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The Myth of the Mathematics Gender Gap
Coryoth writes "The widely held belief that there is disparity in the innate mathematical abilities of men and women has been steadily whittled down in recent years. The gender gap in basic mathematics skills closed some time ago, and recently the gap in high school mathematics has closed up as well, with as many girls as boys now taking high school calculus. Newsweek reports on a new study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that begins to lay to rest the remaining argument that it is at the highest levels of mathematics that the innate differences show. Certainly men dominate current academia, with 70% of mathematics Ph.D.s going to men; however that figure is down from 95% in the 1950s. Indeed, while there remain gaps in achievement between the genders, the study shows that not only are these gaps closing, but the size of the gap varies over differing cultures and correlates with the general degree of gender inequality in the culture (as defined by World Economic Forum measures). In all, this amounts to strong evidence that the differences in outcomes in mathematics between the genders is driven by sociocultural factors rather than innate differences in ability."
Certainly men dominate current academia, with 70% of mathematics Ph.D.s going to men; however that figure is down from 95% in the 1950s. Indeed, while there remain gaps in achievement between the genders, the study shows that not only are these gaps closing, but the size of the gap varies over differing cultures and correlates with the general degree of gender inequality in the culture (as defined by World Economic Forum measures).
Of course, the study was done by a team of female mathematicians/statisticians, so we really can't trust the results.
I'm kidding, don't flame me.
How about showcasing the widening gender gap in BA/BS degrees in Western culture? Women are earning more degrees almost across the board, and yet there is almost no measures being taken to call attention to that disparity.
How about we close that gap in CS now.
Im so lonely :(
...as many girls as boys now taking high school calculus
My problem is the number of **attractive** girls taking my class. There are girls, and then there are girls.
The only correlation between math and sex that I can see: I don't get either of them
In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination. And every single time, as the residual sexism fades, the third claim is shown to be false as well. Business, politics, medicine: it's a familiar pattern. Now math is next on the list.
In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.
Men and women are different, yadda yadda. Yes, they are, and they may be even be different in ways that affect performance at certain jobs. But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe. The difference in means between the sexes, or any other groups into which people can conveniently be divided, is far smaller than the variances between individuals.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Really, I thought it was that Science is so watered down now, that it no longer really interests anyone...
Science should be exciting, and excitement attracts young men.
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I don't really care whether there is a gap or not, but I am a stickler for accuracy. Taking the course is not the same thing as passing or excelling. It's an important metric, but not the only one. Perhaps we have a "traditionally disadvantaged" group being pushed, in the name of equality, into an area they dislike because it doesn't come natural, and they're barely passing. That's not success - that's a failure because these people probably would be more successful in life playing to their strengths rather than weaknesses.
I'm not saying that's the case. But it's a plausible explanation for the results in TFS, while not dismissing the myth, I'd say they have to do more work and study to proclaim this myth busted.
Obligatory XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/385/
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Does it really matter? There are countless abilities that differ between the two genders...
and between left and right handed people
and those with black or red hair
and those with blue eyes
or darker skin...
The list goes on, what of it?
Barbie said that "Math class is tough!" (often misquoted as "math is hard.")
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/21/business/company-news-mattel-says-it-erred-teen-talk-barbie-turns-silent-on-math.html
It's funny how these inaccurate stereotypes find their way into the stranges places.
We have a statistic, 70% of PhDs in Mathematics go to men and up to 30% go to women.
But does this tell us anything about the abilities of both men and women to compete at that level? It might, but it also could be social. Boys are from a very young age encouraged in Maths, Engineering, and Sciences while a lot of girls are encouraged to embrace their social and emotional sides.
If you look at a Psychology, Social Science, or English they have an extremely disproportional amount of women in them. Just as Maths, and Science often has a disproportionate amount of men.
PS - Too few women in Maths/Engineering is "broken." Too few men in Social Science/Child Care/Psychology is "fine."
So does this mean that it's hereby not only politically correct to say that females have better verbal abilities than males, but now also higher overall aptitude too?
(not meant to necessarily have any correlation with reality)
People seem to assume that what is happening is that previously, cultural norms dictated gender inequality when there was no biological basis, and now that those norms have changed, biological equality is restored. Couldn't it be the other way around? I.e. that there is a biological inequality, that is being altered by cultural factors to produce equality?
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I was a sports broadcasting and psychology double major in my undergraduate studies. When I was taking sports broadcasting classes it was a total sausage fest. Thirty guys talking about sports in an academic environment as if it was a locker room. Meanwhile in psychology it was always majority female in classrooms ranging from 60% to 90%. It was because sports writing and reporting is a male dominated field, whereas psychology was a necessary field of study for many female students who wanted to teach elementary or middle school, a field traditionally occupied by women. Also my school was 60% female so a typical class would have 60% women which really emphasized how incredibly one sided sports broadcasting was a major regarding gender divide.
While men and women solve problems differently, our brains are made up differently so that is to be expected, most studies conclude that even though we solve problems differently men and women reach the same conclusions eventually but they take different paths. Both genders are equally smart but think differently to solve the same problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences
In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination.
. . . so which one applies to pissing contests?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In most fields with a gender disparity in either direction, the minority sex is generally, under any reasonable attempt to measure inherent "ability", just as able to do it. The real gaps seem to be in interest: fewer men than women wish to enter psychology as a field, and fewer women than men wish to enter mathematics as a field, to take two examples. Why is that? It's not entirely clear, but it starts pretty early. For example, boys are much more likely than girls to play ad-hoc games that involve numbers and math, even at ages where girls tend to do better in school. Boys are also much more likely to build electronics or program computers as a hobby. Probably much of this is cultural, but that's where the real disparity lies, and you're never going to get parity unless you figure out how to change interest.
On the other hand, changing interest is always tricky, because you run the risk of trying to tell people they ought to be interested in something they really don't seem to be interested in.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
By the time you are 20, your brain has gone through several "windows of opportunity" which are the best time to learn specific skills. For example, the window of opportunity for foreign languages for most people is in preschool.
If a given culture discourages certain members from learning certain skills until after the window closes, these individuals are now stuck with what might as well be an innate disadvantage in that area.
For these individuals, it's not important whether they could have been good at this or that if only they had taken classes when they were younger, the important thing is that if they do try to learn it, it will be relatively hard for them.
Plus, there's the whole issue of experience, someone who starts learning a skill at age 5 will have a 15-year head start on someone who starts learning a skill at age 20.
--
As societies, we need to accept the fact that there are very few if any things beyond giving birth or being a wet-nurse that either gender has an inherent advantage in if both are given equal opportunity and encouragement when they are young. All or almost all "gender-specific" advantages are created by the environment in which we live.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is an extremely dishonest story which does not address the most basic issues involved.
What Summers said at Harvard is supported by the evidence and remains the best explanation
for the "gender gap." Indeed, he felt confident that he could "get away" with his statements
because the evidence is so overwhelming and the facts so obvious.
Consider any number of physical traits the measurement of which is not controversial
(for instance, height, weight, ratio of arm length to leg length, etc.) A few empirical observations
can be readily made:
(1) the distributions are roughly Gaussian --- this make sense as these traits are controlled
by multiple genes and some version of the central limit theorem is operational
(2) the means vary by gender and ethnicity
(3) the standard deviations vary by gender and ethnicity
(4) a pattern quickly emerges: for virtually all traits the STANDARD DEVIATION
of the male distributions is somewhat larger than the female distribution --- although
not by much. Again this makes some intuitive sense --- men are biological more expendable
then women so more variation in male traits can be tolerated.
I can hardly be expected to believe that physical traits (the measurement of which is generally
not controversial) are unique in having property (4). Especially when the observable
data available for mental traits exhibits a difference in standard deviation.
This difference in standard deviation predicts what we see in practice --- if we set
a high threshold and look at the number of men and women with ability above
that threshold we expect the ratio of men to women to be large. Because this
is an effect of differences in standard deviation, it is not observable near the
middle of the distribution --- only at the tails.
There are many many articles which conclude that there is no gender gap
in mathematical ability because the mean of the male and female distributions
are the same or similar. I am not familiar with every such article,
but every one I have read --- including the two famous Science articles ---
presents observational data showing a difference in STANDARD DEVIATION.
An issue none of them seem to address.
Incidentally, any one familiar with the error function can easily
see that the variations in the ratio of men to women whose
mathematical ability exceeds a given threshold by ethnicity are
also predicated by this approach (to startlingly high accuracy --
do the math!) This again follows simply from the fact that
the mean and standard deviation of biological characteristics
vary by ethnicity
Everything I have said can be verified to a ridiculously high level of
certainty by someone with basic knowledge of Stat 101 and a copy
of Excel.
To say that there's no gap means that whatever statistic is being used for comparison, it has the exact same value for the population of men as it does for the population of women.
The likelihood of that being true is essentially zilch.
The real questions should be: (a) how big is the gap, and (b) is it big enough for us to care.
I think men are just getting less intelligent and they think differently than they used to. You see, in the 200+ year history of our country, we've sent our strongest, mentally stable and most intelligent men to die in wars and left the weaker and less intelligent and mentally unstable at home to breed. Through unnatural selection, we've thinned our own gene pool. The male gender has become more effeminate and now it seems they think like women instead of men. It's not the women who are getting smarter, it is us men are are getting dumber.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Why oh why would you ever want to change interests? That's my whole problem with this debate whenever it comes up.
The real "solution" to this "problem" is to allow boys and girls to go into whatever field they so choose and encourage them no matter what.
There is a branch of Applied Science where discrimination and outdated sexist attitudes still rule. The gender balance there is so heinously skewed that no other explanation is possible. There are those that suggest that perhaps persons of the under-represented gender simply aren't interested in this profession, or perhaps they lack the skills to do well, but clearly they are just making excuses for the sexist bigots that still dominate this field. I'm talking, of course, about the School of Nursing, where only 5% of the graduates are men.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Science should be exciting, and excitement attracts young men.
Nope, ease and money attracts young men in American culture now. Math is neither easy nor high-paying. So young men go into things like sports and multi-level marketing instead.
excitement attracts young men.
Whereas women revel in repetition and boredom?
Give me a break. Some people get excited about science. Most do not. This is true of men and women.
I'm still amazed that you can CHOOSE to opt out of high school calculus. I live in the US now and I know some youngsters that chose to minimize mathematics in their school schedule and then they wonder why they are stuck at pre-calc in 10th grade. Where I went to school in Europe, the girls or anyone didn't really have the choice. It was 8 hours of mathematics a week portioned between statistics (1h), geometry (1h), calculus (3h) and algebra (2h) and sometimes statistics was interchanged with small episodes of chaos theory or applied mathematics or whatever was necessary for a particular group.
I believe that the US schooling system needs a complete overhaul in order to create a better knowledge economy. First thing to do is add at least 1h per day to the school day. I see most kids get home at 2 or 3 in the afternoon even if they have to travel 2 hours because they're in an intercity exchange program. I remember being at school until at least 4pm and then you had to do homework and study for the next day too and if you were going to a specific specialty (eg. art, electronics, sports), traveling could also take 1 or 2 hours. The second thing to do is reduce sports activities during school hours to a maximum of 4 hours per week and fill those voids with science, mathematics and art. And for all those living in rural areas it would be interesting to expand electronic schooling so they only have to go to physical building two or three times a week (hybrid of home schooling and standard schooling). Those times should be devoted to a short overview, lab time and testing to make sure nobody is slacking at home.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
These days, white straight males don't like math much, either.
I think its too simplistic to put men and women on a continuum and talk about which is 'better' than the other. In my experience teaching math to men and women, they are approximately equal in skill overall. However, on the average they excelled in different ways. Women often organized their thoughts more clearly, while men seemed to get farther kludging their way through things. And at the very high end of the distribution, its not obvious what the differences would be.
In any case, there are obviously very intelligent mathematicians of both genders at the high end, so there needn't be any debate about that.
If fewer women become mathematicians than men, maybe women are just smarter about their career choices. Its not like there are a ton of non-academic jobs out there for people with math degrees.
it's just that men are getting dumber. We have lower enrollments in college. We tend to sit around and watch TV/play video games more than women do. Just a thought.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The article is confused about where most of the real differences are purported to be.
No one credible claims that females have less ability to learn mathematics or crunch numbers in most cases, which is what this article is contesting. In other words, they built themselves a strawman. The differences involve application, not learning.
What *is* credibly claimed, in the sense that there is not insignificant quantities of direct and indirect evidence in literature, is that females are markedly poorer at certain classes of applied mathematical problems, notably applications involving complex, high-dimensionality metric spaces. Females understand the mathematics just fine, they have relative difficulty applying it to real-world problems when system complexity exceeds a certain threshold. This is largely attributed to male brains having more neurons dedicated to conceptualizing and manipulating spatial relationships.
There are real differences, but it is mostly in specific areas of the applied side and there is a relatively straightforward causal theory related to brain structure. That people feel it necessary to repeatedly trot out the strawman that women have less ability to learn math while conveniently ignoring supportable arguments for differences in practical ability reeks of a political agenda. There are other biases in application spaces strongly favoring females that also have straightforward causal links related to differences in brain structure but which say nothing about the ability of males to learn.
Women tend to gravitate towards fields which there is a degree of socializing, such as education, medicine (Regular and veterinary), and communications.
Men tend to gravitate towards either exciting fields, or fields which they feel will be financial rewarding.
This is statistically backed up. This is well understood. This does not mean there are no counterexamples. There is a definite difference between the genders, and I don't understand why people feel we should artificially shoehorn people into career paths they don't want, in order to achieve 'balance'. What's equally baffling is that, despite Females in Veterinary College outnumbering males by 4 to 1 (!), nobody seems to be decrying that we need more males in that field...
Let people choose what they want to do. Stop trying to 'fix' it.
This story was used in the A-level general studies paper (Edexel, I believe?)
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Who cares about gender differences? Just encourage every kid to find what they want to do and do it. It's certainly possible that men are better than women at certain things, and vice versa, but it's equally true and more important that individual differences are more significant than group differences. For all I know, women in general aren't as good at algebraic topology as men are, but that doesn't mean women shouldn't be algebraic topologists, or that when constructing a team that needs an algebraic topologist we should make sure we get a man.
In the meantime, gender imbalances are evidence, although hardly conclusive, that there's some stereotyping going on. If there's stereotyping going on, some people are being discouraged from doing what they should be doing, just because they've got the wrong number of Y chromosomes.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
When it comes to mathematical and scientific ability, I really don't care about someone's genitals. Stop checking. If a woman shows ability there should be no additional road blocks compared to a man who shows ability. There should be no affirmative action either.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.
I still have an open mind on the subject. Does that make me a bigot and a twit?
But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe.
I find the gender gap in mathematics interesting. While I would like to know why there is a gender gap, I really don't have any personal stake in the reason for the gender gap. Is it inate? Is it social? Is is a combination? All of those would be interesting results.
I have no desire to shut women out of lucritive jobs in science and engineering. However, I don't think that we are suffering from a shortage of scientists and engineers, and further more I think that these fields are wide open to anyone (man or woman) that is interested. And yet there is still a gender gap. Is this something that really needs fixing?
There are more girls taking it, or just fewer boys?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Let people choose what they want to do. Stop trying to 'fix' it.
But we need more female nerds! Who else can we possibly relate to?
I'd say that's inaccurate, too. It would be more accurate to say that the top end of all women can't reach the level of raw strength as that of the top end of all men. There are many women who are stronger and faster than a number of men.
Completely accurate but incomplete. Men on average have significantly higher upper body strength than women. Aside from being simply obvious there is a vast amount of data to support this thesis. Men overall also have greater ability to build muscle than women. One simply has to watch a bodybuilding competition to see the difference in potential. There are some women that exceed many/most men in a given sport but no women that exceed all men when strength matters. Outside of a few niche sporting events, men hold virtually all athletic world records where strength is a meaningful factor. This holds true at every level of competition and every age past puberty. Even at relatively low levels of performance and even with adequate training most women measurably under-perform their male counterparts in most sports. If these differences did not exist, there would be little reason to have women compete separately from the men.
I cannot reasonably address the mental differences between men and women but there is NO question that men are physically stronger on average or in peak potential. It's ok to admit that there are at least some differences between men and women.
Men and women are different
No no no... you got it all wrong. It's "Women be different than men!"
Now personally, I was pretty strong in math when I was in high school - but the best math students were girls... So I never really thought of math as a guy thing.
Bow-ties are cool.
These days, white straight males don't like math much, either. Well, I'm a white male and I think math is just fabulous!!! Oh, wait...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You are a smelly pirate hooker!
Just encourage every kid to find what they want to do and do it. When I was a kid, it was obviously to me what I really wanted to do required the willing participation of a member of the opposite sex, and while it might be useful for the propagation of the species, there was no way I could make a living by doing it.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The second thing to do is reduce sports activities during school hours to a maximum of 4 hours per week and fill those voids with science, mathematics and art.
reducing highscool extra-curricular / sporting time would only lead to an increase in the already rampant obesity rates. new plan.
I'd love to see the studies you claim make this a well understood fact.
I suspect the truth of the matter is that this is a possible explanation that has become popular, but without any rigorous work being done to see if this is true- and if it IS true, whether women choose certain fields because of some innate difference in preferences determined by biology or for some other reason, like the fact that being discriminated against and subjected to insulting comments at every step of your career is enough to drive many reasonable people to choose a different career.
No one is decrying the disparity in number of women and men in Vet school because there is no evidence that men are being kept out of Vet school due to discrimination. Show me some evidence of discrimination, and I'll be right behind you in arguing that this should be corrected. Heck- I'll even take you seriously if you can find me a male Vet student who has heard things like "it must be nice to be a man so that you can win scholarships" or "I'm sorry, I just don't think men make as good vets as women" or "I'll bet he slept with the TA to get that grade." Yes- I have heard comments similar to both of those as a woman in science. The few women who stick it out in math probably have even worse stories. Thankfully, my experience with the overt sexism displayed in those comments has declined as I have advanced in my career- but there is plenty of less obvious sexism still out there.
Did you seriously just fall for that troll?
If women want to display equality, they need to compete on equal ground.
That presumes that the ground IS actually equal which I would argue it probably is not equal - not yet anyway, though it is headed in the right direction. Nevertheless I agree with your sentiment that for true equality to exist the playing field should be level and many old prejudices need to die. Personally I'll concede that things are equal or nearly so when women in the US have to register for the draft.
I've always found it ironic that most women who claim to be for equal rights never seem terribly eager for certain dangerous responsibilities that should go with those rights. For example I see no logical reason why women in the US are not forced like the men to register for the draft. Women clearly are capable of serving on a voluntary basis, and most of the jobs in the military apparently can be performed admirably by either gender. Yet I've NEVER heard a single self-described feminist clambering for the right to be drafted into military service. Sometimes rights come with ugly responsibilities. Seems like a double standard to me.
In order to prove that women or men are superior at ANYTHING ...
Anything? Are you sure? Why do we have separate categories for women in athletics then, where they consistently under-perform compared to men by a wide margin? At physical activities they don't come close. To deny that women on average are notably physically weaker and slower than men on average would be beyond absurd, like claiming the sky is purple - the evidence against it is right in front of your face, everywhere you look. And no, it isn't caused by "socialized gender roles" alone, it's basic human physiology. It isn't in doubt, not in the scientific world or anywhere else.
Now math is a different ball game, but you did say "anything" in capital letters.
No, but some law and medical schools try to keep 50/50 balances. So where they used let in underqualified women, now they have to let in underqualified men to achieve that.
This is media propoganda, through and through. It's insulting even.
Women in math? The "gender gap" between women and men in math, even "basic" math has "closed"? BULLSHIT!
First, "calculus" is not "basic math". It's not needed for most academic majors, nor is it a requirement for entry to so much as a community college. Perhaps, "General Math" is a "basic" math. Perhaps, Pre-Algebra is a "basic" math. But, most certainly, any level of Calculus is NOT a "basic" math.
Secondly, I have been in five higher education institutions spanning two different countries and have majored in Math in particular along with engineering courses. I also took Calculus in High-school... when I attended a high school that even HAD the course (not all American high schools offer calculus).
First, anything past Algebra I and Geometry in highschool and you are officially a nerd or geek, therefore you probably have less options of having a girlfriend. The girls have no interest in that sort of thing, nor any male that has such aptitude. If they did, such classes would have a fair number of girls in them, just to be in social alignment with the males fully able of completing the courses. But, look no further than media entertainment, and frankly, being a nerd or smart isn't "hip".
Ok, so that's more of a social outlook on the issue, and it is. Can girls do the calculus? Maybe, but most don't even if they could, most don't even try or think such a task is even credible to endure.
As a result, any claims that there are a lot of girls in a high school calculus class, is just that a claim. I dare any of them to actually, physically, literally walk their ignorant butts into a random high-level math class and count with their index finger the number of girls in that class. (This will render a far higher count than if we subtracted the ugly girls from any "attractive" girls.)
Now, walk to college. This will be easy as randomly roaming the halls of a high school might have the police arresting you. But you can stand around and most colleges and universities. The gap is closing? Bullshit, if anything it's getting wider.
Of all the years and all the courses of math above Trigonometry I have took, maybe two girls total I might have personally dated . Including all "females", less than ten total. Two of them, were the professors. My Linear Algebra professor was a female, a rather attractive one too. But, the numbers are there, per raw experience. And it only got worse in college and at the highest levels of math females are virtually extinct.
My gripe about all this, is that they should actually do something to make girls look at being smart as an advantage to life. Instead, if one has a cute ass, they'll just leave Calculus to the nerds and hope her boyfriend becomes a NFL star. Regardless if she could have passed a calculus course, the fact she didn't makes her dumb all the same and since she's among millions of other girls the end result is well reflected that women can't be counted on when it comes to mathematical abilities.
They want people to believe there are females in these math classes even if they aren't actually physically present. For most people never take calculus, and now they face the few that have and might call them sexist if they announce "uh... I only saw a handful of girls in any of my classes when getting a Masters in Mathematics".
They want more girls in math? They need to come up with something that actually makes girls consider it as a useful tool in life. As it is now, 10,000 dollars for a hard and burdensome education or an easy and highly profitable breast augmentation? You decide, as inherently lazy humans, which many girls might opt for.
Yay, /., where if you're not PC, you're 'flamebait'...
What if OP had said "how many asian mathematicians are there"? That would probably not be tagged flamebait.
Both would be interesting statistics to see.
These career path selections are never made in a vacuum, either. If you're interested in two or three career paths, and one is full of sexist bullshit and one is not, more women may go into a second choice.
demi
I'm 5'7". That's the same height as Florence Griffith-Joyner (aka Flo Jo). Back in high school I could run faster than Flo Jo did in her 100m and 200m world records. Two problems: (1) I'm not a woman, and (2) I wasn't quite fast enough to compete with the 6'+ men that dominate mens sprints (Hint: 5'7" is ~75%ile for women, but ~25%ile for men).
I've observed over the years that speed divided by height is fairly consistent for top performers(*), regardless of gender. So I'm confident in saying that I think a 6'2" to 6'5" woman could beat Usain Bolt's 100m and 200m world records. The problem is that there are very few women that tall, and most of the ones that tall aren't very coordinated.
(* Usain Bolt should be able to run 4% faster if he took some time to work on his stride; compare the videos of Michael Johnson's 19.32s 200m world record in 1996 vs Usain Bolt's 19.30s 200m world record in 2008, and then compare their heights.)
I think the issue has little to do with trying to equalize the balance of men and women so much as equalizing the balance in the opportunities to pursue the fields that people want. I think that the general agreement is that (especially since the percentages have been changing quite dramatically in recent decades) women don't have the same opportunity as men do. There are various studies showing that women make less than men for the same jobs, and this is blatant discrimination. I don't think anyone is arguing that men have less opportunities in veterinary medicine (although I think there is some framing that goes one as I mentioned below).
This reminds me of the way orchestra auditions have changed over time (described in "Blink"). Before, candidates would play in front of the judges and the judges would decide-- seems harmless enough. However, women have been consistently under-represented in orchestras, and especially on instruments deemed "better" for men (e.g. french horn). Now, candidates perform behind a curtain, so that the judges can't see the candidates, only hear them. Almost overnight, the number of women skyrocketed. I think it's essentially the same thing with women in math and science. People are predisposed to think that men are better than women at certain tasks/professions (even if it's subconscious) and this is reflected in the number of women we see in various industries. I don't think anyone is really immune from this, and in math and science, I think the framing effect is rather strong. Just read some of the blogs of women in science (e.g. http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/) and you'll see that there is still an opportunity gap.
Also, it's not entirely the fault of men. I think women have almost just as much to do with the problem. From mothers telling their daughters they're not smart enough to do science to an example from aforementioned blog: Isis took her toddler to daycare and the caretaker asked what she did; she said "I work at the hospital" and the response was "oh, a lot of the other mommies are nurses too." This does not help the problem...
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I tend to agree with the idea that gender has little to do with ability in math or science. As someone who has had to pull a team of 3 clueless guys through a programming project, I can tell you I have no problem keeping up in class. I do recognize that social pressures and conditioning do influence young girls to do other things. My classes average about 1 female to every 5 males. I once volunteered to help some brownies (younger girl scouts about 6 to 8 years old) through an activity in internet browsing at the computer lab at my college. The general impression I got from doing this was that they were more interested in fashion than computers. There was a lame flash game that let you pick a girl, backdrops and music to make your own music video. They went through the selections and when they got to one that looked very studious and wore glasses, they said she was ugly. It was just a cartoon drawing of a girl, so I did not think it was possible for her to actually look ugly, but the girls I was helping said they would never pick her and picked the "pretty" blond girl instead.
How come a 70/30 ratio makes this gap a myth ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
[citation needed]
Hmm girls taking maths? Now lets just extend maths into physics for the moment. In my college there are just 2 girls in my class out of 20 and about 6 girls in the entire year of physics. Strange huh? Surely there's a correlation between maths & physics?
Oh, if I had mod points I'd give one to you, because what you say is completely true. I've lived some of that discrimination and predisposition against me for being a woman in the math and physics fields. Of course I like to prove everybody wrong so if I have to work twice as much to achieve that, I'll do it just to rub their own words in their faces. I think that's what has motivated me the most when it comes to science. Science itself is very interesting to me, but proving everybody wrong is priceless :).
And I always thought that females were conditioned by society to not to be interested in the hard science fields. I have yet to see how much influence does environment and culture have, compared to the fact of having a XX chromosome, when it comes to math.
I call bullshit.
From TFA:
I think "popular" is a relative term here. But if you go back to the 50s-60s, I think "hard" subjects like math, science, and engineering had a lot more prestige in America than they do these days. Back then, people were really looking towards the future and envisioning grand new technologies, space travel, etc. These days, Americans don't dream like this at all. Instead, their dreams are of getting rich by selling houses and driving a giant SUV. Some of them may have put those dreams on hold at the moment, but that's still the way they think. Other Americans with lofty ambitions pursue lucrative careers such as baristas, cell-phone salespeople, and tattoo artists. And of course, the most ambitious Americans these days pursue a career in music by attempting to get on American Idol.
Women tend to gravitate towards fields which there is a degree of socializing, such as education, medicine (Regular and veterinary), and communications. Men tend to gravitate towards either exciting fields, or fields which they feel will be financial rewarding.
That certainly used to be the case in my parents generation. However, I've noted more interest in crossing the traditional roles by the opposite sexes in my own life time. I'd say that people in contemporary society have been engineered (physically and psychologically) with a purpose towards eliminating those traditional distinctions.
Perhaps women who are good at logical reasoning and details go into better paying fields than mathematics and the sciences, such as law and management. That was the theory put forward by a blog post I read, which suggested that some of the discrepancy that reappears at the PhD level in mathematics, computing, and the sciences may be because men are foolishly seduced into spending years getting a PhD and working in academia by the ideas of the prestige, status, excitement, and importance of this research. A woman with the same skills and general interests might be more realistic, and make the much better paying choice of a successful law or business career. I tried to find the blog that made this point, but could not. It seemed quite likely to me though. The same skills that make someone a good mathematician or programmer, would make them an outstanding lawyer or manager, as long as they have reasonable people skills. Perhaps a study of the careers of skilled undergraduate math majors, of both genders, would indicate if people are just making more (women) or less (men) rational choices about their future paths after a math B.S.
Share. Until it becomes uncomfortable. Or at least a little.
So the reason I washed out of college level math in my third year is because I'm a dimwit not because I'm a girl? The truth hurts.
and all you 20 somethings, wait till you hit 30 and you realise you've only got 5 years left in you to have kids. my partner was never that interested in kids and she's about to have her 30th and it's nothing but talk about babies all of a sudden.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is missing an important point.
Males have greater brain specialization. (In particular, right handed males have the most.) This is why savants are more likely to be male. Head injuries to males (and especially right-handed males) are more likely to cause the complete and utter loss of some function.
So you can have female savants, you can have female geniuses, you can have just as many females doing just fine in math, but the overall likelihood is that at the very top of the field, where the people are often badly broken people who specialize in math and seem oddly incapable of anything else, the ratio of males to females will be higher.
Is this a societal phenomenon rather than a genetic one? While it might be a mix of factors, you absolutely cannot argue that male brains are just like female ones. You need only look at the prevalence of autism in males vs. females to see this. (Unless you're going to argue that autism is all about rearing technique -- in which case we ought to be dressing all our children uniformly in pink.)
"You know why women can't play Chess? They have small hearts...can't get enough blood to the brain. That's why Chess is a Young Man's Sport!"
-- Eccentric Chess Player to a bunch of college freshmen hanging out at the Union. I was one of the dumbfounded freshmen...
It's good to know that Math is not in this category :)
Whether you like to accept it or not, women and men are psychobiologically different. Meaning, there are observable, quantifiable and consistent physical differences in the brain and its chemistry based solely on gender.
As a result, women consistently perform worse at spatial-based tasks than men. Women consistently perform better at communications-based tasks than men. There are millions of well-conducted experiments and studies that re-prove the existence of these and other gender-based differences over and over again.
It frustrates the hell out of me that the loony 'Politically Correct' regime is so enforced on us and continues to reduce to denial any innate gender difference even in the face of hard evidence.
Most 'normal' people now feel they can't even openly raise the possibility, much less the FACT that we actually are mentally differently-abled BECAUSE of gender.
Society as a whole will not properly develop until we accept the existence of gender-based ability differences, including mental, as a fact and move on.
Males
Frequency *
* *
* *
* *
mathematical ability -------->
Females
*
* *
* *
* *
mathematical ability --------->
less variation in females, at both ends
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I won't argue with you about whether or not a lonely female TA might choose to extract sex from one of her students in exchange for a grade. I'll just take your statement as written and say: propose a reasonable way in which anti-male discrimination in Vet school might manifest itself.
Frankly, I'm at a loss.
Which supports my initial point.
"Math is tough" --Barbie the Bimbo
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Show me the female equivalents of an Euler, Pascal, Leibnitz, Newton, Laplace, Riemann, Fourier, Gauss, Euclid, Archimedes, Poincare, Lagrange, or this article is only so much Dvorakian handwaving crap.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Compared to football stars and celebrities, no, math isn't very high-paying.
Compared to serving coffee, yes, it is high-paying, but it also requires a lot of time, dedication, and hard work to get to that high-paying status, and Americans aren't interested in doing something that requires a lot of dedication unless it'll make them multimillionaires. They'd rather settle for being a barista.
Also, it's not entirely the fault of men. I think women have almost just as much to do with the problem.
I don't know how I will be modded for this, but yes.
Statistics on child-rearing consistently show that women do the bulk of it (not a value judgement; that's what the numbers show). In my own case, my mom has more education than my dad, and I would say their relationship is pretty equal (if not tipped toward my mother in most things), but yes, she is the one who raised me and taught me values about the world, etc. My dad wasn't absent or anything, but he was the guy who taught me how to do stuff--build things, fix things, make bad puns. It seems that this is the norm, from the sociological data I've seen.
How is it, then, that women find themselves the victim of "social gender roles?" Men, I think, in a very real sense, do not make society. Women do. Women raise kids and instill values in them; men's behavior is almost entirely based on doing things that will score and keep women. If mothers raised children with egalitarian values and young, fertile women did not hook up with guys who had sexist ideas, guys would fall into line almost immediately. Think how quickly the American image of men changed from "strong and silent" to "soft and sensitive" in the 90s. We were told that's what gets girls, and next thing you know, guys are bawling over every damn little thing. Eventually this started annoying women and there was a backlash in recent years, asking where all the "real men" (look at that choice of adjectives, ladies) went, and guys of the current young generation aren't so weepy as we Gen-Xers were. Guys do what they are told.
Again, in my own case, every time I run into a sexist idea I may have, I think "hmm, where did that come from?" and I remember being taught it by my smart, well-educated, empowered mother.
I think women have a lot to do with the problem, and can do a lot more than men can about it, in the long run. Guys are puppets.
Finally, I also have to echo someone else's comment above: Just let people choose what they like. I want to be sure that people are all given equal opportunities so that they can do that, but I don't think that's going to lead to 50/50 gender representation in every field, and that's okay!
Money always attracted nearly all men. A good definition of "geek" is someone whose interests override their need for money.
But the ease thing... yeah. American culture right now can go die. Exactly when America should be reinvesting in making things and in R&D, everyone just figures that a bit more management can make it all work again.
I have a new slogan for the business world: "If you're not in production, research, or development, you're in overhead."
sorry who care's this is the most irelevent and pointless article on slashdot to date, no one cares what the OP has to say as it's irelevent
Money always attracted nearly all men. A good definition of "geek" is someone whose interests override their need for money.
What's funny is that there's plenty of "geeky" jobs that pay quite well these days. Engineers generally make pretty good money, though they need to be prepared for a sudden layoff with the way many companies operate now. But still, it's a lot more money than working at the mall, or even most other jobs requiring a college degree. But Americans don't want to bother because "it's too hard!" or "it's too boring". (Of course, if someone is bored by technical things, I'd rather they didn't go into engineering, but them being bored by it is frequently a product of how they're raised.)
But the ease thing... yeah. American culture right now can go die. Exactly when America should be reinvesting in making things and in R&D, everyone just figures that a bit more management can make it all work again.
Yep, everyone wants to be a manager, but no one wants to do the actual work. They all think we can all be managers, while all the work gets done offshore by teams in other countries.
Thanks for promoting gender roles/stereotypes. Acknowledging "counterexamples" does not change the fact you are stereotyping men and women as acting in certain ways and having distinct preferences on the basis of their sex.
"There are various studies showing that women make less than men for the same jobs, and this is blatant discrimination."
Are those the same studies that also show that women at the same jobs work fewer hours per week, take more time off, drop down to part time more often and retire earlier?
Women do, indeed, make up the bulk of new vets, but the gender switch may have the odd effect of sharply reducing the number of active vets in the future. There are already shortages of vets for farm animals.
You're missing the point by a mile. TFA isn't about whether this is so, but rather about why this is so. There is a relatively prominent set of people who insist in attributing this kind of thing to innate differences between the genders; TFA is mentioning studies that rebut that claim, and rather support the counterclaim that the differences are due to culture.
There is a separate question here that TFA doesn't discuss, but which your quote does bring up: pay differences. I'm not going to argue this one way or the other, but there's a question to be asked as to what extent men gravitate towards those jobs because they're financially rewarding, versus to what extent the jobs are financially rewarding because they're done by men. I know it's hard to think of the latter alternative, but basically, it comes down to the power to set the relative prices for different kinds of labor being overwhelmingly in mens' hands.
Are you adequate?
I'd love to see the studies you claim make this a well understood fact.
I'm not going to do a cited paper, so give me some latitude here with some well understood facts.
Its nice to believe that there is some equal playing ground in life, but its the differences between people that make things interesting. This perennial debate over the sexes being the same is quixotic. All sex based species have differences between the sexes for survival of the species. Humans have not evolved any more than the animals that they have domesticated. Dogs still bury bones in the corner of a carpeted room because its in their genes to do so. Cats kill birds and bring them home even though they have plenty of food because its in their genes. Dogs are not cats.
Humans are not genetically different from the hunters and gathers from around 100,000 years ago. Meaning they are not any smarter, even though some of them know how to do partial differential equations and some don't. In humans, its the males that typically did the hunting and females did the child rearing and gathering. Female humans have wider hips for giving birth which limits their ability to run and catch prey which is needed for protein in their diet. Hunting abilities gave men better spacial abilities, the ability to plan and execute a plan, and also men have a much greater upper body strength and lung capacity. These are well understood facts for anyone who knows a little about human evolution or biology. Gathering abilities enable women to have better periphery short range vision (eg, why they can find things in the refrigerator that were right in front of the man's face!).
To say that women and men are the same is nonproductive because by definition they are different.
This is good to hear. Now we can start to address other gender issues.
The 10:1 gender ratio in prisons is obviously driven by sociocultural factors rather than innate differences.
We need affirmative action to address this imbalance. To get the ball rolling, I propose a 12 month minimum sentence for parking across 2 bays.
From the abstract "The gender gap has significantly narrowed over time in the U.S. and is not found among some ethnic groups and in some nations ... It correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes." http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/01/0901265106.abstract
The president of Harvard was changed for ignoring this equality.
But the simple problem here is that everybody grows up in a culture, and that this throws the whole concept of "biological ability" out the window. There is no way to establish a baseline level of purely biological ability; all you can do is measure relative differences in the end-results of different cultures.
If you have Culture A with equal outcome, and Culture B with unequal outcome, there is simply no way of deciding that one of these outcomes is "more natural" than the other without making some value judgement about the cultures.
Are you adequate?
"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a mathematician] than a white male who hasn't lived that life." You know what is the best quality of a mathematician? Empathy.
And no, it isn't caused by "socialized gender roles" alone, it's basic human physiology.
Sexual dimorphism is one of those "chicken and egg" situations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are a couple of things being conflated in this type of research, which to me muddies the water. One question has to do with performance of people not too far from the median. For this question, I believe it's reasonable to look at how achievement test scores vary with factors like gender, race, culture, nationality, socioeconomics, and so forth. The original research cited here involves data of this type. And the conclusion isn't so surprising: Female performance relative to males is very situationally-dependent. Anecdotally one only needs to look at the gender gap (if one exists) in east Asian students vs. the gender gap in white students. *Maybe* white women are at some genetic disadvantage relative to asian women -- again relative to their respective male counterparts -- but it seems unlikely relative to a cultural factor.
What these lines of research don't really show -- because there isn't enough comparative data available -- is what are the external factors that most correlate with the gender gap within different groups. Is it culture that drives the variation? (Asians have higher expectations on daughters? Asians don't propagate the "geek stigma" as much for girls?) Is it economics? (Poorer people cannot educate all their kids, so preferentially educate the boys?) Or something else? Who knows.
The second question being conflated is performance at the far, far, end of the performance spectrum. Fields medal winners represent the 99.999+ percentile. Who knows what defines people out there? There aren't enough of them to really study as a statistical emsemble. It's fair to say that at the high end of any performance curve, a lot of things have to come together simultaneously: Raw talent, motivation, opportunity, persistence, environment, dedication. It could be for example that men have no more innate ability than women, but are just more single-minded in their approach to life. I.e., more men than women are willing to do what Andrew Wiles did, namely hole up in an attic for 10 years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem (with a low probability of success).
Finally, I think with regard to this sort of research it's important to maintain a dispassionate attitude. When I get the feeling the authors are trying to *advocate* for a particular conclusion, that makes me a bit queasy. There seems to be this unstated assumption that an unequal outcome is indicative of unequal opportunity. Would anyone argue that the relative lack of white men in the NBA is indicative of low opportunity or discrimination? Probably not. Perhaps white women don't pursue math at the highest levels because they simply don't want to, compared with other uses for their time. Is this a bad outcome? Within the scientific enterprise it's a very slippery slope to start asserting value judgments about these things.
I see most kids get home at 2 or 3 in the afternoon
That would be because they got to school at 7 AM.
There are various studies showing that women make less than men for the same jobs, and this is blatant discrimination
I haven't seen those studies, so I don't know what methodology they're using. I have seen numbers like 70% bandied about (women being paid 70% of the amount men get for equal work).
So my question is: if that's true, why would any businesses bother hiring men at all? If you can get the same work by hiring just women and paying them 30% less (or even 10%) you have a crushing advantage over the competition, especially in low margin businesses. I can't believe all employers (including women business owners and hiring managers) are uniformly sexist. I'd expect the market to force the equalization of pay to work. So why the contradiction?
And someone who took stats to a graduate level and read TFA will respond with this quotation from TFA:
Mertz and Hyde looked for evidence of this imbalance - more boys than girls at the extremes of math ability - in international data, too. Again, they found that in some countries as many girls as boys score above the 99th percentile, and in others more girls than boys are extreme math dunces or math geniuses. In both cases, countries with as many or more girls at the upper extreme tend to be those with the greatest gender equality, such as Germany and the Netherlands.
Furthermore, in T(Actual)FA about which TFA reports, I read the following:
Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero, with 3 even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. (Hyde and Mertz, PNAS June 2, 2009 vol. 106 no. 22, 8803)
In other words, statistical measurement shows that what you're seeing in the performance differences between men and women in mathematics are not innate differences but culturally-mediated differences. Same goes for the ability in language, verbal expression or other acquired skills, I would argue. Women aren't innately better communicators or writers. We're just kind of herded that way, as a group. Young women are, from very early on, acculturated to those skill sets seen as appropriately feminine. Young men are supported to learn and behave in ways that are considered appropriately manly. This socialization begins very early and extends quite a ways into the life-cycle.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Engineers generally make pretty good money, though they need to be prepared for a sudden layoff with the way many companies operate now.
You're at least partially right. Even back in 2005: "High school and college students considering their futures know that work as a scientist is morally nasty, brutally alienating and financially insecure."
Science != engineering. They're totally different fields. You might as well compare high school teachers and college professors.
Science, in the USA, is a pretty lousy field to get into. Engineering, OTOH, while not a panacea, does pay pretty well (it's not hard to get to six figures with experience), and there's plenty of openings. While I have been laid off a couple of times in the past few years, I found it quite easy to find new jobs in the same area, and got a big pay raise each time. Since there's not enough experienced engineers to go around, there's a lot of demand (even now). The key, however, is to make sure you have the experience employers want since everyone wants someone who can start contributing right away and doesn't want to take time for training.
But yeah, science is a horrible field, unless you have a morbid interest in doing tests of useless pharmaceuticals on live animals or something. There's very few places for scientists to work, mainly pharma and a little government stuff like NASA, and the pay is terrible. You'd make more money working at the mall most likely. And of course, a lot of it (like the pharma stuff) is very morally questionable. The lucky scientists get to work at NASA, but what if you don't manage to get a job there? Maybe you could settle for a research position with a university paying about $20k.
I am the father of two girls. Just wanted to make that very clear. I think one of them is quite brilliant with mathematics, in fact, and she routinely outperforms her male peers. Top of her class.
Be that as it may, we appear to have one study here, and the rating on "gender equality" by the WEF, to which it is correlated, is a politically derived statistic at best, absolute chauvinist political posturing at worst.
What this indicates is we need to have many many more studies, until we can see repeatable results or a pattern, based on hard statistics, not political ones, before we start calling some very intelligent people who work in the field, most with an excellent grasp of statistics, perpetuators of "myth" and "stereotype."
And anecdotal stuff about who gets sent to the Math Olympiad doesn't imply they performed well at the math Olympiad, or that they belonged there. It implies that the countries were more willing to send women. Period.
Did they do well? That's the real question, the only question which addresses aptitude, and it is not answered.
I want to believe in gender equality as much as anyone else, perhaps more, but this article is shot through with correlative holes and shoddy thinking. It is bad science and political spin.
I am fully willing to believe that this is because mainstream journalism cannot competently cover science. Is there a more scientifically minded article covering this paper?
--
Toro
Some colleges and universities are preferentially offering more admission spots to male candidates than otherwise they would. Why? In order to redress the gender imbalance that's seeing fewer men than women enroll. (See this article from 2007 in US News & World Report.)
Last month also saw the 2nd Conference on College Men which also dealt with some of these concerns.
As an academic and someone who advocates wide access to all sorts of education, I want to see everyone have a chance to study for what they want to and can manage, men and women.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Nevermind that 95% of *all* PhD's went to men in the 1950s. This statistic might be useful about women and education in general, but it's completely misleading and pointless with regard to math.
Have you considered the possibility that children actually don't acquire their values exclusively from their mothers? But rather, acquire them from their interaction with the culture at large? Have you considered the possibility that, just for example, schools are sites of sustainable transmission of values between the children themselves? So that kids end up learning a very large chunk of their values from peers and kids slightly above their grade.
And what about the constant portrayal of gender roles in the media? Are you also absolutely convinced that that has no part to play? Or, also, what about the fact that until relatively recently in our culture, licit sexual access to women was negotiated between the suitor and the woman's father? Are you absolutely sure that our culture contains no residues of that? Like, for example, are you sure that men's behavior toward women is always truly aimed at gaining the women's favor as an end in itself, and never as, say, a means towards winning an imagined competition between men?
You've considered all of this and more, and correctly discarded all of it, right?
Are you adequate?
The key, however, is to make sure you have the experience employers want since everyone wants someone who can start contributing right away and doesn't want to take time for training.
Which is a self-creating problem of not wanting to pay for entry-level workers.
But btw, the article I linked was about engineering, not science. And I'm a Comp Sci, so I figure I can go any way.
Is that in those countries girls generally outperform boys in school. Yes, boys and girls seem to do just as well in math but girls substantially outperform boys on the reading/linguistic tests. Moreover, the difference between girls math and language scores seems to be fairly similar across all these countries.
I wouldn't read too much into this but if anything this is evidence for a biological difference in terms of math ability. Either you think that girls are simply innately better at academics in general or you think some other factor explains the generally superior performance of women in school in these tests. If so one would want to subtract out that effect (say maybe girls care more about achieving in school than boys) before trying to estimate any innate differences.
Frankly what nearly everyone says in this debate is stupid for several reasons:
However, it really pisses me off when I see people try to misrepresent the (still fairly hazy) data as obviously implying a position that they wish were true.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
But when I looked up the article on PNAS http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract it was subscription only.
When I read the Science magazine article on girls and math, buried in the fine print they admitted that they didn't really have statistically significant data for high-performing girls.
So I won't take this seriously until I can read the original article.
Because the perceived value of women's work is lower, which is part of the reason they get paid less.
I call BS on a study that looks at test scores, (seemingly) for high school students, and says that the more women are in the 99% percentile so it's cultural.
that is idiotic. I was in the top 99th percentile my entire life in math (well, before college). Even in the intro college courses I was at the very top , but there were others. when we hit hte high level maths (proofs, abstract algebra, etc) I was trounced, just so absolutely outpaced it wasn't even close.
When you talk about the 99th percentile for high school math and try to draw some sort of line talking about those people who are actually at the top fo the math field, you are basically a moron.
what you care about when talking about math geniuses isn't the 99th percentile. you are looking for the 99th percentile fo teh 99th percentile of the 99th percentile. at that level, there are no tests other than fields medals, nobel prizes, citations in scholarly journals, professorships, ground breaking findings, etc, differences that have shown up over time in every culture.
I'm in the first group and I'm so far behind the group people talk about when they call someone a math genius it's stupid to care. it's like saying more women are in teh 50th - 60th percentile so more should be in the 99th percentile for high school tests. there is no reason that has to be the case.
NSF stats for all levels in science and engineering, broken down by gender and race for 2006.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Depends how good at it you are. If you're on the cutting edge of cryptographic research, for example, you'll be raking it in. If you're not on the cutting edge of _something_, though, it's both boring and not very lucrative.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I call BS on a study that looks at test scores, (seemingly) for high school students, and says that the more women are in the 99% percentile so it's cultural.
So let me get this straight: you're saying that it's not significant that nations with greater gender equality have more women scoring above the 99th percentile in mathematics?
Methinks someone failed Logic 101.
Certainly, scoring in the 99th percentile is by no means an indication of math genius-ness. But that's missing the point entirely—what matters is that there are strong cultural factors that are pushing many capable women away from mathematics, leaving any mathematical ability unidentified, genius or not.
Reducing fat intake will lead to a decrease in obesity. When parents give their kids fatty cheese or hot dogs or hamburgers with ketchup and mayonnaise as a snack something is wrong. Maybe more parents would become aware of the kids and their own obesity and do something about it (you know, like parenting). Right now there is just about enough activity for those youngsters to become slightly obese but not morbidly (there are exceptions) just enough that it's something to watch out for but not something to worry about.
Do you really think that in Europe, China, India, ... all those kids are fatty's? I think that only Americans are so much into sports yet so obese. Heck, I only had 2 hours of gym per week in my days but nobody in my class was ever obese nor am I now.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
So did we. In most countries, schooling is a full time (36 to 40h/week) activity. So worried about your kids when you have to go to work that you need to bring them by car: drop them off and they'll hang out in a study hall where they can work on whatever they need to work on.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You seem to agree with article's premise, that the rising percentage of women in science is simply due to the diminishment of sexism. What if it is (at least partially) explained by the Affirmative Action instead?
Colleges do seek out female applicants for science majors — that's a very well known fact. So much so, female applicants are advised to specify Math major in their applications to improve their chances, whatever their actual interest — it is easy to switch major once you are in... Other things being equal, a girl will be admitted to Science program over a boy. I'm not saying here, whether that's good or bad in my opinion — only that it does affect the statistics.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wow - some of those figures are very interesting. In 1998, there were 3.6 million white male students, and 500 thousand black male students. In 2006 when the study ends, there are around 4 million white male students and 650 thousand black male students. So a small, roughly proportionate growth in both, although white males are definitely more likely to receive a university education. Likewise for white females, who went from 4.6 million in 1998 to 5.2 million in 2006. So far, ratios are staying pretty constant.
Where it gets interesting is that black female enrolments rose from 850 thousand in 1998 up to 1.1 million in 2006 - a 30% increase in enrolments compared to around 12% for the other race/gender combos. Statistically, black women are well ahead of everyone else in terms of improvement in education.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The difference is that the lonely female TA just has to wander down to the local bar wearing a tight top and by the end of the night she'll have half a dozen offers. A lonely male TA, on the other hand, will just be one of those dozen offers, and his odds aren't good, so when that hot chick in his class offers to sex him up in exchange for a few extra days to work on her assignment... well who knows, maybe she had a crush on him anyway?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Also, even when considering men and women in exactly the same role and environment, expected long absence from the workplace will effect lower earnings. Consider the wages that your average guy will earn compared to the wages (yearly and accumulated lifetime) that another guy in the same job will get if he takes 5+ years out of his career to care for his children. Hint: 5 years' worth of pay rises is quite a lot. Also often not taken into account is the fact that, traditionally, women are financially supported by their partners. Obviously these days that's less common than it used to be, but still, it seems unfair to complain about a man earning 20% more than his female counterparts when 50% of his net wage goes to supporting a spouse.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
My whole point was that sexism is to a large degree not conscious and hugely dependent on the societal f of the perceived value of women. So yes, in some sense, there is some uniform level of sexism across men and women due to framing and I think this accounts for the differences and why the employment "market" isn't efficient in this sense.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
As an ex-mathematician, I can say there's a lot more to having a successful mathematics career than simply how your brain is wired. It is far more of a lifestyle choice than simply a job. If you want to solve the hardest problems your best hope is to have long stretches of peace and quiet where you can do nothing but devote yourself to the problem. Also there is the long hours culture, the regular conferences without available childcare, the amount of collaborative work done in the pub, the way everything has moved on completely if you have a few years out, having to move anywhere in the world to get the next job... None of that fits with family responsibilities. Some still manage to raise a family and make it as a mathematician but those are the exceptional ones who've made it through despite the handicap. Most women either don't go into it in the first place or else quit after their PhD's to settle down.
Well here are some:
http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/publications/2006/ke7606200_en.pdf
http://www.bmfsfj.de/bmfsfj/generator/RedaktionBMFSFJ/Abteilung4/Pdf-Anlagen/entgeltungleichheit-sinusstudie,property=pdf,bereich=,sprache=de,rwb=true.pdf
The second one is in german, but serves to prove the "same work different pay" aspect. You have to imagine the following: In Germany, YOU NEVER GET TO KNOW WHAT YOUR COLLEAGUES MAKE. That's right. You can work alongside a person for thirty years, doing the same work, and be completely in the dark wether or not there is a pay difference between you. Germany has a very rigid culture of secrecy regarding matters of pay. There are no legal obligations or even guidelines for transparency.
Now look at the numbers of the second study. You can see that even in jobs in which stereotypewise we wouldn't expect a pay gap (example: cook) women earn something like two thirds of what men make. THAT'S the gender bias people are talking about.
Both studies were created by government agencies, btw. (EU Commission, German Ministry of Family Affairs)
as many girls as boys now taking high school calculus
This particular observation doesn't really tell us much about the respective abilities of the groups, does it?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
whoaaa! I'm a young man and I had no idea that I like sports and multi-level marketing, I thought I hated that stuff.
The summary seems to confuse innate differences with the gender distribution in the workforce. If the two were directly related, then a change in the workforce would mean a change in innate skills, which are pretty unlikely to have changed that drastically in the past 100 years.
If the argument used to be that the low number of women in math wasn't proof that women were poor at math, then the greater number of women in math now is likewise not proof that women are good at math; the number of women in math is much more strongly influenced by other factors besides innate ability.
my point was simple, none of those countries show a predisposition for women at the very upper eschelons (you are no more likely to see a woman field's medalist in Korea or Europe compared to the US or Japan).
every discussion I've heard isn't why women can't do calculus at the high school level. anyone who thinks they can't is an idiot. the question is why aren't they winning Nobels and Fields medals for math related work (theoretical physics is very math intensive so I would argue a similar amount of math aptitude is required for a nobel in that as it is for a field's medal).
there may be strong cultural factors causing women who could do calculus to not do it but that doesn't explain why there are fewer women PhD. As I said, it's like saying because there are more women in the 80th to 90th percentile than men, women should have a great representation in the 99th. that is required by any amount of logic.
so if we are only concerned about women taking calc in high school, sure, this study is very relevant. if we are wondering why there aren't any women's field medalists, it's a completely different question that requires much more than just looking at averages. if you want to look at outliers, you need to study publication history, citations of work, and look for mathematicians opinions on the significance of work.
not logic, just pointing out that the study does not address what it seems to make conclusions about.
As a doctor, I've noticed that the climbing of women ratios has gone along with the decline in pay. Not sure if in the US, but it happens in European and 2.5-world countries I've lived in.
Could it be perhaps because of the popularization of the medical career, which yields a growing number of physicians (and easier opportunities to become one) each year everywhere? Or is it that males are rushing out of this career as it becomes less paid for the sacrifice it demands?
In my experience, though, the females in med school are in average much more studying and dedicated than us their male counterparts. Thus, they tend to set the bar higher for all of us.
You must be new around here.
I'm all for equality in opportunity. ... But I think it's naive to think that, different as men and women are, that all careers will equalize out to a 50/50 distribution over time.
One eloquent way to put it I have heard in a debate about affirmative action:
"Do you want equal opportunity? Or equal results?"
Oliver.
You're ignoring the fact that women were actively, wilfully, consistently kept out of higher academics and especially from publishing -- even fiction -- until quite recent history. How are there supposed to be women equivalents if women couldn't even study beyond high school, were laughed at if they wanted to publish anything (unless they used a male pseudonym and had a male friend present it) and were being pushed to get married and have babies ASAP? (Keep in mind there was no birth control, so they'd have several, with the attendant responsibilities. Oh and, their husbands weren't expected to help them beyond finances.)
I wonder if they could already be indoctrinated by the time they're six or so.
BTW, I've heard a saying of some Girl Scout troops, "too much doily-making and not enough camping" (the way that statement was given, and common sense, implies that there are some out there that aren't, just sayin'.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I studied in a technical University in Portugal and both the Physics and the Mathematics degrees had as many women as they had men.
Computer Science had somewhat fewer women than men, Chemistry had more women than men and Electronics had almost no women (guess which one I was doing).
As far as I can tell, were I come from there as a many women in science as there are men.
(PS: From what I remembered, universities that taught social sciences did has a lot more women than men.)
Maybe the disparity being discussed here is a cultural characteristic specific to the US...?
How was that a troll? Guess a moderator with an agenda didn't like me pointing out facts!
You are attempting to be funny but you speak the truth. Try couching it in this terminology:
If you are in science at postgraduate level chances are it isn't for the money it is because you really love it. It is part of who you are. Now, what affect do you think it has on one's self esteem if half the population (in particular those your sexual orientation dictates you are likely to become romantically involved with) don't understand your passion, or even are socially conditioned not to? Of course that is going to suck.
Note that it will also suck for the females who stick with it because opportunities for female-female bonding are also reduced. If your peers don't value what you do that sucks too.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
This has been an ongoing debate in education for years. The only area where there does seem to be a real significant gender difference is in the ability to visualise 3D spatial relationships, and there is a reasonable explanation from evolutionary biology, in that this skill does seem to assist in hunting large mammals, and a better hunter would have been a more desirable mate. The effect (if it does exist) is not huge though. There seem to be as many studies showing the effect does not exist as that say it does, so the source isn't breaking any new ground.
Really? Why would anyone think that the abilities to do math are gender related?
Biology plays this little trick om women, it's called giving birth. The only innate thing, that is 100%, is the maternal instinct that will definitely leave a woman out of a chance to pursue a degree, in a not so easy field as mathematics.
The last 50 years have brought more possibilities to women to have baby(-ies) and pursue an academic career.
If the whole supposed male power structure is responsible for holding a supposed equal or greater number of female mathematical geniuses down, then it should be relatively easy to show with actual examples in a country such as the United States in the last 50 or so years, where these barriers are no longer in place. Or you could accept the more rational explanation, that the higher variance in IQ in the male means that you have more genius males and more dullard males. Of course, you will have a few genius females. There are going to be exceptions, and humanity is better off for their contribution.
Then you will get into subjective issues as to who is the greater mathematician and how do you judge this. Of course, you can look at similar intellectual endeavours (e.g. Chess) that are absolutely objective and have no barriers to entry for females. At extreme levels of skill, chess is dominated by males, as is the upper echelons of all cognitive endeavours that I can think of.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I'd love to see the studies you claim make this a well understood fact.
I'm not going to do a cited paper, so give me some latitude here with some well understood facts.
Its nice to believe that there is some equal playing ground in life, but its the differences between people that make things interesting. This perennial debate over the sexes being the same is quixotic. All sex based species have differences between the sexes for survival of the species. Humans have not evolved any more than the animals that they have domesticated. Dogs still bury bones in the corner of a carpeted room because its in their genes to do so. Cats kill birds and bring them home even though they have plenty of food because its in their genes. Dogs are not cats.
Humans are not genetically different from the hunters and gathers from around 100,000 years ago. Meaning they are not any smarter, even though some of them know how to do partial differential equations and some don't. In humans, its the males that typically did the hunting and females did the child rearing and gathering. Female humans have wider hips for giving birth which limits their ability to run and catch prey which is needed for protein in their diet. Hunting abilities gave men better spacial abilities, the ability to plan and execute a plan, and also men have a much greater upper body strength and lung capacity. These are well understood facts for anyone who knows a little about human evolution or biology. Gathering abilities enable women to have better periphery short range vision (eg, why they can find things in the refrigerator that were right in front of the man's face!).
To say that women and men are the same is nonproductive because by definition they are different.
I think you need to read up a bit on human evolution. The things we know don't definitively indicate that men were hunters and women stayed back in the caves and reared children. In fact, it seems early humans were primarily gatherers and trap setters. Both of those tasks were done cooperatively by both sexes. There is also evidence making this dichotomy murky pointing to the fact that what we sometimes perceive as innate difference in people's abilities are manifestations of the differences in people's reaction to prejudgment and expectations. In other words, some people are psyched out more easily than others. Certainly, men and women aren't the same biologically, but the argument of nature vs nurture is far from settled. I'm not advocating making us a society of drones, but glazing over the breadth of each genders' psychological and mental reach is just as shortsighted as claiming there are certain forever unbridgable divides between us we simply must accept.
Alexey
so true, any company that would take advantage of the so called pay gap would crush its competition, greed always wins. it basically shows how big a lie this is. a 30% advantage is simply a recipe for domination of any sector. it is a manufacturered figure that is exaggerated and oversimplifies reality by assuming everyone makes the same life choices and so should have the same result. that it doesn't make sense doesn't make a spit of difference in politics where reason and truth count for nothing, and repeating big lies for political gain is perfectly kosher, especially if you have the power of political correctness to smash down anyone that questions your dubious claims.
seems she was previous debunked, and is back for another swipe with dodgy data. http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/June2009.asp#5 http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm the top 1% of students in general esp at a high school level are not what matters when it comes to mathematical genius anyways. its ridiculous to draw conclusions from that. and if asian/colored women outperform their men then they should continue to do so when it gets to the phd level/awards right? probably not addressed. i think what matters with these studies is they are published and get a headline, thats all that really matters, very few of the gender warriors that like your conclusions are going to check your work.
http://www.uaf.edu/northern/schools/myth.html it is amusing the language/reading gap that favors women is just accepted, when under the same viewpoint it should mean that boys are horribly discriminated against when it comes to that aspect of education!! look at the gpas, women outperform men in many areas other than mathematics. are we to conclude that men are being highly discriminated against as well? that is the logical conclusion from such thinking. "Grades: That females receive higher grades in virtually every subject is undisputed. In reviewing the literature on gender differences in cognitive tests, for the flagship journal of the field, American Psychologist, Halpern (1997, p. 1102) points out that "higher grades in school, all or most subjects" is an area of unquestioned female advantage. Another recent, comprehensive review of the research literature on gender differences in school performance comes to the same conclusion: Data from a wide variety of sources and educational settings show that females in all ethnic groups tend to earn higher grades in school than do males, across different ages and eras, and across different subject matter disciplines. Many researchers in past times and today consider this to be such an obvious fact that they treat it as axiomatic....Modern reviews of the subject are unanimous in their finding of higher grades for females (Dwyer & Johnson, 1997, pp. 128-129)." "Class Rank and Honors: Since girls receive higher grades in school, they should also surpass boys in class rank. This is exactly what happens. Examining gender differences in high school class rank and honors in a nationally representative sample from the 1970s, Adelman (1991, p. 3) makes this point, "No matter how one slices the high school class of 1972, women's mean class rank exceeded that of men by a minimum of 10 points." Caucasian women attained, on the average, the highest class rank (67th percentile), while African-American men attained, on the average the lowest class rank (44th percentile). African-American women ranked far higher (56th percentile) than African-American men. The same pattern of female advantage in grades and honors shows up in the 1990s, in a nationally representative longitudinal study of the high school class of 1992 (NELS Second Follow-up, cited in Dwyer & Johnson, 1997, p. 139). In the academic arena, high school girls outdistanced boys in making the honor roll, in getting elected to a class office, and in receiving writing awards and other academic honors. In the academic arena, boys outdistanced women in vocational-technical honors and in awards in science and mathematics competitions. While males are still ahead in gaining mathematics and science honors, females are making strong gains. From 1995-1998, close to 40 percent of the winners of the most prestigious science competition, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, were female (Science Service, 1998). The Westinghouse Science Talent Search requires high school students to complete a project in science, mathematics, and engineering and submit a report communicating the results. The work goes on over many months, often with the assistance of a parent, teacher, or other researcher. The contest is notable for producing winners who later go on to win a Nobel Prize. Westinghouse finalists from the 1940s through the 1970s were overwhelmingly male. The number of females among the top 40 finalists has increased since the 1980s and is approaching parity (Table 2)." all this hand wringing over women is clearly missing the real problem eh?
more proof the bias in education is against men. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8085011.stm Female students are ahead of men in almost every measure of UK university achievement, according to a report from higher education researchers.