? A combination, perhaps, as Mr. Summers suggests: due to innate differences, women are not advancing, and he is concerned about the role discrimination plays in keeping women from advancing at elite universities. Universities which are among the most demanding of their junior faculty. Recent PhDs, who are at an age when most women in our society have children.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
Everyone knows that only women can do the multiplying!
Bickering aside, studies about what sex is better at what are nonsense, because the only de-motivate. If you want a technological society, you need the most people working, men and women, in all strata. Therefore, this Harvardite is taking a cop-out, saying it becasue of the women themselves that they are not being trained in science and engineering. Could it be that the sexes are different, might approach things differently, and maybe the educational system needs to teach in different ways to accomidate both. Its mathmatically stupid to say half the population is not good at something so broad as science or math.
It is my view, based only on personal experience and observation, i.e., not scientific study, that women are perfectly capable of doing well in science and math, but that they tend to just not like it.
At the same time, I think men are capable of doing well in languages and communication, but they tend to not like it.
Of course, exceptions abound, but I think each sex has their tendencies towards embracing different skills. These tendencies are base on personal whims and not on capabilities.
Are these tendencies hard-wired, or culturally learned, or a little bit of both? I don't know.
Proverbs 21:19
I believe allot of it is shaped by the fact that women have been marginalised out of accademia and politics for so long. Thats all changed now though. I think women are insisting now on having the same opportunities at less of the cost i.e. the women that are happy to keep old traditions like men paying for everything and yet cry foul when embracing these same old traditions involves giving up this new accademic, and political power etc.
However it does annoy me when I here an ignorant man brag about how men are (arguably) better technically then women. I find that these men are usually inherently weak technically. With this, as with all things, those who brag are usually the weakest of all.
Another point: Whats so wrong with the traditional ways. At some point a woman gives birth and the genetic makeup of women makes them better child carers than men. Thats just the way it is. Going against the grane by ignoring this reality is a formula for unhappiness in my view.
This gets me back to my original point. If women had more rights to begin with, then education would be tailored towards them and they might be better, who knows, but the reality is that men took it upon themselves to start up these institutions. In terms of who I think should have power / influence - noone / everyone. But if anyone is going to have it it shouldn't be decided on the basis of sex. I think a rigorous random test ( and one that cannot be prepared for) of ethics should decided the case for each individual. Why should ethics decide? Because then we can al know what script we are all reading from and start to make real changes knowing we have the confidence to start it off because everyone with influence is working with the same ethical script...
This then starts off the question of what is ethical. We should probably make a sudden announcement that the top X % of all PHD's in ethics around the world will be the carriers of influence and power. They would have to prove their credentials by accepting no money for themsleves or any aquiantances of them from anyone or anything for this "inaugeration". They would all come together and create an ethical charter by which people are given influence / power in companies, governtment, science etc. They would maintain the testing of candidates for any such positions. The tests would of course have to be random and highly unpredictable so that immoral people (fakes) could not just spoof the answers (this happens in real life with psychometric tests for example). Once we are all reading from the same hymn sheet, things might get better faster...and men and women would be picked for certain rolls without discrimination.
Racism couls become a thing of the past too...
Who has the most to fear by such change? The ignorant, weak, ape-like people among us...
My family went out to buy shoes last year. My youngest - 5 year old - daughter wanted 'Yu-gi-oh' sneakers (she liked to watch the show on TV and had the trading card game) and so that is what we got her.
The first time she wore them to school was also the last. Apparently the boys in class embarrassed her and told her girls couldn't wear shoes like that. The shoes have since languished in her closet, she no longer watches the show, and has abandoned the playing cards.
I have tried all sorts of things to get her to wear them to school - boys be damned. But the stigma was too much for her to take, and so the shoes sit unused, unloved and unwanted.
The message was clear - there are certain things that are okay for boys to do, but not okay for girls. By the time she is a woman, she will have had that message reinforced thousands of times in subtle and not-so-subtle ways - through interactions with others, messages in the media, and misinterpretation of 'scientific' studies.
Both my wife and my daughter can run rings around me in Math (of which I have no deep love or interest). My wife learned to love Math early on - her grandmother would get her to count to 1000 when she would visit as a young child. Later her father, who is a mathematician inspired her to learn and see math in everything around her. My oldest daughter is 17 and a scrapper (she would literally get into fights with boys who tried to enforce their world-view upon her - and never lost such battles). She is an A-B student who makes straight A's in Math (she is taking Pre-Calc this year). I hope my little one learns a thing or two from her mother and big sister.
Everyone is an individual with talents they are born with, but also a large opportunity to develop new talents whose limits are only circumscribed by their own determination to follow through. This is how Spud Webb at 5'7" can play in the NBA, and these women suceeded in a field dominated by men.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
shhhhhh, don't tell anyone, but 'on average' boys are physically stronger than girls.
/psych grad who studied group differences in abilities, far too much. there are differences, get over it. just don't let them use it as an excuse to subvert you, and you'll lead a rich life... even though I'm sure I can beat you in an armwrestle.
now now, I know you stand firm in opposition to such a blanket statment because you knew a girl once that could beat you in an armwrestle.
but am I really being sexist in saying this?
I somewhat understand where this guys is coming from but I don't even think he comprehends the bull $hit he's spouting. Because I have not seen one study that says men are better than women at say math. Why, because, there is not a "math" part of the brain. And math is a very broad subject that would encompass many many many different parts of the brain dependent upon what type of math you are trying to do.
The only difference in men and womens brain thus far has been found in reasoning skills. Example, women have better "spacial reasoning skills", hence, why women tend to remember land marks to remember directions as opposed to remembering street names etc like men tend to do. But , gues what there are maths where "spacial reasoning" skills are more useful such as geometry or say abstract algebra.
Furthermore, studies show that women are exceedingly score better than men on math standardized test up until the point of High School. Which would tend to show more of lack of interest right around the time a girl becomes a women and starts realizing she can succeed to obtain what she wants in life using her new found assets.
Bottom line, making blanket statements like this guy made is ignorant. It's like saying blacks on a whole aren't as good as whites in terms of intelligence which is bull $hit. Because in 1750 95% of blacks were illiterate did it mean blacks had an inability to learn how to read? No, I think the fact that they'd be shot if they attempted to do so might have added to the illiteracy rate of blacks.
In short, this guy is right in that men and women are different, and we need study the innate differences to understand how it manifests itself in every day life. But, he's absolutely wrong to say studies suggest women aren't as good at math do to an innate mental weakness. As stated, there is no math portion of the brain, there are reasoning portions and men are women are better at different types of reasoning skills.
Let's say that a female speaker, let's even assume the same Mrs. Hopkins that walked out because she was just so offended, would have said that there is evidence that females excel at languages and have much better innate verbal skills than men do. That would have been alright, any ofended men walking out would have been just regarded as a crazy, but in fact it is the same thing.
It is "ok" for the feminists to be different as long "different" somehow means "better". When liberal zealots promote equality and tolerance foaming at the mouth, they usually promote "equality as long as we are more equal than you" or "tolerance as long as that means you tolerate us". Nothing new, same type of activism that ultra-conservative zealots have on the other side just disguised as being somehow more "intellectual" or more "progressive".
Interesting list, but it's apples and oranges. Your list talks about some ways women, as a group, tend to fare better than men in society.
This list *could* be due as much to chauvinism and archaic gender roles than to anything inherently physiological. e.g. women are less likely to be killed in war because they're less likely to be front-line combat soldiers due to societal intertia regarding the role of women, not because they happen to have a vagina.
Almost all humans, male or female, suck at math. Particularly in the US, if standardized tests mean anything. And I don't care where you're from or who you are, the high level math of college can ensure that EVERYBODY sucks at it ;-). Guys or girls doesn't matter much in my experience. Two of our brightest physics undergrads (both a heck of a lot smarter than me) were female. Our best math student in Differential Equations was female. So if it's not obvious by now to anyone that sterotypes are a waste of time, it's because they're not paying attention. Clearly, in general a lot of people uses biases to internally justify assuming power over others, and so I understand and agree that these trends need to be squashed.
Another problem though, and a less malicious one, is that people also want to generalize things because it's a lot easier than the correct approach of dealing with each person on an individual basis. Note this is different from doing studies of the human body/brain/animal. That type of research, in my opinion, should have no impact on our social system. That's not what it's for. Or at least, ideally that's not what it's for. But people want to be lazy when dealing with other people, and so they use statistical studies of gender based trends (which, if caused by nature, are the result of circumstances wildly unlike modern life in an evolutionary sense) and try to draw conclusions about people they don't know. That's dangerous, but also hard to stop.
Here's a point I would like to see more study given to - are some trends of gender bias a consequence of the mind trying to reduce the burden of dealing with many, many more individuals over the course of a lifetime than most of our ancestors did over the course of our evolutionary history? For most of the history of the human (and precursors) species, we operated in small groups where everyone knew everyone else, and any outsiders were regarded as competition. That trend is still obvious today (nations anybody?) but the emotional, personal scale of these groups is now so vast that we spend a large part of our time surrounded by people we have no time to get to know well. My hypothesis would be we do a LOT of categorization based on superficial characteristics (weight, height, clothing style, car, and even gender) simply because we have neither the time nor the comfort level to get to know EVERYONE around us well, but our instincts tell us we should know about the individuals we "group" with. After all, in small groups everyone knows everything about everyone, and the isolation caused by our current HUGE populations and lack of tightly nit groups must have SOME impact on us. I would be curious if our tendancy towards "snap judgements" and biases is an attempt to cope with not being surrounded by the traditional "pack".
Note, that is NOT an excuse for such behavior, just a proposed reason for it. Being thinking beings, we can (and should) deal with individuals and not preconceptions.
Of course, that's probably psychology 101 - any psyc guys or gals out there who know?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
See Kraft, Phillip, Programmers and Managers (Springer-Verlag) for details.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
In the west, its equality under the law. This does not mean equality in the physical world. Skills and physical ability are different from individual to individual. Moreover, there are trends in certain skills and groups.
Facts are facts.
I think what happens a lot of the time in cases like this is an anti knee-jerk response. That is, when someone says that maybe women are intellectually inferior, we're afraid of making the knee-jerk response and call that person sexist. Instead we say "now wait a minute, maybe he has a point." But the problem with that is that this person doesn't have a point. In this case we're talking about a male economics professor who seems to think he knows more about cranial biology and psychology then his biology and psychology professor peers. To make an analogy, if an economics professor went in front of a group of professors (some of whom are biology professors) and said "We need to more closely examine the issues of evolution because it may just be that the Intelligent Design people are on to something," I don't think anyone would have any trouble writing him off as a lunatic (and rightly so). When this guy said that women may be mentally inferior to men, he was on the same scientific grounding as Pat Roberts when he says evolution is false.
Although the anti knee-jerk reaction may be better than a knee-jerk reaction, the best solution would be just to recognize sexism and idiocy when we see it. And when an economics professor says that fewer women in the math and science fields is an effect of inferior mental development, that economics professor is sexist and ignorant. No need to beat around the bush, it's a fact.
and pull the trigger, too.
Equal rights/equality means that everyone has the opportunity to do as they wish, with a few obvious exceptions (blind people can't drive and men can't become pregnant, etc.)
It doesn't mean that people are have the same abilities.
I think that people confuse these two ideas a lot.
Could it be true that women, on average, don't have the aptitude for math and science? Sure. But if we have equality in our society than those women who have the aptitude for math are not excluded solely on the basis of gender.
I'm just curious, here. No need for offense or attacks.
None taken.
Perhaps you (and I) ARE sexist, but don't really know it, because we don't WANT to be sexist. An interesting notion don't you think?
I say that because you seem to care about this type of hypocrisy... you are taking it personally, as though it will swallow up your own sense of maleness if you nod your head in approval at such behaviour.
THIS IS OKAY. Nothing to be ashamed about. Just try to understand their point of view, and have compassion for their struggle to find happiness. Once you understand someone's point of view, you'll understand your own point of view better, and you won't feel your self identity threatened.
I'm amazed by how many 'feminists' I've known who firmly believe that no man should ever hit any women no matter what
It is elementary to think up a situation that makes this statement false. There is, however, a lot to be said for the spirit of this statement. A lot of women get abused physically.
I'm going to lay her out like I would a man who did the same thing
Don't think of such things or you'll suddenly find them, and it won't be an accident! If you are being assaulted by a women, and she really is threatening your safety, then you'll automatically defend yourself. If she isn't threatening, then all you need to is say "You ought to be ashamed of yourself".
Seems like many feminists believe not that women = men, but that women >= men
Everybody thinks they are better than average... it is easy to see that this natural human disposition can lead one to think that one sex is >= to the other sex. Again, just have some compassion for their point of view, and if they get too carried away... laugh at their foolishness!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It seems that nowadays, there are some things that you cannot say, no matter if they're true or not. That's just the political climate that we're living in.
It also seems that "normal" people- those who simple believe or don't believe something yet don't get worked up about it- don't have much of a voice even though they comprise the vast majority. It's usually the lunatic fringe on both sides which seem hell-bent on making themselves heard. It seems that the lunatics are more likely to declare those issues their life's goal.
I don't get worked up about issues like these, but I'll voice my opinion anyway even at the risk of both sides attacking me.
People have to be fooling themselves if they think that everybody performs the same at all functions, across all genders and races. I believe in evolution (here come the attacks from the far right), and I believe that over time different races and the sexes have evolved to excel at slightly different tasks (here come the atacks from the far left).
If you think that the hormones running through your veins don't have any effect on the way you think, you're mistaken. I'm a man, and I will admit that women are right when they say that testosterone makes men more aggressive and violent. Is there really any disputing that? Yet some ultra-sensitive male advocacy groups would take great offense to that.
We're different, face it.
I will end my post by saying that just because something isn't PC doesn't mean it's necessarily false. It just means that there are some people that don't want to hear what may be the truth and they'll get very emotional about the issue.
Now we believe that black people have this huge innate physical sports advantage.
Whaddaya mean we
women need to get over an aversion, but I think it's societal. Women aren't expected to be scientists and mathmaticians.
... the more lucrative endeavors.
Why do most men want to do well for themselves sometimes this involves education as the means to an end? So, obviously we can land ourselves a beautiful woman/womens/wife whatever and actually be able to afford to take care of her.
Most women at somepoint realize through guile, manipulation, and the all mighty "P" they can get what they want through the use of men, and they don't need education to do so.
Now, with that said, men have reinforced this behavior because an educated woman who still has all the guile that accompanies being a woman and also has no need to have a man to provide for her is going to be almost impossible to please. So, men perpatuate keeping women out of sciences, math, etc
Oh yes, I see. Very cunning.
What a fantastic way to find the female geeks here at Slashdot.
Force them to disclose themselves by defensive comments.
Very sly.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Maybe the speaker could have phrased his comments better at the time but it's terribly ironic when you say something like:
You even qualify your statement with this:
Have you analyzed the context of the comments? Have you looked to see if the professor indeed has a history of disriminatory behavior?
Or, are you simply disciminating against him because of behavior of a group of people?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
you must be functionally retarded to not know that PUBERTY affects the specialization of the hemispheres of the brain, VISIBLE to the naked eye without microscope on a forensics bench.
I did in college
and you must be further stupid to not know that negros go through puberty EARLIER than other races, have more effect from secondary sexual characterististics, and also score ashocking standard deviation below whites in ANY of over 100 different types of IQ tests.
We are comparing genders here and I am not saying that a woman has to act like a testosterone-laden butch dyke male-hater to be successful. What I am saying is that she must be as good as a man and be interchangable with the men. There are only two possibilities in most environments that I have worked in: the women compete at the skill level of the men and with the same gung-ho attitude toward achievement or they whine, bat their pretty little eyes and try to get a man to do it.
One of my best friends is a girl that has the "bring it on, fuckers" attitude toward sexism because she got sick of seeing that cry baby and girls like her get their way. She got tired of so many of the women she worked with on her internship using their feminine wiles to get out of work, and she knew that that would end up bighting her in the ass because men aroud her would see 80% of the women ignoring or pushing their work onto others.
My mother passionately despises that tendency in women. She went into federal law enforcement in the 70s when affirmative action had basically no real reach or hold on the old boy's networks. She wanted to be an agent respected for her work, but most of the female agents she worked with wouldn't take tough and potentially dangerous cases and would try to get "one of the boys" to do it for them. It took years for her to finally force her superiors to admit that she was the exception and could be fully trusted to not act like the rest of the female agents in the office.
The funny thing is that most of the time in college that I have been assigned to mostly female work groups, the girls wanted me or one of the other guys to lead. It's been my experience that the one thing that most women truly despise is taking orders from other typical women when they could take them from a man. One of my friends explained as she doesn't have to deal with the same level of pure shit from the men.
No doubt too, most women who have some competitiveness in them would rather deal with a little bit of the shit from the guys (a little potential sexual harassment) than the pure loathing and backstabbing they can get from other women. The cruelest competition I have ever seen has been between women, not men.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
You're a woman in a relatively male-dominated field. If you play well with the guys, then you're a "rare commodity" because you're a woman in the sciences and you've got a personality that works with the guys. The other women, who can't keep up with you, see you as dangerous competition which you probably are and should be proud of.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The fact remains - the gap between Blacks and Whites on cognitive tests remains.
l d- fossils
As for TMMoM, here is a what you could consider a reply:
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gou
naturally-good-at-math geeks are doomed to be 99% guys :(
I'll tell that to my mother, who has a BS in Mathematics, then my friend, Jenn, who is getting a PHD in Mathematics.
it's a sig, wtf?
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003390.htm
Alexander & Hines (2002) gave 44 vervet monkeys of each sex six toys to play with...
basically, girls are hard wired to play with dolls.
and women go through puberty earlier than males and furthemore going through puberty tends to center IQ closer to average IQ levels.
the chance of a a person with an IQ of 124 being male is 800% (yes eight HUNDRED) more likely than female!!!
puberty is the root cause, and effects of sexual hormones on a body overall
but the Daddy Truck study i cited was done with non human primates, because HUNDREDS were already done on humans but women refuse to listen to facts
To me, the lack of womeon in math and science is more likely to be an issue of communication than anything.
Yes there are physiological differences between men and woman. And there are I think differeces in how the two sexes think and approach problems...
So I really think that women would be better served by a style of math teaching that played into how the naturally communicate and learn. The fact is that education has been geared primarily to teach men for a long time, and so it is naturally optimized for that process - thus the more abstract a topic to teach, the worse off women are learning it.
I don't see why it makes any sense to believe that any given sex is wired to know any given topic less deeply than any other - our brains are very general-purpose learning devices so it makes no sense to extend the physical diferences into this realm.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"So since many minorities live in poverty or near-poverty, the IQ scores for their races were subsequently lowered."
Even this doesn't prove anything. First of all, can you prove that being poor lowers your IQ? And if you can draw the conclusion that poor people have a low IQ, how can you be sure that those who are poor aren't poor because they had a low IQ to begin with? (their parents, their grandparents, etc)
When you say "minorities", you're using a politically correct euphemism. Asians are minorities but their IQ is higher, on average, than white people. And they generally don't stay poor for long, even if they started that way and were subject to discrimination.
You also didn't address studies that show that poor whites and Asians do better on IQ tests and other standardized tests than wealthy black people.
It seems that you are set in your beliefs that Hernstein's results must be wrong because they go against your beliefs of political correctness. Would you ever consider the possibility that there really is a difference in IQ by region, and that those in Africa really do have a lower IQ on average?
My beliefs are always up for revision when I hear a compelling valid argument, but political correctness and other emotionally charged pleas don't constitute a valid argument.
This is...
O
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T
R
A
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I remember a study on this kind of thing was described on NPR. They concluded that females have less variation than males in many subjects, and NOT that they were "dumber" on average. There were more male geniuses, but also more male super-dummies. Thus, it may be misleading to say that females are not good at such subjects. For everyday stuff, it may not matter. It just may result in less "stars". But it may also be why they are less likely to end up in jail.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't worry about all this. If you are not already living in America, come, live with us. Here in the United states we are an equal opportunity country. Here, we are *all* bad at math, men and women alike, because of our horrible school system.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
WTF!!
mod abuse. i hate it when mods do this.
Maybe lack of female coworkers has resulted in increased frustration on his part.
That's ok though, no one will touch him now.
I have seen the use of the word "controversial" as being more subjective and indicative towards a certain person's or group's bias. Take this case for example. There may be many people who say, "Huh. You know what? This guy is dead-on right about how women do not do as well as men in math and science." But since the presenter of the information does not necessarily agree with the news, that presenter immediately labels it as being "controversial".
Is it truly controversial? Well, to the presenter it is, so that makes their statement true to an extent. But does it spur controversy amongst the masses? Not necessarily. I belive that this was covered in depth in a book called Bias.
--Chag
I have a marvelous proof of this, unfortunately it is too large to write here in the margin.
- Some dude
My life is a good example of how things can end up not working the way I wanted them to but worked out pretty well.
Rewind eight years ago -> married a "career gal" wanted to be a DINKs as both careers were going well. Ended up having a kid, she decides she wants to be a homemaker. I was really unhappy about it and the loss of income. But I figured I was not going to force her to so something she didn't want to.
Today-> well knowing that I had to support a family I have been forced to make smarter career moves, twice being stuck in well-paying jobs I didn't like at all. However, our kids (five and three) are well adjusted, healthy, home is calm, my wife is very happy doing what she does and spending some of my money. But in return she keeps me happy. Realises that I do bust my ass to support them and doesn't hassle me when I want to spend a bit on myself or go out with the guys.
I think I ended up with it pretty good. Will have to see what the future holds.
Notice that you got modded up, not down. You are thinking that slashdot moderators are a bunch of rational males who will evaluate your post based on its substance. As it turns out, you got modded "informative" despite the fact that your unsubstantiated assertions are contradicted by actual accident statistics.
Why? Because emotionally, it's hard for us males to accept that women don't get into as many accidents as males, whether you look at complete smash-ups or reversing into lampposts. So we concoct a fiction to help our mental model of the world to be more favorable to ourselves. This is not rationality.
Two objections:
If prejudice does, however unconsciously, play a part in the hiring procedure, would it not be sensible to apply a correction (affirmative action) just as you would apply a correction to any other measurement susceptible to systematic error?
My wife's neurologist told us that generally speaking, male neurosurgeons tend to have more success than female. He noted that men tend to be more mechanically inclined and that this made them better suited to surgical procedures. He said he never gave much credence to the notion until he started his practice and noted the number of patients with re-occurences or complications and the relative disparity between those with male neurosurgeons and those with male neurosurgeons. What he said made scientific sense and I didn't take it as sexist. Are there exceptions? Sure. Probably many. I can tell you when it came time to have a benign meningioma removed from my wife's head, we went with the male. It turned out my wife liked his personality better anyway.
"some" intelligent females
[many] generous and kind males
"some" welcoming black folk
and
"a few" tolerable chinese
And you have +4, Insightful. Kudos.
It seems like you are making judgements on the reactions you are seeing, and not on the substance of the issue at hand.
I'm sure if the issue was as cut and dry as you say it is, it would be very easy to provide irrefutable evidence that shows him to be wrong. I don't have the answer, but I think it's worth finding it. Running away from the issue crying "un-PC!" isn't the way to handle it.
Scientific answers are the solutions to scientific questions. Emotional outcries solve nothing.
All of which is just a prelude to my real point, regarding "You can't say that." Which is that nobody ever just says "women have less mathematical aptitude". Nobody ever says "women have less innate ability at math, so let's give them additional tutoring to help and maybe we can cover the disparity". No. It's always "women suck at [X] so it's okay that we don't admit/hire/promote/assist as many, and let's not try to give them a boost because it would be a waste of time". In other words, the statement is always used as a way to justify discrimination against women -- discrimination that existed long before any possible proof of the statement itself.
So when people just assume that "women suck at math" is a sexist statement, it's because every single time I've ever heard it uttered it has been.
Perhaps you couldn't hear the "so let's give them additional tutoring" statement that was going to be said because the groupthink people were too busy screaming after the person started off by saying "women suck at math".
If you don't listen to the whole thing, then how can you know what the intentions were?
So far, all that I can see this guy has said was that women suck at math and he thinks that is something that should be studied. He didn't say why it should be studied, and as far as I can tell, nobody asked either. They simply assumed the worst.
If you assume the statement is sexist on it's face, then it never has an opportunity to not be sexist.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Driving
Keeping their mouths shut
Honesty
Logic
Giving
Doing their own work
These are not my own personal views. They represent my exposure to a large sample of women. (not large examples of women though)
It seems to me that being appauled by such a comment is just pure ignorance, he mentions nothing of discrimination and only that of generalizations. Whilst I am only in highschool they require us to learn about racism and the like, and nothing was mentioned about how generalizations can be bad unless theyre turned into racism (or sexism or what-not). There are different things going on in the brains of men and women, and different levels of estrogen and testosterone within the brain could be a contributing factor, has anyone yet to prove is isn't? It is the same situation with cloning, people don't want to accept it or have anything to do with the subject simply because it doesn't seem moral, then again morals are a creation of man and therefore can be voided in the scientific world. Limiting our studies will never aid to the constantly growing world of science so why bother doing it? I reiterate, these are only generalizations and should never contribute to making a decision without proper study. If this were to change the decision of who gets hired for what positions put the blame on the people making the decisions for who gets hired, women are capable of being better at men in maths and sciences but as a GENERAL rule, they TEND to not be as good as men, just as men TEND not to be good at some of the subjects that women TEND to be better at. I sincerely hope this clears up any ideas on generalizations.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
I believe she was acting emotionally rather than logically
Which proves the point. It's not "good at math" vs "bad at math", but rather "emotional thinking" vs "logical thinking".
Men are naturally bad at sharing their feelings: they're colder and probably more rational, they take less into account their feelings when taking decisions.
Women are "naturally" more emotional than men - is that really a weakness? After all, which mother would you prefer? One who has great math skills, or one who knows how to make you feel better when that bully at school took your sandwich and beat you? Sharing and understanding your emotions is a virtue, not a defect.
Sure, women could need more "training" to develop their math skills, but really... what's the big deal? (After all they're humans, they can learn).
If I say that women are naturally prepared to become mothers, should all the ultra-progresist girls out there come and burn me at the stake for chauvinism? No, instead they should go after the guys who use these [facts?] as an excuse to consider women as inferior and abuse them.
My problem with ultra-feminists isn't that they want equal rights for women - but that they neglect their own feminity and innate motherhood to achieve it.
This is only hippy-ish ancedotal evidence, but supposedly yes, they can, and there are supposedly historical accounts of it from before the hormone junk and the "Fab Five".
Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed
So if you are a man, take heart in the wholesome knowledge that your nipples, puny as they are, actually can achieve their natural purpose. Although you'll just never be as good at is as women. Pity. I'm sure you're weeping.
Well, i don't know if woman are really worse at maths than men or not, but it is a proven fact that woman think differently than men.
There were some test where by giving woman and men some different tasks, and had them do the tasks while doing a brain scan.
The scans showed that different areas of the brain were used by woman than by men when doing the same tasks.
Of course, the fact that most woman seem to be less attracted to math might have nothing to do with it, and might might purely be social, but there do are differences.
And there's nothing wrong with being different... Woman are known to generally handle multi-tasking much better than men, among other things
NOT NEWS.
... were ALL GUYS!
Everyone knows the basis of this fact lies in a mans inate familiarity with angles, his own, and curves, as seen on women. Bottecelli was a math wiz, evidence his art. Leibniz, Newton, Cauchy, Fourier, Dirac, Euler, Euclid,
Don't tell me women were suppressed either. Look at all the literature they produced and the wars they started.
Allow me to jump in with some physiological ones...
Women have proportionally larger language processing areas in their brains (Broca's and Wernicke's areas)
Young women have measurably better hearing, on average than young men (measured prior to loud rock concert or boom car age)
Women can sustain higher g-forces than men (probably due to less mass and shorter height)
Women are less susceptible to space adaptation sickness
But yes, point out that statistically, men have better spatial reasoning skills, and you'll get beat down.
-T
The question at hand is whether that there may be a biological reason why more women don't excel at math. It's about looking at the numbers as a whole and seeing if biology has a statistical influence. If that's the case- prove it. If it's not the case- prove it. It did not, however, say that all women are bad at math.
I think some people are getting all worked up about this and are giving their emotional outcries. That doesn't say anything- I want to see facts.
So obviously the view is doing fine in our schools and society.
However, if society was based on reason, such a view would only be allowed to exist if it could be backed up with fact.
But note that the view was presented by an economist far from his area of knowledge, not by a biologist, which immediatly should cause your inner skeptic to wake up.
Career choice begins in womb
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg184247 12.700
Also, MRIs Reveal Differences in Brains of Women and Men
http://nursing.advanceweb.com/common/editorialsear ch/searchresult.aspx?CC=4127&AD=10/27/2000
So, maybe the complex interaction of biology and culture defies the simplicity of labels like "sexist" and "PC" and the knee-jerk reactions indicated by their use?
Tales from the nipple!
Right now I'm just compelled to say....I hate you Milkman Dan.
He said people "prefer to believe" that the reason there are fewer women in science and engineering is due to social factors and discrimination, "but there are things that need to be studied." link
Although, to be fair, most of the news stories are just as guilty of not looking at what was actually said. As one of the other participants pointed out, though:
Paula Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University, said the remarks did not offend her. "I think if you come to participate in a research conference," she said, "you should expect speakers to present hypotheses that you may not agree with and then discuss them on the basis of research findings." link
If you can't ask the question "what if there really are biological differences?" at an academic research conference, where the hell can that question be asked?
If there are differences, we do ourselves no favour by ignoring them; research into them could show us better ways of teaching to boys and girls so both learn better.
If there are no differences, we certainly do ourselves no favour by refusing to finally examine and dismiss the notion forever. Until there is clear research on the issue, there will always be the question lurking unasked in the background.
For fuck's sakes, people, how did "are boys and girls different?" get to be a verboten question?
(Disclaimer before someone whines: yes, I know plenty of excellent female scientists---I work for a couple of them---but thanks for trying to undermine the questioner instead of answering the damn question. True spirit of scientific inquiry, there.)
I heard this at MIT in the late 1970s. It may be much older.
Q: How do you describe an MIT coed (female student)
A: A guy who worked his balls off in high school.
I am a woman with degrees in physics and astronomy. It shouldn't be any shock that people are individuals. A person's ability is different than the next person's. It also shouldn't be a shock that some people are better than math than others.
.... Men are good at ... We start to grouping people without looking at their individual abilities.
... Women are good at...) has had huge consequences for both men and women (have you looked at the K-12 academic rates for boys in this country? - they are falling).
..." or "Men are better at..." is an absolute idiot who refuses to look at people as individuals and would rather keep their simplistic sexist ideas.
This article falls into the very dangerous trap that many of the posters of this article have fallen into. You group abilities to a gender. Women are good at
And yes, I have read the research that ON AVERAGE women tend to be better at some thought processes while ON AVERAGE men tend to be better at others. But here is the fact that always gets ignored - there is a huge range on those averages. So large that it makes grouping abilities to a gender nearly meaningless. Yet people use this "research" to make broad assumptions and use these assumptions to discriminate against individuals. Numerous years ago the exact same argument was used with race.
I cannot count how many times I was told "Woman cannot do physics", "You will never succeed in the hard sciences because you are a girl", "Women do not make good programmers". "You would be better suited as an elementary school teacher." Of course all comments were made without looking at my individual abilities, only my gender.
This line of thinking (Men are good at
In my personal opinion, anybody that starts with "Women are better at
Article
1) There is pretty much never just one single "best person for the job." Others have commented more on this.
2) You aren't sourcing any of your statistics, so they're effectively meaningless. Try finding some demographics and we can work from there. "Look at most of the universities in your area" is not anywhere near good enough. Another poster has already called you out on the "mostly caucasion" claim, but how do you know any of your statistics are correct?
3) I.T. jobs? Since when will the "top level computer science" students want I.T. jobs? What about the software engineering departments? Are you including those in your statistics? Because from where I sit, I certainly don't see > 35-50% females in engineering. Most of those I've worked with in software design groups are in HCI or project management. And as for I.T. -- hell, a lot of the people I know working in I.T. have never even graduated college. Actually getting your statistics from some place other than the ether would alleviate this problem somewhat.
I think your comment actually typifies a lot of what's wrong with gender and other sensitive social relations nowdays -- people just "know" things to be "true." They catch wind of some study that seems to support their views and hell, they feel more confident about it. But do they ever sit down and break down their strongly held views from a rational and empirical perspective? Most really don't seem to ever bother.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
I would like to report other evidence that mathematics is only patterns. When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side and you want to figure where they are goint to intersect." Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that is goes up, and they start twenty steps apart, ect. -I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersections was! It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.
I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The femal mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting that the male and female are equal and capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have nevery yet discoverd a way to communicate with the femal mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Well, there's your answer.
Your lab is full of empty-headed hairy-legged earth mothers who want to "save the world", torturing the data for artifacts of statistical noise that can be used for further scaremongering and grant chasing.
I don't know the details of your operation, but I can guess. Politicized pseudoscience, a few drops of fact in an ocean of speculation, with an anthropocentric view of Nature more in keeping with a medieval churchman than a modern scientist.
In ear shot of my mother, the retired (25 years plus) math teacher.. with a masters degree in Computer Science (granted all work was done on an IBM 1130 card cruncher). She'd give him an earfull and set him on his ass, I've heard her say that on average the best of her female students was always better than her male students. She'd also say that often the women wouldn't get the same amount of attention that the men got and that was part of the problem.
I do still tease her however about not being able to program her VCR
people used to say "men are natural hunters, women are natural home-makers and organisers, therefore it's correct that the man should be the boss and the woman the secretary"
Maybe not correct. Perhaps eficiency would be a more appropriate word (after all, you put people where they're more efficient at doing things, right? I recall that around WW2 women were employed in wiring circuitry because they were considered experienced at sewing and knitting -i.e. delicate manual labor. Just matter of optimization.
However... we should make sure OPTIMIZATION doesn't result in DISCRIMINATION.
The US is a country where having children and having sex have nothing in common now - where lack of opportunities force women to leave their children just to maintain their home - and where divorce is more common than marriage.
In this strangely unnatural (i'm not saying right or wrong) society, women *NEED* jobs now, it's logical that they want to refute any excuse for them not to get one.
So, mankind has changed society, and many natural (or genetic, whatever) laws no longer apply. And saying women are "naturally bad at math" only means that there are less women available for certain jobs than men. Those who stand out from the crowd obviously are not part of the average, so why discriminate them?
If man has altered nature, he can't use nature as an excuse to do things one way or another.
Before everyone gets bent out of shape *or* blindly agreeing I would suggest we all do the analytic thing. Data collection, research, evaluation, etc.
5 311834/qid=1106067238/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-8003 752-5475305?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)
..." because that is the only absolute truth on this topic. Because on an individual basis none of this stuff makes sense anyway.
I read a couple books on this years ago, John Stossel (sp?) from 60 Minutes did a special on it as well.
Here is the one book I could remember off the top of my head.
Brain Sex : The Real Difference Between Men and Women (Amazon http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038
My opinion on the topic. Lets face it, Men & Women *are* different in both physiology & brain structure. So why wouldnt we expect them to be better at different things.
Just like a hammmer is different than a screwdriver, yes you can try to hammer a nail with a screwdriver but its not as good as a hammer. Different tools are better for different jobs.
But as with all discussions on this topic, you must remember the bell curve and preface discussions with "On average
--
John Cavanaugh
Women are perfect at everything and they don't ever make mistakes.
Just ask my wife!
(Notice I posted Anonymously to spare my hide)
Variability within groups is far greater than variability between groups. This point is lost in most of the discussion here on /. though and is even more likely to be lost in the general population. When it's stated that "men are better at math than women" it's frequently interpreted as "any individual man is better than any individual woman." In reality though, a random individual man has only a very slight chance of being better at math than a random individual woman.
Men are, on average, taller, faster and stronger than women.
So, am I a mysoginist? Backwards moron? Chauvinistic macho?
The really great thing about the free market, the best solutions tend to rise to the top.
If women really are better at 'work', employers that hire women employees will be more profitable than the rest.
If women would quit complaining and get to work, then we'd really see what methods were superior.
There is no reason to argue. Let the results speak from themselves.
There are lots of cries about PC speech and such on this subject. Mostly by a lot of men who frankly have no idea what they are talking about. Here's my opinion as a male to female transsexual woman who has experienced both sides of the gender divide.
I can say that it isn't easy being a woman in a computer field and I would imagine that would extend to other hard sciences as well. When I was male and less experienced, my opinion seemed to matter more. I was given an elevated status just because of my gender. Now I have to fight to be listened to by idiots who think that I might be somehow deficient in my logic or math. It's really weird and damn annoying to be questioned time and again when you've proven that you know what you're doing.
When I was trying to live the boy life I really thought that others were being understanding to other women but it wasn't until I was in the role that I realized all the little condescensions here and there and the amount of leeway and tolerance men get in comparison to women. I can only imagine that growing up in a school environment. Honestly you will never meet someone as feminist as someone who has lived on both sides of these coins and is trying to earn a decent living.
My point is just this. The glass ceiling is real. The condescension is real. There is a LOT of social bias that can make a statement like the above a false positive and that can't be ignored and I would challenge all the men here to take that to heart and start listening to your female coworkers a little more. Chances are they worked their hineys off just to be seen as your equal and they deserve a little recognition.
While I'm not a big fan of being PC, THIS GUY IS PAID TO BE PC!!! As a spokesman for Harvard, he should be more careful what he says than the average person.
LOL
Does that count?
Interesting this is I have a friend still in college who says these two things have happened/do happen to women teachers in Rhode Island.
First, If a woman is seen on a date by one of her students, she is fired. Also, that this happened to one of his teachers.
Second, if a woman teacher becomes pregnant she is sent on a "leave of absence" for the duration of the time that her pregnancy shows. Basically, once she starts to show, she has to leave until she has the kid. Contrast this with teachers in VA where they don't leave until sometime in the third trimester.
Don't speak against the south until you've heard some of the crazy shit the New Englanders do.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I am not a sexist; however, I see that women lag behind men in many factors of life. I am not sure if its because of biology, genes, etc. Maybe it is due to the fact that women are treated differently from the very beginning. Let's face it: this world love dumb women. And women see nothing wrong with it.
Majority of my guy friends are subscribed to magazines such as Fortune, Money, Popular Science, etc. and every single girl that I know receives either Lucky, Real Simple, People, etc. or other magazines that targer looks, fashion or home design. Do me a favor, next time you're at a party, listen to what people are talking about. Usually, I find that men talk about business, sports and politics and chicks while women discuss latest celebrity stunts and who looks good in what. Does this ring a bell? While men talk about money and investments women blab about Oprah's weightloss...
I am not saying that men are better than women. Yet, everywhere I go, I see that women are being treated in a different way. It looks like our society is trying to make women weaker and keep them stupid. Just check publications that are popular with females and you will see what I am talking about. Eventually, you end up with grow-up women who do not know jack shit about life. They are used to their dads and husbands who solved provlems for them in the past. Once on their own, they do not know what to do. I kid you not, I know some women in their twenties who do not know basic principles of personal finance (we are talking about very basics, like what is 401K and why you should save some money), and yet if you ask them who plays the main role on show X, they will tell you all about it. So what's more important: knowing who is an actor or being able to manage your money?
I wish I were wrong, but I am not. Men still make more money than women -- although women spend more than men -- and women are not promoted as fast as men. What bugs me even more is the fact that women are okay with it. Whenever I try to explain some stuff to my female friends, they do not want to listen. However, when they're fucked on taxes, they want a simple answer. The same thing goes for almost everything. When I say something about it, they tell me that I suck at sales.... Whooptie-fucking-do :)
Gender is a phyisical condition.
Gender is "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex* The word "gender" explicitly excludes the physical characteristics of human sexuality.
My point is not to be pedantic, but to point out that our ideas of what is "male" and "female" extend beyond anatomy. There are many social and cultural aspects to the sexes.
( * Except in the linguistic sense, in which "gender" refers to the difference between masculine and feminine nouns and articles. See linked definition.)
It is sad that we live in a world where the mere expression of certain ideas can cause a backlash and a shit storm of such proportions that mere censorship appears weak by comparison in its ability to bury and deny those ideas.
If ideas are wrong, they should be proven so. Unfortunately P.C. outbursts and hissy fits do nothing to prove anything. If anything these responses appear to be a desperate reaction to ideas that are unthinkable to those who oppose them, yet fundamentally true nonetheless.
Not everything can be proven absolutely, but that doesn't mean you can't marshal enough evidence to convince a reasonable person. Trying to convince an unreasonable or irrational person is a waste of time. For some reason the P.C. crowd is unduly afraid of the irrational ones among us. It is almost like they feel that any disagreement with whatever it is they believe somehow undermines the inherent truth of what they believe.
The truth is not a matter of public opinion. It is what is real, and in political or social issues, the truth is beyond the control of any one person, and in cases of innate human nature, beyond the control of anyone.
It is no big secret that women tend to have stronger verbal skills, and be weaker at math, at least as measured by standardized tests. There have even been studies conducted on transsexuals to determine if the hormones they are taking have affected their abilities in these areas. Does this mean that women are "inferior" to men? No, just that they are not the same.
So much of our society is caught up in this BS notion that certain segments of society are perpetually out to get other segments. That men seek to oppress women, or white people are out to keep the black man down, etc. etc. There are certainly sexists and racists in the world, but when fear of these members of the lunatic fringe overcomes our ability to be rational and objective about the differences between different types of people, our understanding of what it means to be human suffers as a whole.
Now the president of Harvard has committed the unforgivable sin of calling a spade a spade. I can only imagine that his attackers, or at least the more virulent of them, are responding more to the voices in their head than to anything they heard him actually say. He says that women (and I'm paraphrasing here) are statistically less likely to be good at math than men. These critics on the other hand don't hear this. Instead they hear him say that women are stupid and incapable and probably also imagine him saying that they should be barefoot and pregnant because they aren't good for much else. Look at how these people are responding to his comments and see if what I've described isn't just plausible, but quite likely based upon their behavior.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but ultimately the outcome is predictable. The loons will howl for as long as anyone is willing to listen to them, and then they will relive this experience among themselves for years to come and hold it up as an example of sexism and men's innate desire to degrade and control women.
Why the world pays any attention to such people is beyond me. Even a cursory examination of who and what they are reveals them to be confused at best, but far more likely to be insane.
Once upon a time sex and issues related to sex were the verboten subjects. Today it seems that race and issues related to race have assumed these roles. Welcome to the new puritanism.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The answers to the question "do you think it was offensive?" at Local6 were Yes (43%) and No (52%). I wonder if there is any correlation between the answer given and the gender of the respondent.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I think part of the problem is that for all the equality in the workplace, there just isn't any, from either direction.
For example, my team is 75% female. I am male. I do not have a problem working with women, and in fact, until my current position, every supervisor I ever had was female. That's regardless of industry...I've worked in hospitality, IT, and finance/insurance.
The female members of my team consistently require special treatment for scheduling due to their children. When I say "consistently" I mean one or more of them require a day off or out of the office, or a late start or early stop every week. Every single week. Its usually because their children are sick or they can't find a baby sitter, or day care isn't open, or whatever. These scheduling events (I won't say "problems") have seriously harmed my team's productivity, and set us back several months by conservative estimates.
Our HR person has instructed us (team leaders) that we can, in no way whatsoever, force any of our female employees to choose between their job or their children without making the company liable to a lawsuit. In other words, all any of the women on my team have to say is "My kid..." and they get to work whatever schedule they want, and usually less than a typical 40 hours.
Yes, they can work from home, but from the logs, they rarely do. If you call them on it, they say "Well, I was going to, but my kid was sick..." and you have to let them slide.
On the flip side, the male members of the team must be here every day without fail unless calling in sick or using a vacation day. 8-5, no work from home, nothing. Occasionally we get to leave early for a doctor/dentist appointment. Other than that, we are here every day, and we work all day. We are not allowed the same flexibility as the women.
Women demand equality, they demand that they be allowed to have both children and a career, yet when it comes time to actually DO both, they end up choosing one or the other a good portion of the time. You can't say anything against them, you can't write them up for missing too much work and not being productive, you can't write them up for contributing less than others on the team even though they make the same or more in salary (the women on my team do).
Maybe the solution is to allow men the same flexibility as women, even if they don't have kids. I'm single without children...if I was allowed the same scheduling flexibility as the women on my team with children, maybe I wouldn't care as much. At this point, however, there definitely isn't equality, and demanding any would just get me branded a sexist.
So, to me, it is a valid concern for an employer to consider whether you have or are planning to have children. It might not be valid legally, but I have epxerienced firsthand that it DOES have ramifications and DOES effect productivity. Given that it does effect the workplace and productivity, why shouldn't it be a valid concern for an employer?
My point is that you can't have it all. Sometimes you have to compromise. If children are a priority, then maybe the compromise is less career advancement. If career advancement is a priority, then maybe the compromise is not having children.
first of all, anyone who thinks he can accurately determine the makeout of a population with a reasonable level of confidence (99%+) without taking a large enough and diverse enough sample size is a fool.
secondly, none of this matters. hypothetically, let's assume that the statements made are true. what does that mean? does that justify statistical bigotry? no, of course not!
we have bigger issues to worry about than identifying people's strengths and weaknesses. if this research really picks up, i fear that we'll end up in a world like the one portrayed in GATTACA.
Somebody went to the trouble of using mod points on an AC joke? Must be one of those 5 inchers the poster mentioned...
Interesting how one person can manage to have both of these opinions:
1. However it does annoy me when I here(sic) an ignorant man brag about how men are (arguably) better technically then women.
2. the genetic makeup of women makes them better child carers than men
Do you have two toothbrushes too?
Whether the average woman is worse at math than the average man, or a greater percentage of women stink at math than men, is largely irrelevent. It only matters to people studying large-scale demographic trends-- people like marketers, sociologists and anthropologists. It bears zero relevence on whether, say, women should get hired as scientists/mathematicians, or whether one should respect women's scientific abilities when demonstrated (e.g. when one interacts with women who ARE good scientists/mathematicians).
In my state (Florida?), one third-- ONE THIRD!-- of black men have criminal records (or was that records of FELONIES, thus making them unable to vote?). Does this mean that it is "okay" to refuse to hire black men because they are "more likely" to steal from the company? NO.. Even if 99% of black men were convicted murderers, that wouldn't reflect on the remaining 1%.
Ditto with this. Even if, say, 70% of women stunk at science and math, that doesn't bear any relevence to the remaining 30%. And somewhere in the remaining 30%, there would be a Marie Curie.
Another un-PC example: The average black person has a significantly lower IQ than the average Jew. So what? There are still African-American geniuses and Jewish 'tards.
When you are hiring, you can't look at the relative average qualifications of the prospective employees' respective demographic groups. You have to look at the qualifications of the prospective employees themselves!
Now, I'll toss in my own personal beef. Why is it verboten to say "more black people are stupid and/or criminals, so I won't hire any black people" (this is morally wrong, as noted above), but it's considered A-OK to say "more people without degrees are clueless stupid twits, so I will only hire people with degrees"? Because "you can't change your skin color"? (Actually, you can. Read Black Like Me or look at some photos of Michael Jackson...)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
for those interested in more about such classification, read: The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain by Simon Baron-Cohen. definitely worth the time.
..The university of California's Congitive Sciences Department is proved that us men is less gooder at non-mathematicall skills of communication and writting and speling by thirteen percent of the survey that was done.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Woman aren't as naturally good at math and 3D space as men, and men aren't as naturally good at speaking, multitasking, and pretty much doing anything else not involving one item at a time.
It's why it's so neat the way men and women fit together as a couple (hey, no sexual innuendos allowed). Seriously, they just naturally work together when the chemistry is right.
We are all know there are differences between races and yes, differences between the sexes. Otherwise, we would not tagged them with DIFFERENT names. The PHYSICAL differences is there to see. There is no refuting it. Physical differences means differences in physical abilities. Why do you think over 90% of the NBA are blacks? If this holds true, its only logical to conclude there are also mental differences and thus mental abilities.
Is this racist or sexist? No because I am generalizing(empirical that is) groups. Racist or sexist is when u apply that generalization to an INDIVIDUAL and treat the individual unfairly based on that generalization.
Every time Slashdot prints one of these stories, it's obvious that it needs an "I'm male and I don't understand the fuss" mod category so that those of us who do understand can filter and won't have to wade through so much loudly proclaimed cluelessness.
Hmm. I'm not touching this one.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Humans ain't that diff'rent. Getting that out of the way...there are differences both between individuals and between groups of individuals who can be grouped together based on sex, ancestry, and age, etc. This does not suggest differences in quality of person/group by any means - merely on abilites (and very little at that). Individuals need to be judged as individuals with discrimination based on the "group" the person belongs to never being considered. If everyone could agree on this we wouldn't be wasting our time trying to work these sorts of things out.
To get to the truly interesting part of the gender behavior/brain differences issue I will suggest that the hormones account for the greatest role creating the differences between the "innate" abilities of men and women (i.e natural abilities, not nurtured ones)
Testosterone and estrogen both regulate scores (if not hundreds) of protiens in the cells of the brain. Both the amount of certain protiens and their activity are regulated by hormones. Not to be a reductionist, but as a scientist, that's what I do. So if these protiens are altered based on +/- hormone then the cells will behave differently when responding to stimulus. So while in a sports car with a friend on a straightaway in a desert a man will probably respond by increasing his speed, a woman would respond (or not respond) by continuing her description of her wedding dress. Again, this has questionably accurate predictive value for use on nonsensical scenarios.
If you accept the idea that hormones effect brain protiens the next question is: How much? And few would dispute that other factors can trump all gender/ethnic-based generalities. Things like increased education in math and science for females will trump a difference in the hardwired natural ability difference (if one exists). Increased education on communication skills for males will attenuate these differences (except for me, I'm hapless.) So I would tenatively conclude that general differences in groups created by the body only work to push these groups in certain ways, but not determine individual ability.
Really, most of this is just wordy ways of saying what you probably already knew. But that's my 2c.
The danger of making broad statements like this, however scientifically accurate, is that people tend to read them and say "Oh, I'm a woman, that must mean I'm not good at spacial analysis and that I will live longer than the men in my life." That's not necessarily true, and I know you're not saying it's true, but most people will read those statments and start to make assumptions based on someone's gender, which is where bias and predjudice begin.
I'm a female geek, and that already puts me in the minority. I happen to have extremely well-devloped spacial skills. In a high school art class I once drew a made-up glass box with interconnected passages for an exercise on perspective (such exercises usually involve rulers and a dot on the horizon). The art teacher (also female) thought I had drawn a bunch of nonsense until I sketched out the box from a top-down view. From that she helped me work out the shading so it looked more realistic. I still have that picture, and most people who look at it will have no idea what's going on unless they stare at it for a while or until I show them the top-down sketch. But it's exactly what a box like that would look like.
I also am extremely good in math. I never had to put any effort at all into my math or computer science classes and always got As. When I went to college I was afraid that my high school had gone easy on me and that I was going to be slaughtered by the Calculus 2 class I took in my first semester, but I aced that as well with barely a sweat.
If women are scientifically pre-dispositioned to be poor at math, why did I do so well? Oh, simple: I'm the exception to the rule. But this is science we're talking about. There are no exceptions. If you have exceptions it means that you need to redefine your rule. Rather than simply saying "women are worse at math than men," find out why!
Now, here comes the controvertial part. The closed-minded and faint of heart need not read any farther. What if gender is not a digital (1 or 0) quality? What if gender is an analog (a range between 1 and 0) quality? Scientifically, sex is an analog quality. For those who don't know, "sex" refers to the physical sex of a being (usually defined by the genetalia) and "gender" refers to the self-identity of the being as either male or female. Different quantities of hormones can create males with female secondary characteristics or vice-versa. You can read more about sex and gender here.
It makes people uncomfortable to think of someone as being anything other than "male" or "female." Gender is a digital quality, but sex is an analog quality. You might also say that the analog-ness of sex is abnormal, and only occurs with genetic mutations. Well, men and women produce BOTH of the sex-related hormones, testosterone and estrogen. It's really these hormones that determine someone's sex. In a way, every male is part female because he produces estrogen, and vice versa because females produce testosterone. Perhaps if a female produces more testosterone than normal, but not enough to cause her gender to switch to male then she'll show traditionally male qualities, like improved math skills.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that using "gender" as a basis for anything scientific will run you into trouble because it's really just a concept we've made up so we can slap people into two neat and separate groups. If you tell me that the presence of testosterone leads to improved math skills (and show me studies to prove it!) I won't doubt it. But if you tell me that being a man leads to improved math skills I'm going to tell you your science needs work.
I find that discrimination is more prevalent in academia (where there are no market pressures) than in the "real world" of IT, where as you say, if you don't hire the best person for the job, your competitors likely will.
So don't you think it's more likely that the discrimination is happening at the universities, and the reason why the vast majority of your colleagues are white males is because of discrimination problems in the world of the university, not because of some innate character of white males that makes them superior in Computer Science?
I work for a small company where most of the employees are white males, but we have females and non-white as well. They were not hired to fill up our minority quotas--they were hired because they're top-notch programmers. I think you'll find the same in most companies.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
There are 3 types of people in this world - those that can count and those that can't.
Johnny Moondog.
You are taking it out of context.
When I say genetic makeup in the context of women I mean that they have inate qualities that make them suitable to raising children. For example they can provide a baby with milk. Also there are psychologists that believe women are inclined to be more loyal than men - especially during the early years of a childs life. (this is arguable) If true, this loyalty makes them more suitable to raise children than men.
Whwn I speak about ignorant men I am obviously not now talking about inate genetic makeup for raising children but rather intellectual makeup.
The mistake I made was saying 'ignorant men' because believe me there's a heck of a lot of ignorant women out there too. I've come across plenty - especially in recruitment agencies...
Gimme a break!
No need to speculate about insurance claims. Women have fewer documented less-serious accidents than men.
I hope the Pres of Harvard is wearing his asbestos underoos.
While I agree that society, historically, has been very discouraging of accepting women into fields like science, mathematics, and engineering, I think it's important that we ask ourselves *why* this grew to be the case. Was it because our society was male-dominated, or perhaps because women were typically (for valid or not reasons) thought to have less aptitude in these domains?
Is society was simply male dominated, why did it become that way?
The trend I've noticed in these types of studies are that we typically try to identify whether these problems are biological or social. Can't they be both? Perhaps there are biological reasons that drove the social attitudes that we have today, even if we dislike them.
I'm glad that - irregardless of whether or not men are typically "hard-wired" to be more proficient in certain fields than women - women are now given a choice in the matter. My Master's supervisor (combinatorics) was an absolutely brilliant woman, as were about half the students in my lab. Even if women tend, as a biological trend, to be less adept at math than men, as a trend, tend to be, there are certainly some women who are astoundingly brilliant when it comes to mathematics. Emmy Noether is my strongest role model.
Actual statistics show that men are more likely to cause car accidents regardless of whether alcohol is involved.
I think the most detrimental thing to society is when the average person takes up a "cause" to "prove something" and is blind to the fact that they are no good at what they're trying to do. This is a generalization that I think can apply to any situation. As it pertains to this discussion, if a woman is simply out to prove that she's good at math by pursuing a career in math, and she's not really any good at math at all, but people are afraid to point that out because of her "cause," that's not good.
We constantly seem to lose sight of pursuing what we enjoy and are good at when we're trying so hard to take up causes and prove things. Go out, kick some ass, and let someone else decide whether or not you've proven anything to the world when the day is done. How other people interpret your life's work is largely irrelevant to your own enjoyment of it and success at it.
There is no doubt that the statements made regarding this study are controversial simply because they're not PC. However, its the differences between various identity politics groups out there that allows us as a species to advance. If everyone were given precisely the same skills, we'd never get anywhere. Perhaps its not the differences between the inherent math skills of men and women that are the problem, but the value our society places on those abilities that is out of whack. My wife is a homemaker, and yet the feminist movement tells her that she is a traitor to her gender because of that choice. Why is the female CEO or tenured professor more important than the homemaker?
Perhaps this study is controversial because we've become so obsessed with envy of other people's blessings (material posessions, skills/abilities, opportunities, etc.) that we have lost the ability to count our own blessings. I'm not the best in math (I struggled with Calculus), and there are certainly women out there who are much better than math than I am. My only desire would be for those women to make good use of that ability in whatever endeavor they choose to pursue. When we can no longer be happy for those who have different skills and abilities than we do, this PC nonesense is the result.
Let's say for a moment that a man's brain is more capable of handeling advanced mathematical concepts than women are. So what? Is the biology of how our brains are wired right or wrong? Of course not, its beyond our control. When we start having problems is when the President of Harvard decides to not allow women into the science, engineering, and mathematics programs based on a generalization of an entire group. It is the actions of individuals that are right or wrong, not the biology of the mind. I did not read the article, but if this guy is advocating placing caps on the number of women who can enroll in math, science, or engineering programs because of the perceived differences, then we have a major problem and this person is no longer fit to run a major University. However, it sounds like he is merely making an observation that may or may not explain why there are more men in science and engineering programs than women. But perhaps we should also look at other fields where women may have a disproportionate representation than men. Fields like psychology, social work, elementary education may be examples of where there are a disproportionate number of women in those fields than men. Would the President of Harvard making a statement that "men are naturally bad at empathy and that is why they aren't as many men in psychology or elementary education" be as controversial as the remarks he did make? If not, then perhaps he isn't the only sexist person discussing this.
Part of what truly disturbs me about the PC movement is its obsessive focus on making everyone absolutely identical. We're different and that is a good thing. We have different skills and abilities. We have different passions, and different dreams. Are women barred from pursuing degrees or certain careers? I'm not talking about being discouraged about pursuing those degrees and careers (I was discouraged about learning much about computers when I was a kid, "there is no future in computers" was what I was told). There is a place for discouraging someone from a path that, after objective evaluation, appears to be too difficult for that person. If they truly desire that career, the discouragement will roll off them like water off a duck's back and they'll redouble their efforts towards the goal. I'm talking about Universities that have "no women allowed" or similar language in their course catalogs and admissions manuals. I'm talking about HR departments dictating blatently discriminatory hiring practices. The altruistic goal is to look at individuals, not an identity politics group.
"I trust individuals, not organizations" - John Sherridan, Babylon 5
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Who should pay for this? If it is the employer solely (which it usually is) then they have quite an incentive to hire someone who is less likely to take a maternity leave of absence and I don't blame them. Heck, if the business is rather small (say two employees) they'd be crazy to do otherwise, unless if they don't care to stay in business.
Yeah. Of course, a serious researcher would just ask random people what is their IQ and then conclude that women have lower IQ, because many of them never took the test and were assigned a value of zero. Sure.
And it would never occur to that researcher to find N women and N men, ask them to pass an IQ test in a controlled environment, with necessary adjustements for their familiarity with IQ tests, and then make conclusions. That would be unscientific.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I read something about this about 30 years ago and IIRC it had more to do with driving habits than actual accident rates. If you see someone weaving through traffic at a high speed it is far more likely to be a male driver. This is much the same type of thing as the fact that males are more likely to succeed at suicide because they tend to use more violent methods...but that is another discussion.
On the other hand, if you see someone making a small, inconsequential mistake in traffic, it is more likely to be a female. After I read that I started watching for myself just to see if it was true and sure enough, every time I saw someone making some silly little driving mistake it was a woman.
So I thought I would get smart with that bit of information. I started commenting to my wife about mistakes we saw other drivers make, and I always referred to the driver as female before we were close enough to make that distinction. Of course she would ask how I knew it was a woman driver and I would respond, "You don't think a guy would drive like that do you?" What really got her was that I was right every single time and this went on for a couple years.
Then one night I was driving down the freeway and I noticed a car ahead made several very nice moves that showed he was very aware and alert to what was going on around him. I commented to my wife, "Now that guy is a really good driver!" Yeah...I'm sure you all see this one coming. As we passed the car in question my wife glanced over and said, "Yeah...SHE sure is."
this is loaner...my sig is in the shop
It looks horrible to many people that there are more men than women in maths and science. Yet, nobody seems concerned about the overwhelming presence of women in nursery.
If we are 49-51 and some works are women-dominated, it is impossible that there are no men-dominated works.
Why is it better maths than nursery?
The politics of this is way too charged. If the issue is whether the president of harvard should have opened his big mouth, then no I think he should have shown more tact. If you want to argue the deeper issue at hand, there is no reason that men and women have different abilities in different areas, and their bodies as well as their brains work in different ways. Men and woman's bodies are clearly different, as well as some of our internal organs, so why cant our brains be different? Clearly men and women act differently and from an evolutionary perspective men and women need this difference for humans to survive. Its a matter of men and women complimenting each other. Women make up in areas that men lack, and vice versa. I think in any strong relationship this is true. If a man and a woman are too much alike, then somehow it doesnt work. Ultimately a man and a woman are a team, and its an advantage if the woman is stronger is some areas, while the man stronger in other. So perhaps men in general are better at math and science. I'm not saying its true for sure, and I can't sit here and prove it to you. But this possibility is not so far flung, and furthermore I think we live in a much better place due to the fact that men and women have different strengths.
and important point was that women tend to be more right brain centric, whereas men tend to be more left brain centric (mri data and whatnot aparantly backing this up).
this harvard guy seems to be along those same lines. atleast, the brain thing.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Let's chain up all those dumb women so we can get this country back on track! The gall of them to think that they can get an education, a job, get a life, not have to depend on another person for their entire life. Oh how I miss 5 children households. Sigh...
Damn progressives! You and your jet-setting womenfolk!
What nonsense. Of course women expressed opinions to their husbands. Talk to anyone over that age.
Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who walked out midway through Dr Summers's remarks, said: "This kind of bias makes me physically ill. Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile."
For good reason - cars used to be physically demanding to drive. This included not only hand-cranking the engine, but heavy manual steering and brakes that required a lot of force to get good results from. That's all changed now with electric starters, power steering and power brakes, but let's not forget what cars used to be like.
How do you know it wouldn't have helped if he had had facts to back up what he was saying? I think his ideas would have been much better received if they weren't ignorant speculation.
What next, a study proving that men are bad at speling?
We know that already!
--Shemnon
There is a very significant distinction between admitting that people are different, some are worse and some are better, and actually discriminating people. The first is rational, logical and justified. The second is usually stupid.
When you are hiring a mathematician, you can make a prediction about the candidate's skills based on his/her gender. But a reasonable hiring process must evaluate the candidate's abilities slightly better than just looking at his name. And it is entirely possible to have a fair selection (by using a defined set of standards), while admitting that women are generally not as good.
A recruiter who hires men when there are better female candidates is simply a moron, but the one who hires the best human for the job and it just so happens that it's usually the best man is not.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Hey, quit being prejudiced against prejudiced people! We need jobs too! ...and that, in a nutshell, is why we will never be rid of prejudiced people. There would be nobody left.
:-)
Smile!
"did not necessarily represent his private views"... talk about a disclaimer! Tryig not to get sued, are we?
My subject line refers to the fact that with a limited number of positions in companies or universities, whenever a policy is enacted that forces diversity, while it may give a job to a minority it will in exchange take one away from a member of the white male majority, which so often becomes the Other. Now while I don't agree with past practices of racial or gender bias discounting minority applicants altogether, I also don't support, at least indefinetly, policies that create forced proportions of diversity. Ideally winning a job would be based solely on the merit of the applicant in best meeting the needs of the job. Practically speaking, while that matters there is the matter of networking, as well as in the past racial and gender qualifiers that excluded some from winning the job. So I can understand the apparent need at one time for things like affirmative action to counteract these racial, or gender biases. I think though that society is much different today than it was back when affirmative action was started. I think this is why the Harvard President raised these issues to suggest that maybe we don't want to take forcing diversity too far to the point where it starts resulting in less qualified applicants getting the job over better qualified applicants for the sake of politically correct ideas of diversity and nurture-tabula rosa only ideas of humanity. By raising the question that maybe there exist real differences between genders that would provide an explanation for why males tend to dominate at the professorship level in the hard sciences in terms of numbers over female. You can try and fool yourselves and pretend that the difference of numbers is based on discrimination, or the culture or whatever but I'm convinced that science will prove eventually male brain wiring works better for math and sciences. But, there are some very intelligent and unique women out there who excel in science and I'm by no means saying they shouldn't pursue a field in science just because they're female. As for races if one looks at athletics it's clear blacks are better heavyweight boxers, sprinters, runners, etc than whites. The statistics show that. Why is that? Better genes for running etc? I don't know but clearly talent is to some extent dependent upon nature and not just nurture. Why would humans breed dogs and horses if not for the fact that genes determine performance to some extent.
4. are less likely to suffer birth defects
: //www.altonweb.com/cs/downsyndrome/risk.html
This seems an odd claim, as most birth defects arise from genetic mutations not on the X or Y chromosomes and would be expected to affect males and females equally. However for Down's syndrome there does seem to be a higher number of male births:
http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic615.htm
http
The second article also notes that 80% of trisomy 21 conceptions result in pregnancy loss, so maybe more girls die in utero?
Still it does seem rather surprising that this is the case...
You know that if you want some real help in any linux irc channel you have to be offensive like in: "Windows is better than linux, in windows i can do X ..."?
/. women seem to be very elusive and they are posting all over...
Well it seems that if you want to find assertive and intelligent women you just have to make this kinds of claims.
Afterall...
But... the future refused to change.
Essentialism is the practice of stating features of someone based on how they were born. In a lot of ways, it's like phrenology, except instead of bumps on your head, it's the colour of your skin, or your sex organs. Just because I'm black, I'm going to kill you and take your stereo. Just because I have tits and a vagina, I'm going to cry, be better and communications, and not take math in University.
Repeat after me: who we are is a complex mixture of nature and nurture. We do not have any definitive research on how much each plays a role in our development, nor have there been significant or breakthrough strides in figuring this information out.
I would consider the low math enrollment to be a social factor: how many times do teacher select males rather than females in a math class, every year from K to 12, and what kind of effect would this have on females going on to post-secondary math education? What about the other behaviours that we unconciously do towards people based on their genders? Where is the story that explores a gender swap, ala "Black Like Me"?
There is a reason gender studies needs to be a required social science in many curriculums: many people are so blindly ignorant and arrogant about gender, that they can say things, or have an intermediary interpret things to cause situations like this one.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Actually, given what I have heard about our national averages in scientific subjects...
:-)
"Have less aptitude for" pretty much DOES automatically mean "suck at"!
I just had to point that out. This is Slashdot, after all.
This article is a bit lacking. It offers very few facts and one big punch of an oppressive discussion. For example, I don't know his exact statement by reading this article. Did he SUGGEST that females are bad at math? Did he DECLARE females are bad at math?
"The remarks prompted Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Nancy Hopkins - a Harvard graduate - to walk out on Summers' talk." Well here is an interesting fact displaying the further irrationality of the entire situation. I'd like to see a judge walk out of a courtroom while the court is in session. This woman isn't bad at math, she is just irrational. And let me also declare: There are tons of irrational men just as there are irrational women. For those who are unaware: rationality is the basis of not only mathematical but all sciences; even biology. Think Darwin ever walked away from nature because he was disgusted by what it had to say?
Does this man think this hasn't been discussed before? Does he have any facts to back his claims? And as I mentioned before, were they even claims?
On another note, perhaps this was a task best delegated? Is President of Harvard, who may be considered by some as "King of Academia" because of his position, the best spokesman for such a sensitive topic?
... I think you see where I'm going with the title of this post.
Seriously, for making such a big ado about "facts," you sure have a bad habit of plainly asserting things to support your argument without ever referencing or sourcing where those "facts" came from.
I think it has been long established that unless other factors play into it, women are driven by different drives than men.
This really isn't saying much at all. When do you have a situation without "other factors?" What are these "factors"? What drives are women driven by and what are men driven by? Can you cite any studies that demonstrate any of these things?
I don't pretend to understand whether it's a cultural matter or a genetic one, but there are a variety of biological reasons for women to be less capable of maintaining abilities in math and logic (which are devoid of emotion).
It seems by saying they're "biological reasons" then you are pretending to understand it as a genetic matter. Last time I checked, your culture didn't influence your biology. And again, no studies, nothing but assertions. And what does math and logic being "devoid of emotion" have to do with it? You seem to have a very shallow understanding of the issues at hand, along side your absolute lack of backing up your "facts."
Now I have seen other studies among toddlers showing that on the large, boys are more successful at getting around obstacles (read as stubborn if it helps you to think so) than the girls who were prone to simply giving up in frustration
Ah! Mentioning some studies without actually citing them isn't much better than asserting things planly. There's a lot of details that need to be evaluated to determine whether a "study" really is demonstrating what it's trying to demonstrate. Just assuming that "a study said it, therefore it's a fact" is quite bad.
The notion is that as a toddler, there is less chance of a child being tainted by learned roles and behavior although there will still be some of that.
Do you have ANYTHING to base this assertion on? Toddlers have learned a hell of a lot by the time they're toddlers.
But frankly, I am a little annoyed when studies are criticised for reasons that have little to nothing to do with evidence to the contrary and more about a conflict of opinion or ideals.
Well that is a good reason to be annoyed, but it's quite off-topic. The harvard guy in question didn't have any "studies" to back up what he was saying. He was just spouting off, quite like you're doing. In fact, your whole post is either off-topic or horribly disingenuous, unless you really mean to characterize Summers's comments as the "facts," or being supported by the "facts." Alas, you don't mention this at all.
We don't want to hear that men and women are not equals -- that would mean all sorts of problems in our future because after all, look how far we've come by legislating that women are equal to men:
This is probably the most ignorant part of your entire little diatribe. The law is supposed to treat all individuals as equal, under the law! . Are you suggesting that we legislate that women and men are unequal?
We have an unprecedented number of single-parent families and all of the dysfunctional children that accompany those numbers. We have an unprecedented divorce rate that never stops climbing. (Studies have shown that 80% of all marriages start where men ask the women, but it is in the 90% range where women initiate divorce.) Women in the workplace are supposed to be equal but statistically, they spend less time at work than men do for the same job.
Several more assertions without citations. I'm sure you've heard the phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics." Statistics (or even worse, superlatives based on figments of statistics that may exist somewhere) without a source are not only useless, but dangerous.
Before women start
My first reaction is that he should have spent more time with his kids to improve their verbal skills. While it has been proven that females have better commnication skills, we all need good role models. Apparently, he couldn't be bothered to teach his kids the terms "large" and "small". (Even "big" and "little" would have worked.)
The kid was just working with the words she had. While her age was not given, I am hoping the child was less than three.
For what it is worth, there are gender differences. There are also differences related to culture, and a person's own capabilities. Looking at one person doesn't give good results as to which difference(s) is (are) being brought to bear.
Of course, an economist can't be expected to understand such things, it's more than a bit beyond them.
Like I said before, I am above average in math (unless the average person is now taking 3 semesters of calc, linear algebra, and numerical computation), but there are many women who are far more mathematically inclined and skilled than me. I have a hard time believing that women who are in that skilled category would be hampered by the notion of how the average man, woman, or whatever performs. A person of that caliber would be motivated to achieve his/her highest level of success.
I mean, seriously, when you were in school, did you look to the 50th percentile as a measure for how you could perform? Chances are you were so much higher than the 50th percentile that you never even stopped to think about what it meant to be "average". I never thought about it. My wife sure as hell never thought about it (she is the academic of the family).
The smart people who I know don't really give much consideration to what average people do. They already know that more is expected of them, so averages have no personal implications.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
My partner is
Look I know it is trendy to treat any relationship as a partnership but (speaking as an attorney) it just isn't.
You two are not filing an IRS form 1065 to declare your partnership income tax. You are not getting flow-through treatment for that income. You are either (non-married) filing separate income tax forms, or (married) a joint tax return.
You two are not keeping capital accounts. When you go to divorce court, they are not going to look at your capital accounts to divvy up the funds. They'll divide them up based, not on partnership law, but on the "equity of the situation." And, when they do that 2 things. (1) The family court will care very much who is the husband and who is the wife. (Even though they are not supposed to.) (2) There will certainly be remuneration for services taken into account, which is a big no-no for partnership law.
When the "partnership" ends you are not going to go into a court of general jurisdiction and go through a "winding up" process. You'll go into _Family court_ and get a divorce.
It would nice, in some nirvana, if the law allowed domestic partnerships between two or more people. That would sidestep the entire gay marriage/polygamy thing. And, the idea of capital accounts and "no remuneration for services" would make divorces much cleaner. But, that isn't the world we live in.
She is either your "girlfirend" or "wife," but (unless you have a joint business) she is not your "partner."
Current level of taxation, maybe? So that for most of the middle class families it takes both parents to work to provide for the kids?
Look up what the tax rate was in those days, I read that it was somewhere in single digits (can not find the link now).
Now 1/3 to 1/2 of your paycheck is deducted...
Paul
I agree. When growing up my sister used to try to one up me by saying, "girls are smarter than boys", to which I would reply, "that doesn't mean you are smarter than me."
While making generalized statements based on averages might be useful for some things (especially arousing controversy), it doesn't really give us much in helping with assessing individuals. i.e. would this person or that person be "better" for this job.
It is still possible that a woman might exist that could have the highest aptitude in math and science of all humans. She could be sitting in front of you in an interview. Even if ON AVERAGE men have a tendency to be better at one thing or another it doesn't mean that given two randomly selected representatives of each group that the man would be better than the woman.
The other greatly misleading thing about this type of statement is that even if it is true, there is no information on quantitatively how big a gap there is between the two averages. It might be extremely insignificant.
Raise the possibility that some things that women are not as good at, such as abstract reasoning, however, and you'll be slaughtered in public.
Yeah, especially when you're "just sayin'" it and not actually talking about the results of a study backing up what you said!
Same goes for your #1-8 "less/more likely" "facts." According to what studies? Under what conditions?
It seems that people have gotten so excited about a chance to be "non-PC through science" that they actually forgot about the pesky need to actually do science to back up what they're saying.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Its very dificult to say anything on this matter. There are so many factors which make it harder for women to go up the maths ladder. From school with a host of curtural preasures and expetations onwards. The social/curtural effect probably swamp any natural ability.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
I hear ya. From the male perspective...THANK GOD I've not had children yet...many close calls...but, if I'd have had them way back when...I'd never have made it professionally or financially. Yeah, I see friends of mine who have kids that are in the 10-15 year old range...it worked out for them, but, would not have for me.
While they've had to settle down and grow up quick back in the day when they had them...I did not. Some of them never moved from the town we went to HS. I've had the priviledge of travelling in the world..living around in very different parts of the US. I've had many interesting jobs along the way...sold clothes retail, restaurant business (waiter/bartender), head chef in my own restaurant for awhile...almost made it into med school, database design, applications development, DBA...etc. Sure, I don't have kids...but, I've had experiences they'll never have. I've had the opportunities over the years to be with a pretty wide range of women...not tied down to one.
What I'm saying is...life IS a set of choices...you can't do everything, and have to decide on what is the best path for you. So far, m y life has been quite an adventure...just because it isn't "the norm" doesn't mean anything is wrong with it or you...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
several of my friends in college were [unfeminine - hehe^^] female math majors
In a recent Brown study, [unfeminine - hehe^^] women performed as much as 12 percent better on math problems when tested in a setting without men.
many proponents of affirmative action claim (logically, in my mind) diversity of race, culture, religion, etc. enhances the success of the group, but perhaps not the individual job. (as i'm sure anyone who's played WoW or FF will agree, every character with the same stats is a formula for disaster)
Sure, in a work environment or in a battle simulator such as that of World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy, you want a party with varied skills. However, skin color isn't a skill except in those rare cases where you worry about sunburn or vitamin D, and having a particular set of reproductive parts isn't a skill unless the goal is to make babies.
Summers never said anything that was his own opinion. He didn't really make that available. His speech was based around the research that was given to him at the conference. A better account of story reads that he suggested these things as possible causes. Furthermore, he said these things at a women in science conference. Which was attended largely by women. He wouldn't be dumb enough to say those things without an ulterior motive. One can't really take what he said at face value. Also, probably what he wanted people to realize, it's stupid to focus on what he said, rather than on trying to change it.
Judging by your spelling, grammar, and only semi-coherent presentation, and assuming you're a man, you're not exactly a shining example of male intellectual superiority! Low end of the bell curve, huh?
Many of math teacher collegues I talk to would agree (based on anecdotal classroom evidence I will admit) that there is little difference in mathematiical ability of high school children. What there does appear to be however is a difference in how boys and girls are able to process and respond to various types of question. 1) Generally speaking, boys are more comfortable with questions that can be answered quickly, without requiring any written explanation of what they have done. Girls on the other hand are more comfortable with questions that to require some written explanation of what they have done. Call it laziness from the boys or whatever else you like, but thats what shows up in the classroom. I believe that this actually reflects what we see in the school yard. Girls hang around in groups talking, boys generally are in smaller groups 2's and 3's making monnosylabic grunts to each other. 2) There seem to be more boys who can process a written question - eg in trig - into a suitable diagram and then to a solution. Girls on the other hand are more comfortable with questions where the diagram is given. 3) many boys seem to have a better spatial awareness than girls - eg in map reading. The solution. Provide a classroom environment where all skills and learning preferences are practiced and encouraged, and follow that up with assessment that is also rich and varied, without being trivial mathematically. Before you flame me out, these are based on observations over a 20yr+ period in math classes. Yes they express my personal opinion. As for girls playing with trucks. Both my daughters were given trucks as well as dolls to play with. The eldest plalyed with both more or less equally, the youngest rarely played with trucks and had a strong preference for dolls right from the start. Coincidentally, both are quite good at math, and both have very good spatial awareness.
but these are things that need to be studied Boy if only there were somebody in a place of influence who had the ability to direct funding to such a study. I wonder who might be able to do that?
...which academic subjects does the president of Harvard think men are innately worse at?
Excellent points you brought up, but I think the *real* issue (that some men AND women don't want to admit) is that men tend to juggle things differently than women do - given the same set of circumstances and time constraints.
....
Let me preface this by saying I'm a divorced guy, with custody of a 2 year old daughter.
In my own situation, I'm very concerned about my job/career - and I guess when it comes right down to it, yes - I "put my job first", in that when my boss calls and says "Can you come in now?" or "Can you take care of this for me A.S.A.P.?", I find a way to do it.
That doesn't mean I have to "compromise" by not "having kids" though. It just means I have to do such things as find good childcare for her during the day, and even someone I can drop her off with pretty much "as needed" over a weekend or evening. In the long haul, I don't really see many negatives to this approach. She gets to spend time around more kids her age this way, and experiences several different people's methods of teaching her things -- but she still knows who "dad" is. Hopefully, she's also learning that time is a valuable thing, and that people need to work for a living.
By contrast, I've met quite a few single mothers who seem to feel as though they're "falling down on the job" if they don't spend most of their waking moments near their kid(s), and still expect people to give them good career jobs with advancement opportunities. It's just not going to work that way
First I'd like to point out that it's pretty obvious that there are innate differences between genders. If you need someone to do a study to prove it to you, you've got serious issues. Lack of intelligence being one of them. Since we are obviously not all the same, it stands to reason that some will be better at some things than others. The opposite is obviously also true. I am not saying that women are innately less likely to be good at math. It may very well BE true, but I haven't seen the data to prove the hypothesis correct. What bothers me the most, is that in our society today, if it were proven to be true, it is likely that the proof would drown in the ignorant river of disgust and fear. People are so afraid to not be PC, truth suffers. For those of you who say that women can take off all the time they wish at work and men cannot... Do you have children? I have been a father since the ripe old age of 23. I have never had an issue taking time off of work for my kids. My wife and I both do. It hasn't slowed our careers one bit as far as I can tell. Perhaps the problem is that your male bosses never took time off for their children or their fathers for them. So sad! The third rails in this country form an almost unnavigable barrier to truth and understanding.
I think there's a chance that he might have a point, in my personal experience, and looking at famous mathamaticians, many people have it in them to be competent at math, but to be a real genius who advances the state of the field usually means being a borderline schizophrenics or autistics - and the indicence of those diseases is far higher in men than in women.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
To say that someone lacks natural ability in something is not to say that they are naturally bad at something. Lacking natural ability does not mean being incapable. *sigh*
I don't have an innate, natural ability to play the lute. That does not mean I am bad at playing the lute, nor that I can't be better at playing the lute than someone who has "natural ability."
Similarly, Joe has some natural ability to play the lute. This does not mean that Joe can even play the lute, let alone that he is good at it.
Q: Why don't blondes do Math?
A: They can't find the zipper.
(experiment to see how many males versus females receive moderator points)
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
If women aren't inferior at math, how come a woman has never made a major mathematical discovery? Indeed, how come a woman has never made a major discovery in any scientific field?
regardless or irrespective
You must choose one or the other -- irrespective is simply not a word.
Jimmy the Greek made similar comments:
The black is the better athlete, and he practices to be the better athlete, and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes way back to the slave period. The slave owner would breed this big black with this big black woman so he could have a big black kid. That's where it all started.
He was fired for that ignorant comment.
The problem is that such generalizations sound very plausible on a common sense level, but they are never backed up with scientific fact. They are essentially hypotheses designed to prove a certain situation, one that typically involves treating someone of a certain group differently (often less favorably).
I could make the comment that "Men are more aggressive in discipling their children because in the wild, when hunting, if they weren't their child would likely die.".
Sounds plausible, right? And what's the harm in people holding that philosophy?
Now how would you like it when a woman judge has this in her head when deciding to award custody of your children? Or when you're appearing before an all-female hiring panel to be a child care provider. Would you like it if the "genetically more likely to have abusive" is running through everyone's heads?
Trolling sucks if you don't understand how percentages work...
Troll on, my friend, troll on.
I have yet to see a refutation of the Mismeasure of Man.
Hernstein & Murray were heavily criticized for their work, since many of the studies were not very solid, and have been shown as such.
Murray's mistake lies in factor analysis, and how he approached that particular field.
The problem with intelligence testing in general is that you are collapsing a wide and varied group of abilities into a set of numbers that are supposed to represent ability, sometimes even a single number. This number, although interesting, does not capture the complexities of human intelligence accurately. Murray knew this--he had to, but he, like many others, made the mistake of treating IQ as a simple object.
Your final statement shows that you know very little about IQ testing. IQ 124 is only about 1.4 standard deviations (SD=15) above the mean (100), for the ENTIRE POPULATION. That is, the standard deviation used on IQ tests is based on scores for a representative sample of the population, and adjusted for various errors. This means, quite simply, that an IQ of 124 is not only reachable for women, but for a sizeable portion of them. There are few gender differences in IQ (it is very small), and more differences within gender than between.
Sorry, but I have to conclude that you have NO CLUE what you are talking about.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
"Sanity is not statistical"
Neither is safe driving.
This sig is false.
You've misspelled the word "Troll". HTH.
I don't argue with the guy saying what he did: probably not the best thing as the prez of Harvard but if that's what he thinks, that's what he should say. If women are scared or think "oh no, don't say that" why the hell not: like it or not these are the sort of perceptions you may face out there so its better to hear it and deal than to hide from it.
:)
Of course, I would think that it would just mean that maybe a woman would think twice about going to Harvard (hell, I would).
With regards to the ability of men vs. women... I don't know.
I don't know if its that women are actually naturally worse at math or not. Unfortunately, even though I am a female in computer science, I can't totally say "Oh heavens no, our abilities are the same" because than why are there so few females in CS?? Almost 10 years ago I graduated from a class of 50 CS majors and I was the only female. Even now in my upper level graphics course there were only 2 females out of 40 odd people. That's really low. Its hard to argue with the numbers.
Maybe women just don't like math or CS. Maybe women aren't bad at math, maybe they aren't just able to learn it the way its being taught, mostly by male profs/teachers. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Asking the questions shouldn't be a dangerous thing. And looking for answers shouldn't be either.
I'm glad the guy said what he said: maybe it'll spur on women in the fields of the math and sciences to show him wrong!!
By the way: I've heard it said and I tend to believe it, that there are fewer women in the math and CS areas but those that are, are often at the top of their classes. I was
> It's just that when a man chooses to not have kids, society doesn't label him as selfish
It does you just don't see that side.
What about a husband who wants to stay at home, and take care of the kids. Society labels him as a deadbeat. It works both ways. Society labels negatively anyone that steps out of what their percieved role should be.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?
Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 - your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.
The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.
That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.
There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.
It may be that this man is a sexist, misogynistic pig, but it is an important question to ask regardless. We know that women think and reason differently than men, and we know that most scientists and engineers are men. What we don't know is how men and women are different, and if women are getting a fair chance at achieving their full potential in the fields of math and science.
If women are indeed achieving their full potential in these fields, then the number of successful women scientists would seem to indicate that there are, in fact, innate differences which keep women from succeeding.
But if they aren't, then research needs to be done to figure out why, and what can be done to help more women reach their full potential in these fields. It's hard to imagine that political correctness can go any farther in promoting women's issues than it already has. What is needed now is objectivity. We need to find out why more women aren't going into math and science, and what must be done about it.
The first step of the scientific method is to determine the problem (and whether or not there is a problem), and the way to do that is to ask (and answer) the questions that need to be asked.
...there have been statistical studies of the difference of math and science abilities of boys and girls. This is an issue that has been well studied. About 5 minutes of looking through the latest TIMSS study shows that in the 2003, in the U.S, there was a statistically significant difference between the performance of boys and girls in mathematics (boys did better than girls). However, the difference was still quite small. Also, there is no evidence that this is biological, in fact, in some of the other countries studied, girls outperformed boys in mathematics! It's also worth pointing out that the 1995 TIMSS found no significant difference in the math performance between girls and boys in the U.S.
Most men, as well as most women, lack natural ability in math and science. So does it really matter whether there is a biological, as well as a social component, to the observation that the small minority of one sex that is particularly talented at these things seems a bit smaller than the small minority of the other sex that is particularly talented?
What troubles me most about the outcry is not so much that it dismisses out of hand something that is certainly a reasonable hypothesis, even if it turns out to be wrong, but rather the implication that it matters whether or not it is true. The attitude seems to be, "let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known."
The reporting of the issue reinforces this perception. Look at the summary in the OP. "Women lack natural ability at math." Well, certainly there are some women who do not lack natural ability at math. For the vast majority of men on the planet, it is possible to find quite a few women who are better at math than they are. So stated as an absolute generalization, it is obviously false. But that was not the hypothesis, which was merely that there is a biological component to the distribution of mathematical and scientific aptitude.
So let us be politically incorrect and suppose that it is true. Does this justify denying any individual woman a promotion or assigning her a lower salary? No, because anybody who is doing math or science is by definition not average, and probably pretty far out on the tail of the statistical distribution, so whether men or women on average are better at math/science is irrelevant--the only appropriate question is how good that particular individual is.
So I suppose that there is some small risk that Dr. Summers' comments might discourage some young woman from pursuing a career in math or science (although I suspect that most young woman with real aptitude would know instantly that such a remark does not apply to them). But far more damaging is the implication raised by the protests that if such a biological bias actually did exist, it would some how excuse or justify discrimination against women in these professions.
Signed: i>A free spirit.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
In other words, the fact that you're seeing a 50/50 ratio of male to female students at the undergraduate level may be an indication that men and women are equally capable in that subject, and women are being discriminated against at the graduate level. Or it could simply be an indication that the undergraduate school tries to admit students in a 50/50 gender ratio while the graduate school doesn't.
To validate a hypothesis like this, you really need to do a random sample of the entire population. Trying to counter a hypothesis with a non-random subsample is only slightly better than trying to counter a hypothesis with anecdotal evidence.
Whether this is true or not women need to be much more encouraged to go into science and engineering. The current situation is devastating to a healthy and productive research athmosphere. Not actively encouraging women to go into science equals to passive discrimination and cannot be tolerated. Hopefully our top tier universities will recognize this and do more in that respect.
Yeah, and in other news women have weak arms. I guess all the feminists should be all over that fact. How could I suggest that women are weaker.
How about there is no gender categories on the next Olympics? No women leagues? Let them compete directly.
P.S. My wife can climb circles around me while rockclimbing, and she can not even do one pull-up. While I do a one hand pull ups. I am rather pissed about that.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
... out of the woodwork.
I fucking hate this place sometimes. You people disgust me.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Though Slashdot is a place for wild, innumerate, illiterate, impossible speculations, as your own post demonstrates.
What an /interesting/ idea. Let's see:
My senior year of physics, the men were too stupid to ask questions. Let's rephrase: when something wasn't clear, it usually was one of the few women who would actually speak up and get it clarified. Which was rather important, because these weren't easy classes and not everything in the textbooks.
I'm pretty sure most of the women that year were also near the top of the class. Interestingly enough, they also tended to be flamboyant femmes. At least much more so than past years.
Although any of them, from any year, would kick your ass if you criticized them just for the hell of it. I never saw any "crying temper tantrums". They'd also kick your ass if you told them "sexism doesn't exist". Wanna come over here so I can kick your ass?
the irony, grades K-8 girls actually do better on standardized test in math. Not until H.S. does the trend change?
If someone does say that in general, women are less apt in math and science, why is it a big deal? If you really care, do something to prove them wrong - otherwise it *will* be regarded as a fact.
They say that women are better at multitasking than men are, so why isn't that regarded as sexist?
All these stories about how the president of Harvard made statements all come from the same schmuck AP reporter. They are all just being rewritten and recirculated by one news agency to another in a giant media feedback loop.
So where's the transcript of the actual speech?
By the way, most people aren't any good at math, men or women. So what? As long as some people are, and they publish their work, and they are willing to work for money that ordinary people can give them, then what difference does it make?
It's like saying that women can't play music because there have never been any women in the Rolling Stones.
Not the last few decades. People are getting increasingly worried that girls are pulling further and further ahead of boys in school, and are starting to believe that the teaching methods used are ill-suited to boys' needs. See, for example, this story.
That isn't true in the USA. At least where I went, once you went through the first year shake-out, women were more likely to stick with math or science as their major. Granted, there was NOWHERE near 50/50 M/F ratio. It was more like 1 female for every 10 men.
How many went to grad school? I don't know. I doubt that if you went through all that work that they'd be willing to completely dump a postdoc, though. Downgrade, yes. Quit? Ouch.
I can tell you that I'm less likely to apply to Harvard for grad school now!
As I understand it. Most serious under-achievers are male. Almost all the greatest scientists are also male.
It has nothing to do with PC. Hopkins walked out on his sermon not because what he was saying wasn't PC, but because it was wrong. And as a biologist talking to an economists she exasperated with someone who doesn't know, an economist, trying to profess on matters that had been debunked by the experts.
.... these the type of studies that were done, and none, of them point to an inability to learn by other sex, it points to how some may process data, how some may learn, that's it ...
It's like saying blacks were inferior mentally, go ahead and say it, but people getting upset about it has little to do with it isn't PC, but because it's not true. This has nothing to do with PC. There has never been any study proving women were inferior in math to men.
The only studies show women and men learn differently and have higher capacities in different areas reasoning. Example, women, seem to have a greater ability to multitask supposedly due to their greater interoparibility of their brain hemispheres. Men seem while lacking this multitasking ability seem to in some cases use more energy and a particular region of the brain, dependent upon the region. Women seem to have better spatial reasoning skills, etc
The point was the guy was wrong, and that is the issue, at hand.
wasn't it that mental capabilities mwere passed on by the X chromosome? Hence making the curve of intelligence flatter for men, hence it is more probable for a man to be a genious but aswell more probable for a man to be mentally retarded? I remember reading somewhere that since women had 2 X chromosomes it made them statistically more likely to be average. Anyone had any insight on this?
To answer this, I give a quick quote from The Guardian - a left, fairly well respected UK newspaper:
'Others said Dr Summers's comments were depressingly familiar. "I have heard men make comments like this my entire life and quite honestly if I had listened to them I would never have done anything."'
Get what I'm driving at?
A number of comments here.
1. Many people view the '50s through tinted glasses. Either they think it was perfect (it wasn't), or they think it was terrible (it wasn't).
2. As for the girl 'not letting any man control her life', well, if she's not supporting herself, then daddy does indeed control her life, it's just that she's happy within the boundries that he places. After all, if he doesn't like what she does, he can withdraw his funding.
I don't read AC A human right
If the brain mass statistic isn't normalized by height or some other overall measure of body size then it is probably totally irrelevant. I don't doubt that most rugby union (or NFL) players have a larger brain mass than I do, in proportion to their greater body mass, but I see little evidense that this translates into greater intelligence. Women have smaller bodies and hence smaller brains but as I know of no evidense that larger men are more intelligent I don't see any reason to think that women having smaller brains, on average, would make them less intelligent.
I would just like to point out that the basis of his argument relies on two things: 1. That some of these jobs require up to 80 hour workweeks 2. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes. That's it, they're basing it on how long people polled want to work, and scores from High School tests. Judging from how most people are in high school, the difference of where their interests lie and what they actually end up doing is vastly different. Such a huge argument is presented here by the Harvard Chief with a scanty "Well, kids in high school are like this" and "my wife doesn't like to work 80 hours a week" is near preposterous. It should be an interesting study and I hope they go through with it, but all in all, I would hope an entire gender's abilities aren't called into question because some high schoolers don't exceed at standardized tests.
I don't want the world, I just want your half.
Mild autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger's Syndrome, are 3 to 9 times more common in men then women. AS has been called an extreme male personality, good at systemising - poor at empathising. The result is demonstrably more Nerds in Maths - Engineering - Maths dominated Science courses in universities. A Women is less likely to be a Nerd, QED.
Are you familiar with statistics and probability at ALL?
Why do you need an explanation for why all the outlying samples don't mesh with the means and modes?
Dumb bitch.
at all respond to this crap piece of an article? It is ill researched, the journalist admits that what the man actually said is unknown at the time of writing, yet paraphrases what it is believed for him to have said. The story is based on one female participant's having left during the speech and by the looks of it having taken the initiative for this crap bomb. Then it gives a few quotes loosely tied together so it appears that the president of Harvard University can't present a thought well.
The three sentences/fragments that are directly quoted (apart from "daddy truck" and "baby truck") are put into a silently mocking paragraph structure, whereas the accuser was given two lengthy, pompous sentences in strategic spots. The first one opens up the article and what a horrible man this Mr. Summers is. The second one concludes the meat of the article with the anger of the just, and an indication this lady speaks for all the women of Harvard University and elsewhere.
My guess is that this article is a piece of someone's personal agenda, and for us as a community to get worked up about this based purely on where the article leads our imagination is, in my ever-so-humble opinion, unethical, unfair and an utter waste of time.
My experience has been that most women aren't as interested in science and math. Those that are interested and motivated can do things as well as their male counterparts. Here in Australia girls up to high school age outdo the boys in math. Some of the best programmers I've known have been women.
(My first software job was in a software house where half the staff were female. This was a recent development at the time and they were very motivated to show they could outdo the guys. They generally did because they were more focused).
We live in a society however that does not encourage women to take up maths and science. Just look at how most astronomy and chess clubs are very male dominated. It makes it very difficult for women to feel comfortable in that kind of environment and further puts them off. Unless this guy's done a study in a very different society where males and females are encouraged in the sciences equally I call bullshit.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What the article describes is not education being geared towards girls. It's the result of girls figuring out how to learn better in the environment they have, really stepping forward to take leadership roles as they have more role models that do that, and also of course teenage boys generally being egotistical idiots (see example of class president). In fact the article itself is more about leadership than education.
Teching styles themselves have not really changed that much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mild autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger's Syndrome, are 9 times more common in men then women. AS has been called an extreme male personality, good at systemising (science-maths) - poor at empathising. The result is demonstrably more Nerds in Maths - Engineering - Maths dominated Science courses in universities. Women are less likely to be Nerds, QED.
http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic147.htm
Google Mathematics+Asperger's
Women have made huge strides in formerly all-male fields like medicine and law. But they've spectacularly failed to make comparable inroads in engineering, science and math.
Some posters here have noted that women with Ph.D.'s graduate around the time that they'd really like to be having children (late 20's, early 30's) and that the demands of the job are hard to reconcile with having a family. But this is also true of doctors and lawyers, where women are not nearly so disadvantaged.
One possible reason for this large difference is that academic jobs basically suck--they're extremely hard, involve all kinds of non-essential extra work, poor chance of promotion and lousy pay. I'm a (male) refugee from academia myself and have dated female academics who are being ground down by committee work, curiculum changes and teaching load to the point where their research isn't so much suffering as non-existent.
I'm writing this from home, where I'm working today because my kids are home from school with colds. If I'd stayed in academia, I'd probably be giving a lecture or in a committee meeting right now. Instead, I'm self-employed and having more fun than should really be legal.
So it's possible that women simply are making more rational choices than men in this regard, and that men are stupidly sacrificing themselves to their academic careers. If we want to put this in terms of discrimination, academics--particularly junior academics--are being discriminated against relative to everyone else, and women are less tolerant of those working conditions than men are.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It is harder, but not impossible. I find this quote interesting: "women seem to have an advantage in dry heat."
Apparently, women are also better at typing coherently.
Statements like that bother me. Let's break this down...
I have heard men make comments like this my entire life
All her life she has heard men saying that she is less likely to excel at math or science than the guy sitting next to her? In short, without any test scores, transcripts, etc. She's probably got worse grades than any random guy on the street. Even if that's the case (and I'm assuming that's not what she meant, but I wanted to point out that the statement doesn't fit this situation), what is the significance of this? Not much. It's no different from saying that the average black guy on the street has a better chance of making it into the NBA or NFL than the average white guy on the street.
if I had listened to them I would never have done anything
If she would have given up her dreams just because she thought the odds were slightly against her, then I would have no sympathy for her if she had.
In short, who cares what science says your odds are? If you are confident that your abilities don't fit that trend then why the heck should it affect you? Saying that the odds are not in your favor is not the same as telling people not to try, or that they have no hope, or that you won't even give them a fair shake. I think we can all agree that using a statstical assessment to defend positions like those is not only unscientific, but flat-out wrong. But it's obviously so. No one is going to "get away" with using this study for those purposes.
But I suppose men can count to 11 using their, um, appendages while women can only count to 10.
Argh. Look, Summers is not saying that all women are bad at math. Yes, Grace Hopper would have wiped the floor with me and 99.9% of other male programmers. That does not invalidate his hypothesis. We're talking about means and standard deviations here, and the theory that males might on average have greater mathematical ability. Because of how the normal distribution works, even a tiny difference in means will be magnified when you get to the tails.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
a broad can memorize how to solve a differential equation but could never come up with an original solution on her own.
After reading several replies regarding this article, both here and on other sites, is that so many people are getting bent out of shape over this. The man isnt espousing some sexist remark. He states something observed through statistical analysis.
Yes, Women can and do excel in math and sciences, just not as many as men. Yes Men can and do excel at art and less exact persuits, but not as many as women.
Ultimately, it boils down to something I heard in a M.A.S.H. episode once way back when. Winchester tries to cheer up a soldier who lost his arm in combat, and who happened to have been a concert grade classical pianist before the war. In a very summarized nutshell, he says this:
Any monkey, with enough encouragement and practice can learn to play the tunes and melodies of the great composers. But very very few have the true talent to make those notes truely come alive.
And that holds true in any activity. With enough hard work and practice, I could be an astronaut, or physicist. However, I would be only a mediocre or average one at best, because my talents lie elsewhere.
That is a simple fact of life. Not being as successful at one thing or another does not make a person any less a person. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses.
You can beat a dead horse, but it still wont get up and keep going, or you can go back and find a form of transportation that is more suitable to you, and keep on moving.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Wait, so my math professor is really a man and since I don't like or understand math as well as English, writing, and languages, I'm a girl?
Finally, a chance to admit my crush on Harrison Ford...
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
... or at least that's my personal opinion.
I Agree : it's definitely not fair that society doesn't seem to hold it against men who refuse to bring up children.
I've had people say to me that the purpose of life was to seek and find pleasure. Needless to say, these were the types who think that having a family is uncool and a total drag ("terrible world, would be heartless to put a child into it").
I have the utmost respect for men who have brought up multiple happy children with their mother.
It takes something special to do that, it's called being a Man.
...so I could rate the last sentence of your comment "redundant." ;p
Share and rate p
For now let's assume that on some kind of idealized test that captures everything we mean by the concept of 'math ability' and that the average score for women is exactly the same as the average score for men.
Does this mean, subtracting all other social factors, we should expect the same number of male and female math Phds? NO
All we know from the average is that the bell curve for both men and women is centred on the same score. It' tells us nothing about the distribution of the scores.
Studies have shown (I read it in the new yorker a few years ago) that males have much more variablility in their math scores than females. This means that both tails of the gaussian contain more individuals.
So as a corollary we can see that the greater variance in male scores leads to more at each end of the tails. In other words there are more men that are really good at math than women, but also there are more men that are really bad at math than women too.
Since society only sees the positive side of the gaussian it looks as though there is some inferiority but looking at the distribution tells you it's just a difference in variance.
You misunderstand.
> In short, who cares what science says your odds are?
It's not science, it people. Reworded correctly it should be "In short, who cares what people around me, people in power, and what role models say your odds are?". The answer is, well, a lot of people.
One of my best friends (who's name shall remain anonymous) graduated with a 4.0 in mathematics. Now, this wasn't your normal math, it was cryptography style math. They go in to all sort of crazy math like proving that numbers exist and equations really do work and a whole lotta stuff that is way over my head! And when she graduated, she immediately got a job with the NSA (National Security Agency for those who don't know) as a code breaker/cryptographer. So it is complete Bull**** to say that women can't do math or are somehow inferior at it or lack an innate ability to do math or science. My best friends girlfriend is a chemist and damn good at it too. Someone needs to beat some sense into this Harvard chauvinist lowlife. OK thats my rant...sticking up for all the female populace one blog at a time!
"But...it was so artistically done"
We live in a world where something can be true, but it can't be a fact if it's not popular. Years ago a doctor did a book called "The Bell Curve" in which his research noted that intelligence tended to fall on a bell curve, with asians being in the largest group, followed by whites, hispanics, and then blacks. He did not say blacks were stupid, mind you, or that asians were smart, he merely gave the scientific fact that a large number of asians scored well and a large number of blacks scored poorly.
The man got raped. His name was drug through the media muck, and his book was blacklisted at universities nationwide. But everything his said was scientifically accurate, and most importantly, did not make value judgements of the individuals based on their race, but on their individual performance.
This poor Sumners bastard is going to have NOW all over his ass simply for stating what is well know, and is evident to any moron. Women don't do as well in mathematics as men. Women are wired to assess different qualities in evaluating a situation than men. This natural wiring state has to be unlearned, and unfortunately girls are not encouraged to unlearn non-math evaluative skills, and then learn math ones. Does anyone remember the "Math is hard" talking Barbie doll?
The result is that if you look in on any higher level mathematics course (Trig, Calc I, II, II) you'll find about a 60/40 split of men and women. Check back on the same class at the end of the term, and it'll be more like 70/30. And look in on any Linear Algebra, Differential Equation, Topology, and so on, and you'll see it closer to 90/10.
The impact of this is that women are in the extreme minority of fields like chemistry, engineering, and mathematics.
Note: It is not that women CANNOT do these things, its that they are discouraged from doing it.
Yes by analogy, it is possible that the most intelligent Elephant is 'smarter' than the most intelligent male.
In science we prefer not to argue with analogies and anecdotes. Harv's pres. said we need to examine the data. Good for him: we do. The innate differences between males in females resulting in some innate intellectual gulf is perfectly plausible. Likely that any supposed gulf alone will explain the percentage increase of tenure awards, post-doctoral studies, graduate studies etc. from female to male? No.
In many intellectual fields, to explain the data by some gulf alone, one would have to suppose an innate gulf so large as to be both intuitively abhorrent and inconsistent with the data when we take into consideration the brilliance, merit, and vigor of our female colleagues.
Personally I think a male-female gulf to be more likely than the elephant-male gulf; that does not make it true.
Harv's pres. gave us an anecdote about his daughter; I haven't seen the transcript, but I'd be very interested to see the exact context on that quote.
w*@mit.edu
I am not surprised that women are taking exception to this comment, but it does bring to light the double standard.
What do I mean? If someone came out and said "MEN are naturally not good at nursing, that's why a large percentage of nurses are female." Women would not be up in arms. They'd be saying "damn straight!"
That's what pisses me off when women get ticked off by statements like the one the Harvard President made. Feminists are clamoring for equality, but when something favors women, all of sudden it's "More power to women" instead of fighting for equality.
I know many MEN who would be outraged by the comments of the Harvard Professor, but in my exmaple of someone saying men are naturally not good at nursing? I don't know many women who would denounce such a comment.
That's a double standard my friends and its sickening.
Yes.
Why?
There are more male nerds then female nerds because autism is 3 to 9 times more common in men then women.
A person with mild autism may have Asperger's Syndrome and are often perceived as an archetypal nerd.
Nerd's have better systemising ability, but poorer empathising ability. It is known that extream Nerds/mildly autistic people (more often male) gravitate to courses that cater for their cognitive profile. This is why Math courses have 3 time more AS people then Arts courses. And it is why Dr. Summers said what he said.
Anybody notice that the two women listed in the article as walk outs (Denice D. Denton and Nancy Hopkins) are suspiciously manly-looking? (Google 'em.)
(As long as we're doing pseudo-science, let's go full bore with the sexist/incendiary/conspiracy theories.)
Statistically, men tend to be more visual, and women tend to be more auditory. The trend is significant. However, it is only a trend, and I have known plenty of men who were very auditory and females who were very visual.
Math and science are typically presented in a visual way which may be a barrier for auditory learners. This biases it against most females, but not because they lack math and science talent but because the information is presented in a less than optimal format for them.
My wife is very auditory. She, unsurprisingly, finds it somewhat difficult to understand many math and science texts. But she really enjoys reading Scientific American articles about the same topics. When I explain math or science to her in a manner more compatible with her thinking style, she has no trouble understanding it, and she is able to draw correct inferences that I, a visual learner, would not necessarily have been able to see so easily.
The "scholarly work" being referred to may be suffering from the same problem that people have when they conclude that language is easier than science. The truth is that science is easy but it seems hard because it's presented badly. Language is hard, but it looks easy because all the good writers work so hard at making things understandable.
Alright, I know this post is probablly too far down for anyone to ever notice but a couple points about the question of whether females are naturally worse at math and science.
So my first point is that there are *clearly* social and cultural factors at work here discouraging women from doing math and science. I'm a grad student in mathematics (well logic actually) and since this is an issue of some interest to me I've conducted some informal surveys of women I know around the department and elsewhere. Almost every one admits to feeling some pressure to be dumb or at least dumb in technical fields to attract men.
Unfortunatly, it really does seem like many men prefer women who they can protect and somehow fufill the masculine role with. Often girls believe that by acting dumb or ditzy they will pick up me, and they are probably right. I have had several women tell me they started acting dumb or hid their interest in math/science to attract men. This matches well with the data which suggests that women start falling out of math/science about when puberty hits.
On top of this is the issue that mathematics and the sciences are naturally somewhat combative and assertive. These are not some random cultural fact as many feminist thinkers would have us believe, but a reflection of the truth conditions in many of these fields. Scientific fields work best when their is a competition for the truth and everyone tries to tear down an idea before it becomes accepted. Now there *may* be a genetic component of ability to deal with competition but in this case I think the cultural component outweighs the genetic.
For instance my mother is an assertive argumentative woman, though much less so than me and other men I know. Yet she often gets shit for being a bitch or the like because she is so combative and stands up for her position. Even if my example is unconvincing, and hell I wouldn't believe someone talking about their mother either, I think it is clear that women are expected to be less confrontational by society. Just look at the way men relate to each other versus women, women are quite frequently big on cooperation and agreement while men will often take enjoyment in competition. This certainly may be rooted in genetics but for whatever reason this has a clear social impact on girls while growing up.
This all is not to mention plenty of people who still instill differnt values in their male and female children, often unconciouslly. For instance one of my female friends would be told 'stop thinking like a man' when she was exceptionally logical or the like while growing up.
So clearly there is a large social/cultural component. Yet it is far from clear that this is responsible for all of the large ratio between men and women in the sciences. After all, the effects I mentioned above should all be fully in gear in college yet women drop out of the math and sciences all the way up through grad school at a greater rate than men.
Now, I admit this surely doesn't prove that women have less ability, in fact if anything I think it suggests they have less interest. Though in a very real sense interest is an important facet of math/science ability. Moreover, it is quite possible that this continued drop out rate just reflects a greater opportunity to do have other engaging lifestyles.
It is quite possible, likely even, that many people in math and science would have bailed out if they were offered a chance at a family life, or even easy sex and partying. We should not dismiss the notion that women are dropping out of math and science because these are very demanding and time-consuming activities and they have the chance to life in some other manner (party, have children). While men might have similar attitudes often they simply don't have the opportunity, or temptation, to leave science for a relationship or another lifestyle.
In short there clearly are cultural influences but it is quite possible that these cultural attitudes arise out of real differ
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
That's not true, they also subtract clothes!
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Even assuming its conclusions are true, the study cited by the article doesn't provide proof that women are necessarily bad in math. It might be a case for why women are bad in branches of math that do require visual manipulation like geometry. I don't see much visual manipulation in arithmetic and algebra or even in much of what goes under the heading "computer science." Hey, even the whole story doesn't provide a "case" for why fewer women are into computers. Programming is more about logic than raw math power.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
See my point? Even our moderators are brainwashed.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I am familiar with the hypotheses based on scholarly work referred to by the President of Harvard University. That body of work also supports a wide varity of racial and ethnic stereotypes. I believe the lead researcher may have been Professor Bunker who went on to play a leading role in a popular TV show. Fire that repulsive jerk (Pres of H.).
I understand they are trying to use testosterone to activate women's libido, for instance. So perhaps you could get your doctor to prescribe you some and you could get a tiny sense of what it's like to be a man.
Women already produce testosterone, actually they produce it in their ovaries. This libido booster is aimed at women who've had their ovaries removed resulting in a lower production of testosterone and lower sex drive.
Almost all humans have (potentially) functional breasts; those of the male are generally underdeveloped, but apparently ARE capable of lactation under certain (generally, but perhaps not exclusively pathological,) circumstances http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation.
e r.html
Though it is not common, men can also get breast cancer http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/malebreastcanc
Summer has a three year record of always beating his previous record by promoting fewer women than the last year of his service, and less women than his predecessors. Only 3 of the 34 tenured in all fields were women this year. Not just in sciences and math. In all fields. His administrative record in promoting women is similar.
He beats his record every year promoting less. In two years, there'll be no women that get tenure at Harvard. In all fields, not just math and sciences.
His promotion record matches his bias. So what he said was not just a provocative statement.
nice one... tell that to my wife, a degree in physics and a math professor. Also has a patent on file.
Why should anyone care? Well, because if you own a car, you get shafted. Traditionally car owners pay more in insurance premiums.
"He also proposes that the insurance industry stop shifting the high costs of the SUV dangers onto car owners by raising premium prices for SUVs to reflect the amount of damage they cause."
Gender is a person's understanding, definition, or experience of their own gender, regardless of biological sex http://www.gsanetwork.org/resources/trans.html
While I would definitely have to say that there are some definite cultural influences that play apart in the gap between male and female students' performances I wouldn't completely rule out physical attributes. However, I be interested in knowing if testosterone plays any part in this.
The bigger point I was trying to get across is, what are these reactionaries going to do if it's true? It's science. You can't just shut the paper in a vault somewhere and ignore it. If it's true, then this effort to try and equalize the proportion of males to females in the field, and claim that this proves fairness, is inherently unfair. These reactionary reverse-sexist people that have jumped on Sommers for mentioning a (purportedly) scientific study at a forum where he was asked to be provocative--What are they going to do then?
If his comment has been "There are biological difference that make BLACK people less able to succeed than WHITE people in academic" what kind of outrage happen? It's crazy that when women complain about sexist comments, they are pushed aside as beeing too emotional or whiners.
Well, you were the one claiming to be pissed that she couldn't do pullups. Well, now she has the means to do so! That is quite different from saying "women never/shouldn't/aren't-able-to do pullups/math" vs. "they can" or at least "can try".
Discouragement is the real issue here. And that is where the sexism comes in. Whether it is at work (promotions) or at home (Who does the housework?).
(in joey voice,)
I'm a woman!
I actually thought it was the other way round. My bad for poor definition of maths.
A blog I run for the wealth
Women are equally skilled professional classical musicians, as men. Look at all the violin soloists out there, and pianists, etc. Music is very much like math.
...and yet you stated that having children is your way to become immortal?
If you think God just put you here to be fruitful and multiply so you can maintain your "immortality" through your children, then you might want to consider switching to a church that actually teaches you God's word.
From what you seem to be advocating, you would think God told you take up grazing like a cow in the pastures and dropping your litter in the fields.
How about educating yourself like this woman and doing something constructive to help the poor misguided souls already in this world rather than focusing breeding for God.
TWO.
You don't know why this woman is studying for her PhD, yet you assume her reasons are purely for selfish gain (money and/or noteriety).
If anything, everything you've written shows how disconnected you are from academics and ambitious people in general, as you clearly do not understand what motivates most academics. You clearly lack any sense or understanding of what it's like to have a sense of purpose beyond yourself, both on an intellectual level and on a spiritual level.
This is only partially correct, women make a lower value of claims than men, but they also do a lot less miles on average. When adjusted for the mileage difference men are much safer per mile. It a classic example of lies, damed lies and statistics.
Now there's some female math....
You consider the women who are able to pursue advanced technical degrees in American institutions representative of how women are doing world wide. Nice.
I think the most telling aspect of this controversy is that when it suits women, they do claim sex differences, like custody, more caring, more intuitive, better nurturers, better listeners, less confrontational, etc. and all men are sexist, aggressive rapists, etc.
Yes very rational.
The noun is breed the verb is bred. /me hides
I once heard that although men and women are roughly as intelligent as one another on average, the ditribution of intelligence is wider for men. As such there are more genius men than women, and more neanderthal men than women. As such men are both 'smarter', and 'stupider' than women at the same time! Of course this could be a crock, but I found it an interesting idea...
I wonder if anyone has done any research into whether men pretending to be women are worse at maths than men?
The Boston Globe coverage is much more detailed.
l es/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/artic
I went to a talk at Google for Women, where a visiting engineer from MIT told us the trick to keeping family life is to outsource the other stuff. Ah ha, that's what's going to happen to my laundry and house cleaning.
No one, man nor woman can maintain a sane life doing 80 hrs a week without having some of the little stuff done by someone else.
Just look at my bank account anytime my wife was "shopping".
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
She is sitting next to me now and thinks that she is very good at math. She goes to a special math class because she is so smart. It keeps her very challenged ... and she even needs more challenges after that.
... she did (third person).
... from 8th grade through grad school.
Note, I didn't type that
I only say this because I was told I wasn't good at math and that's exactly when I fell from A's in math (albeit 90.01% kind of stuff) to C's
So, at times I wonder if we just make these statements and that is a bit self fufilling?
About 50 academics from across the nation, many of them economists, participated in the conference, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.
I recognize that nobody signed an NDA to go to the conference, but it seems unfair to me to leak word of what happened in a forum whose intent was to be free from "public misunderstanding" and whose very design precludes Summers being able to defend himself.
Next, Summers went on to discuss the various hypotheses:
The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.
Sounds reasonable to me. But the response he got wasn't:
Dr. Hopkins said, "I didn't disagree, but didn't like the way he presented that point because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a lot of women who work that hard."
In other words, what Summers said was *completely correct*, *not bigoted*, *agreed upon by his critic*, and STILL she was offended. I simply don't see what there was to not like about this point. This passage pretty much shows you what sort of mindset Summers is up against.
Next, Summers discussed another potential theory:
In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.
Possible... he's not suggesting it's necessarily true, only potentially true. Perhaps it needs more research? Not mentioned in the NYT article was the fact that Summers said that he hoped he would be found wrong on this hypothesis, or that another alternative (which he discounted) was discrimination.
To summarize: Summers delivered a speech on a problematic yet touchy subject in a conference designed to allow people to speak freely on touchy subjects. He then got burned by someone who wasn't really interested in understanding the nuances of what he had to say but instead immidiately assumed he was a bigot. He's trying to find the answer to a question that has no obvious answer: either it's discrimination (discounted), women don't want academic success as badly (reasonable), or women just aren't the math-science types (a bit out there but not insane).
That's not to say that my university's president is a great guy, but these accusations that he seems women as genetically inferior are absurd.
Women can say men are useless at multitasking, but men can't say women are bad at Math.
Both sexes have different pro's and con's. We can drink more alcohol and tend to be physically stronger.
He _may_ have a point, perhaps it needs to be studied. I once heard that while mens brains are bigger womens brains have more communication are between the two lobes. I would have actually thought that a structure like womens might mean that they are better at identifying patterns (science) but worse are raw calculation (maths).
I think humans are creatures not of great intellect, but great stored knowledge (books etc), and by ourselves would still be hairless apes. I'm 100% sure that the success of an individual in a specific field has much more to do with determination/study of that individual than what sex they are, although i would not say that a bias of the sexes would not be visible, maybe as a very small percentage take from a massive sample.
So when does he get fired and replaced by a chick? Just curious.
[o]_O
I'd go farther. The political reaction to this is largely driven by inummeracy (see my letter to the BBC on this story). Saying that men on average are better at science and math says nearly zero about whether a particular individual is good at science and math.
That said, the studies he refers to (IIRC) are about differences in achievement between high school males and females. That kind of data is mere correlation; we can correlate sex to achievement but can't say to any degree what particular aspect of maleness or femaleness contributes to the difference. The situation is so fulll of confounding factors, it's rather presumptuous to say we have any idea how much of that is due to genetic differences, or whether genetic differences are involved at all.
Now, to my mind, it would be highly surprising in my opinion if there weren't genetic differences between male and female minds. However, I don't think anybody is close to knowing in any quantifiable way how any specific genetic feature, such as protein variations or hormone levels, correlates to something as complex and ill defined as scientific acheivement. Parsing out the genetic contribution to scientific achievement has to await some fundamental scientific advances, I think.
In the meantime, there are clear social differences between the sexes that drive achievement in professional academic achievement. For example, Dr. Summers notes the difference in commitment of women and men to child rearing. There are practices that bear on this that have no discriminatory intent either latent or manifest, but simply differentially affect women because of their presumaby statistically higher commitment to child rearing. Reducing the well know burden of pointless committee work that academics are expected to perform would help everyone, but differentially help women, without introducing anything like quotas.
The ultimate question is whether the institution he leads actually wants to do something about this, or wants to badly enough.
That said, the reaction to this is overblown. Dr. Summers unwisely and perhaps even arrogantly tread on an explosive subject in a way that would be more appropriate to a private cocktail party of dinner conversation than an address. However, political foolhardiness doesn't excuse the overheated reaction, which clearly is distorting what he said.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'll accept for a moment that statistically, women are worse at math then men.
It doesn't matter. General population statistics tell us very little (if nothing) when it comes to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of any individual. I'll make a ludicrously simplified example to show my point. Take a ten sided die. Roll it once. What's the probability any particular number will come up? 1/10, 10%. Easy. Does this tell you what number actually comes up? No. The only way to know is actually look and see what happened.
The same thing is true here. While statistically women may be worse at math then men, this does not tell you whether a specific women will be bad at math. You can know the likelihoods, but you don't know where she falls until you look at her actual performance. Hence, as many other posters have pointed out, the danger in drawing too much meaning from these statistical trends.
It's indisputable differences have been identified in the way male and female brains work. What has not been well identified is how this translations into actual, high order skills. To quote the perl maxim, There's More Than One Way To Do It. Women may have a different approach to certain tasks (say solving a differential equation) than men, but this does not speak to whether or not the women's approach is inferior, per se. Any scientist worth their salt will tell you we still have a long way to go studying what all these differences we've identified actually mean. Any claim that inate biological differences between the sexes map perfectly to perceived cultural differences should be treated as highly dubius. They may, but I'm willing to wager there's a much more complicated interaction between biology and environment going on here.
While I agree with the value of working hard and being thick-skinned, I must assert that succeeding in a technical field does not require doing anything "like a man." It's an obsolete figure of speech. Hard work and perserverence are not inherently masculine traits.
I have heard it said that a woman selected it random will usually be closer to the average than a man selected at random, in either direction. Women are Mother Nature's safe bet, men are the crap shoot. It troubles me that so often feminists quote the 70% pay figure, but that it was difficult to procure a statistic of the number of men in prison compared to women (1,368,866 men, 101,179 women in 2003; that's an order of magnitude more men). It doesn't look to me that there is any interest in closing the latter gap.
I had a point to this post to begin with, but I think I've said what I've wanted to say, that the deviation in women is smaller than in men, for good or ill.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
.... that is not correct my first reaction is "you can't say that".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I can't say I hate to be the one to inform you of this. But irrespective of your sex, your math is quintessentially female.
:(
Some guys run like a girl, some guys throw like a girl, some even pee like a girl, you solve word problems like one.
There's really nothing wrong with any of that, except the answer....
Any human that would let an erect penis anywhere near them must be on a completely different plane of existence to me - or indeed in prison. Yes siree, this one simple fact proves our brains are wired so completely differently.
during or between menstruation?
Is that you? You're gonna WISH you had just shut up when you get home. You can sleep on the couch again tonight!
Marge, is that you? It's me, Kermit. I'm staying with my mistress tonight -- don't wait up.
-kgj
Who modded this up as insightful? Read this, ya creationist clown...
The ever insightful Rei
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
I cannot believe my eyes! "Pompous" is right! Last semester at Mt. San Antonio College I took a course titled "Psychology of Women." Some wonder why there is a course so specific, initially considering it to be sexist, without realizing that many studies that have contributed to today's psychology theories have been done with groups consisting of white males. Having taken this course I learned a few interesting things, one being about a few groups of women that took a math test. The control group was not reminded of their sex while other groups of women were reminded of A) their gender or B) ethnic background. Finding: women not reminded of either attribute (gender or background) did better than the women that had been reminded; women reminded of their gender or race did worse! I'm simply astounded at this moment, that people are so ignorant.
See pics of me at http://photos.yahoo.com/chiromyu and get to know me at http://www.livejournal.com/users/sweet__kitty
And one of the problems with the reports of the research (esp in the popular press) is that nobody quotes the full statistics. With a bare mean you have no idea how wide the range is and how much overlap there actually is between two populations being compared. Until you see that, you can argue means, you can argue exceptions, but you don't have a clue how real the difference is.
I believe that there was a study done at some point that showed women chose careers based on more practical reasons. Math and science are comparitively difficult and offer less pay and satisfaction than say, accounting or nursing. H-1B and oustsourcing have only made things worse. Women are smarter than that. The last 2 times a coworker became pregant, she was fired soon after. Working 20+ hour in unpaid overtime every week doesn't make it easy to raise a family. It's terrible how abusive companies have become.
I'd wonder if someone wants to bash the poor man's reputation. Did someone who has a grudge against him or who wants his job say, "Look what a shameful thing this mysogynist said! Shame, shame, shame!"
I beg to differ. Next time, troll on a topic you might actually be somewhat competent in.
I believe in Evolution, and I believe it can go fuck itself. A dumb physical process has absolutely no business interfering with my free will.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
If someone came out and said "MEN are naturally not good at nursing, that's why a large percentage of nurses are female." Women would not be up in arms. They'd be saying "damn straight!"
:-P
Not necessarily the case. In fact, the whole idea that men are not good at nursing is (naturally) just so much rubbish. At least in the UK, the Royal College of Nursing is trying very hard to get as many men as possible into that profession, for the very obvious reason that they're good at the job.
I'd be surprised if you can find all that many female nurses (or physios, or carers...) who come up with 'Men can't nurse' style comments, though I'm sure that it's a popular opinion amongst those who have no involvement in the health service, for the unfortunate reason that they're working from an outdated stereotype.
So there you go; no double standard involved. The Royal College of Nursing is entirely on your side about male nurses
The ultimate proof females are bad at math: Look how many have posted (1500 and counting), while not realizing no one would ever read the posts there are so many.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
on average women are slighty worse @ math than men, conversely women are slightly better than men @ multitasking blah blah etc...
in the end, it ALWAYS comes down to the individual. Studies like this just serve the weak and stupid who feel the desperate need to categorize people with static boundaries.
People have had studies saying women tend to have better communication skills for decades, and that doesn't seem to cause any controversy. Most studies have also shown that men (and cab drivers) tend to have better spatial skills - but, unless you're talking about cab drivers, people tend to get a little angry about the last one.
My point:
1) You do indeed have to use the odd broad brush stroke to paint a picture. This doesn't mean that the picture's always the same flat color. There will be men with exceptional communication skills and women with exception logic/math skills.
2) Sorry Roseanne Bernstein, this doesn't mean its unreasonable to use the results of such surveys (provided you trust the sources), or your own experience, to relate to people.
This is not year zero. It makes sense to use your experience to relate to people. People who call that sexist or racist have no true experience of sexism or racism.
Amongst all the study-toting scienceniks here, I am amazed that no one has brought up the social construction of gender. Even if your studies show a difference between men and women, how can you prove that the difference is innate, and not a result of societal conditioning? Except for very rudimentary abilities (e.g. visual perception), you can't.
Social Constructionism
The sociological method of social constructionism is to look at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Their focus is on the description of the institutions, the actions, and so on, not on analyzing causes and effects. Socially constructed reality is seen as an on-going dynamic process; reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretation and their knowledge of it.
I was going to comment on this as well, then saw someone else had done so already. While it is pedantic, it is also fair. In your great-grandparent post every use of the word gender would have been 'better' (more precise) as sex. I don't begrudge you though, as I'm sure you don't have a degree in Anthropology. (Otherwise you would have admitted your mistake immediately and issued your mea culpa. :-)
:-)
I guess the point that is trying to be made is this: If you are talking about genetics, you have to talk about sex, because gender isn't genetic, despite your (fallacious) argument by generalization.
I apologize in advance if I don't catch any replies to this post.
http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/asitgets.txt
ZOE: How do you write women so well?
MELVIN: (as he turns toward her)
I think of a man and take away
reason and accountability.
pleate note this is not necessarily my personal view
I think that Summers is trying to make excuses for being a bigot. Girls are continually made to feel alienated, lonely, peer-less, like they are 'objects to be stared at' in male-centric departments. THIS has MUCH more of an impact than any genetic differences.
:p ). The mix is now ~110 girls : 60-70 guys. and it is *GLORIOUS*. the top students are equally gender mixed.
It's easier for him to say "there is something *wrong* or *different*" than to risk someone noticing that there is something wrong with his attitude.
I'm a male "perpetual student" in W.Australia.
which campus/how does you department go about getting female enrollments?
I would say that a mixed-gender class is *ESSENTIAL* if you want to be any better than a "mediocre, white-male student".
Post your uni name and I'll know where to go if I decide to go for post-grad (if/when I get back into that field).
When I did engineering there were only a handful of girls, my Physics/chem/maths undergrad had maybe 4 girls : 38 guys in physics, 50/50 in chem and maybe 1/4 in maths.
The physics department got labeled as "little boys creche". mostly because of the level of immaturity of the students. the attitude of the department didn't help.
Without exception, a good mix of girls improved performance (you could spot the classes/tutorials/labs that didn't have girls). frankly, the girls I've studied with out-performed the guys in maths and *ALSO* physics (plus, ex-g/f who would routinely kick my ass in any of my fields except chem/languages.. couldn't even pretend to keep up with her fields of study).
having female colleagues stopped the guys being sloppy in their work (aka. lazy) & improved their attitude, in my current course you can spot the guys who have female study-budies to work with.
I'm now studying medicine (as if 5+ years of hard-science +field work wasn't bad enough
before anyone says "yeah, medicine is a different type of logic... you can't compare them.." *YOU* go do Electronic Engineering (+ work + good dose of programming/CS/IT), Physics/Chem + Maths, THEN Medicine/Surgery.. then come back and tell me what to think. yes, it has differences, but I still think that much of the performance is due to the support that the students receive. provided with the correct encouragement and support..
I think there needs to be a 'mind-shift' in the many physics departments. sure, girls are wired differently to guys. BUT that shouldn't be used to excuse the discrimination that occurs. Male-centric common-rooms, a lack of female mentors and role-models. Most of the 'social events' can be described only as "boys-nights". Frankly, the attitude of my old department was DISGUSTING..
they were "trying to get more girls into the field", but frankly, there were more girls in the honours class than in my 1st year class, when I first enrolled.
Mixed gender classes are an advantage to all students, and frankly a *LOT* of girls can kick the boys asses when it comes to maths/physics.
Thank you for some fine posts Sire.
Allowing equalizations of this sort to permiate through society will only encourage excess consumption and environmental stress.
Does it go on forever?
Well, you were the one claiming to be pissed that she couldn't do pullups. Well, now she has the means to do so! That is quite different from saying "women never/shouldn't/aren't-able-to do pullups/math" vs. "they can" or at least "can try".
Encouragement is good. But a one-handed pull up may always be beyond her. Human females are, by their nature, have at least a small disadvantage here.
Sort of like humans in general have a huge disadvantage in this kind of contest when compared to a chimpanzee, or any other kind of brachiating ape. They're built for it, we're not.
Sometimes it's better not to measure your success against your own capabilities, rather than those of someone who has a natural advantage.
I think it's important to note that these kinds of studies aren't saying that all men or women are better at a particular thing, rather it is saying that on the average men or women are better in the particular area. It's certainly not a rule as I'm sure there are women who are much better at certain things than most men and vice versa. It's a game averages, so pointing to a single case where a woman or man is extremely good at the activity in question doesn't invalidate the studie.
Moderators: Please note that "bonch" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft shilling. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, bonch is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.
/. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than bonch. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider bonch and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Windows or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a
For example, in this recent post bonch not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "MS". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +0) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, bonch wants to be Bill Gates, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?
FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed yet? Don't forget that KDE and Gnome make you dumb, and it's all a Slashdot conspiracy. How low do you want to go? Maybe as low as this?
The infamous Slashdot Front Page Troll? Nuclear fireballs? It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on (troll?). Like the energizer bunny. Or take these two, which stretch the definition of weird.
It's up to you. We can get rid of this guy and make Slashdot a better place. I don't know about you, but I'd rather take the trolls and crapflooders over people like "bonch" any day. And I sure as hell don't want to be categorized along with him. This is not how you advocate free software, period.
Hi twitter
Le français vous intéresse?
I agree - science rules.
So I'll take the chance to dispel some feminist feel-good myths.
1) Women do not have a higher threshold/tolerance for pain.
2) Women do not have better physical endurance than men.
3) Women and men multitask equally well.
The evidence can be easily found in hundreds of replicated studies on Ovid/PubMed.
Feel free to correct a woman any time she starts to joke about men having a "one track mind", "inability to do two things at once", or "collapsing in bed with a cold, while the women with colds still manage to do a thousand things at once without complaining".
What's that? You only want to point out flaws with men's reasoning? Oh... I see.
I suggest reading Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. It was written by an African American academician and explores the disparities between blacks and whites/asians. His conclusions differ from the Bells Curve theory but are equally, if not more, persuading.
I feel everyone is missing the point:
;)
Due to persistant environmental differences from society for men and women, of course they will develop differently. Kids grow up and what is their brain? The relation between every perceived event to every other. Female kids will receive different events than male kids. A true blind study of this phenomena is impossible though for the ethics.
I've got a good feeling that women are every bit as competant as men are.
You're just hanging out with the wrong girls
And my point is just because it is true, doesn't mean that the president of Harvard needs to say it. The trouble is that it causes an unfair bias, and makes women feel less welcome.
I haven't once said that it's not true. I have said that almost certaintly the reason that there are less females in science is due to more issues than biological (from the way they are raised, to having female role models).
This isn't about some paper that a scientist has published. I don't know why you keep twisting the facts. It's nothing to do with shutting a paper a vault or anything even close to analogous. It's about the president of Harvard being a bit more responsible.
Btw, as to being unfair, this is what 'positive discrimination' is. The reason is to get more women/black/some_other_under_represented_group in power. This makes it easier afterwards to be fair since you then have role models and a more equal (trodden) path.
Without being 'unfair' at the start, it is harder to judge the reasons why there are less women.
Why do you think Harvard went from the tenure being offered to 34% of women when the current president of harvard joined, to just 18% (iirc)? Biological reasons?
what does time have to do with anything
If you're engaged in a conflict with someone or something... it's very easy to get carried away. If you feel like you're in the mood where you'll say something stupid, unproductive, mean or just something you'll regret, then you just need a little perspective before you open your mouth.
In 500 years, no-one will care about argument you had with someone. That's an easy place to start.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Counselor: I couldn't help but notice that you have signed up for 6 AP courses.
Wife: Yes.
Counselor: You need to take fewer AP courses.
Wife: Excuse me?
Counselor: Only our very top students take that many AP courses.
Wife: Have you looked at my class rank?
[Counselor actually looks at her transcript this time, and sees a class rank of "1"]
Counselor: Oh.
Wife: Do you have any further excellent suggestions regarding my education, or may I leave now?
My point being that people who are smart do not listen to stupid suggestions like that. They do what they know is right and don't let ignorant folk stand in the way.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I am pissed because she climbs better then I do, while not beeing even able to do a pull up.
No, discouragement is not the issue. Imagine that nobody told women that they can not run as fast, or hit as hard. So there are no women leagues or separate competitions. That would be discouraging.
I new quite a few female scientists - they were quite aware of the facts beeing discussed (cause they were much smarter then those moaning bitches who are upset with the story). They were not discouraged at all.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Great! Now I'm a "moaning bitch"! How about next time you see one of your female scientist friends, try asking them if they can truly say they've never run into any subtle or overt discouragement in the science world.
/that/ bad, granted. But apparently it gets worse later on, whee! (Try tenure fights!)
Except for Harvard presidents, much of it is subtle. (Some is logistics: the tenure vs. children problem.) And a lot of it takes place early on in high school or before. You get to deal with different shit in college. Its not
Wow, if that isn't flamebait, I don't know what is.
Oh, he can say it, he'd just be very careful how. The fact that he's refusing to release transcripts of what he actually did say makes me rather disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Heh, I'm even less charitable towards him after seeing the Harvard tenure stats. (Anyone care to provide a cite?) I figure tenure granting is more subjective in the humanities.
In fact, one of those women would be my mother, who is a Professor in a top university. Or my office mate, who is a Ph.D. in Physics. A quite good looking I should say.
They are not discouraged - they know what is the science behind those statements. It is a simple cold fact - repeat after me: women are not as proficient in many kinds of abstract thinking. Just like males are not proficient in any other kind thinking.
What part of that beeing a valid statistic and a fact of human psychoogy do not you understand?
Tenure? Males can not get tenure just as well. Do you know how they feel when some underqualified arrogant lady gets ahead of them using some "quotas" and political pressure? It does happen. That is as big part of the problem as "discouragement".
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Correction of unfair reverse discrimination that lead to promotion of underqulaified female applicant that occured in the past?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
"Let's go shopping!"
When I was in school (one of the top ten computer science schools in the country), there were all kinds of affirmative action programs that resulted in the standards being astonishingly lower for admitting women. What would you estimate the ratios to be for the people who meet the male levels of admission?
Still...a lot of women get bored very quickly whenever math or computer science become the topic of conversation. They're just not into it or our culture has taught them not to be interested in it. It's not that they can't do it.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
First: To publish a study of this nature without seriously taken the cultural influence into the calculations I find it a very naive action.
Second: What possible reason is there to publish this kind of study at all? To keep the woman from even trying to succeed in the science-world? Or to enlargen your own fat penis?
Third: This is the 21 century allredy. Seriously. Get over the sex-things. NOW. Do it. It's completly outrageous that someone is allowed to publish these studies based on a single point of view. I would have thought more from someone from harvard. (Fucking idiots)
the average person is bad at math. are you insulted?
I'd love to see your cites for this.
And cites on quotas actually existing and being used to deny a male tenure. I have a hard time believing either.
You haven't been keeping up with gender studies.
Porn is now feminist.
I never saw any quotas for tenure-granting in the hard sciences at my school. After all, there's only so many women out there to hire in the first place! Its a little hard to have "quotas" when you have such a small sample size. It was more like "token".
Unless it was a 1.5% quota! I can't see anyone complaining about that. Especially not some guy who can barely write English.
Suppose that women were/are dominated physically, politically, socially, economically and every which way.. and that is the reason why they dont have numbers in the relevant areas of (hard) science and math. Lets look at some males: 1) Jim Gates: Black and was afraid to apply to MIT for fear of rejection - and in 1969 there was a lot of racism.. but .. somehow he did ok .. he got into "the relevant areas" see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bpgat e.html
2) Stephen Hawking "They predicted he would die within two years. " It would be easy to beat him up... But through it all and without the aid of his body to write down mathematical calculations he still ... sort of...perservered... into "the relevant areas" see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/spaceguide/hawk ing/index.shtml
3) John Nash - A person of severe mental challenges ... yet he managed to make some non-trivial contributions to the mathematical community.. sort. of.. into "the relevant areas" see: http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1994/nas h-autobio.html
These examples show perserverence and how they got into "the relevant areas of (hard) science and mathematics"
In conclusion I think that hard work is how women or any body else for that matter CAN get into "the relevant areas of (hard) science and mathematics."
If a woman were to post a solution to "Fermat's Last Theorem" like say Wiles did .. then .. well... the mathematical community WOULD HAVE TO LET THEM TEACH AT HARVARD OR YALE OR WHATEVER..
FOR HOW COULD YOU HIDE SUCH AN ACHIEVEMENT?
SpawnClown.. see you online in SOCOM2