Slashdot Mirror
Study: Belief That Some Fields Require "Brilliance" May Keep Women Out
sciencehabit writes Certain scientific fields require a special type of brilliance, according to conventional wisdom. And a new study suggests that this belief, as misguided as it may be, helps explain the underrepresentation of women in those fields. The authors found that fields in which inborn ability is prized over hard work produced relatively fewer female Ph.D.s. This trend, based on 2011 data from the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, also helps explain why gender ratios don't follow the simplified STEM/non-STEM divide in some fields, including philosophy and biology, they conclude.
We think (and so define in IQ calibration) that mean intelligence is the same for men and women.
We know the deviation of intelligence is higher for men than women.
By selective bias many people end up thinking men are smarter than women (caused by selecting the top few which will be weighted towards men due to above).
Some fields really do require IQ >= 110 (one std above mean).
Between these three I would not be surprised if the effect is fully accounted for.
It's a statistical fact that many women make career choices that will or do give them time to take care of a family. This results in them earning lower pay and avoiding highly technical fields. Furthermore it's well known that a good portion of brilliance is dedication. To women considering a career knowing that "brilliance" is necessary is the same as knowing dedication and willingness to devote time to it is necessary -- to the exclusion of having a family that makes demands on one's time. Some women make that choice. Some don't.
As long as the choice is there; as long as the trade-off for women is the same as for men there's no sexism in this. And if a woman has a hard time finding a man willing to stay at home and support her, well, that's the choice men have and make and should be free to make. In fact to distort these fields by making it harder for men to enter, that's sexism. Let people make their own choices and stop trying to distort markets until reality matches certain twisted worldviews.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
There have been some assertions that there are more smart women on average than men, but that the men are better represented at the extremes. Which is to say, men are not as "smart" as women on average, but the few men that are brilliant outnumber the women. Of course, the flip side is that men have more complete idiots than the female gender does.
However, I'm not going to pretend that this doesn't sound suspicious. It could be that at levels of performance considered "brilliant" we undervalue characteristics that females are more likely to be "brilliant" at. It could simply be a bias towards actions a male might take.
Or alternately, the domain of the "brilliant" people is so small, that it is easy to make it an exclusive club. History shows us that this happens all too regularly. If you deny someone the resources (i.e. a lab, funding, space in a journal), even the smartest person cannot turn their potential into actual achievement.
That said, it is at the extremes like this that even relatively small differences become important. We know that men and women do have differences that are not as pronounced in most situations, but could become important in edge cases. I'd be interested in seeing some studies on this to prove or disprove that notion.
There are plenty of well paid jobs that are advertised as only requiring hard work and no particular brilliance.
Typically those jobs are in garbage disposal, the mining industry and such. Turns out men are vastly overrepresented there too.
Marie Curie?
Hedy Lamarr?
Brilliance not possible within women? Utterly preposterous.
Why do some fields not have as many women in them as men?
Because they're NOT INTERESTING TO THE WOMEN. Quit fucking deluding yourselves that men and women are totally and utterly identical in temperment, mental function, etc.- BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT.
Quit moaning about the lack of women in this or that- because there's not some fucking sinister motive or conspiracy going on. It's because of the very nature of humans that it's going on.
Cimpian, Leslie, and their co-authors say that their analysis considered other factors believed to depress female representation in academia, including women having different academic preferences and working fewer hours than men, and found them to be much less significant than the field’s believed importance of genius.
Why are there not as many women geniuses?
Right or wrong in perceived importance.
Isn't this worse than saying women just have different preferences?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
From TFA:
Only 6.5% of the 28,210 academics who were contacted provided usable data. But the authors say they corrected for that single-digit response rate, which they note is typical for surveys of academics, by weighting the respondents’ scores.
Translation: the study is total bullshit.
I don't know about women, but it certainly kept me out of theoretical physics. It also delayed my entry into the computer industry by about a decade.
As a student I loved cosmology and particle physics. Then I met the guys who were working on their PhD's. I was good at doing math. They spoke math. It was clear that they were in a different category from me, and even though I might be able to do it with hard work, I would never be one of them. At the time you had to be a math major to get a degree with a concentration in computer science. Again, I met folks who were real math majors. They also spoke math as easily as John Coltrane spoke music. I knew I could never compete in their world. So I didn't.
As it turns out, my friends in comp sci were right to encourage me to join them. Just because I was never going to be the next Alan Turing doesn't mean I couldn't have been doing good work.
Anyway, there is definitely something to the notion that certain fields appear to require a certain type of brilliance. Music. Athletics. Field theory. Topology... Fields like these all appear to require special gifts. LeBron James and Tiger Woods have abilities that 99% of us just don't have. The same goes for Eddie Vedder and John Lennon. Or Alan Guth. But that doesn't mean that you can't participate in athletics if you aren't Michael Jordan. There are gym coaches and trainers all over the place making a living in athletics. There used to be music teachers at all the elementary schools. And there are loads of people working in applied mathematics crunching numbers for companies and governments for various purposes, doing perfectly good work in a field they love without being a 1% talent.
But I certainly didn't believe that when I was 19 and trying to decide where to dedicate my life's work. So I agree with that part of the premise. What in the world that has to do with gender, I don't know.
Maybe the reason for only 30% of Philosophy PhDs being female is because it takes a bucket full of BS to do philosophy and women are too practical...
Or maybe they don't like wearing tweed and corduroy...
Take my wife as an example. She's incredibly smart, hard-working, and capable. She could be AT LEAST as good an engineer as I am. Why isn't she? Because she's smart enough to make a conscious choice to choose a field with better work-life balance than I did (engineering). She can take 3 months off when we have a child and organize her work to be compatible with having a young child. It's much harder for me.
I think she's smart.
So we shouldn't expect more than mediocre competence just so women feel less bad about themselves? Are they saying women are less capable of brilliance now? I can't believe that was intended, but sometimes I wonder if feminists get so wrapped up in their crusades, they miss (or purposely ignore) the logical missteps along the way.
"gender balanced" score
what is that?
Given the prevailing societal view that fewer women than men have special intellectual abilities..
“The argument is about the culture of the field,” Cimpian says. “In our current cultural climate, where women are stereotypically seen as less likely to possess these special intellectual gifts, emphasizing that those gifts are required for success is going to have a differential effect on men and women."
It's always a war against culture with these people. In reality, this is a fact, not a 'societal view'. Both genius and retardation are overrepresented in men.
The authors of this 'study' are likely biased and likely cherrypicking evidence to suit their position. Janet Hyde is not just a psychologist, she's a radical feminist.
A quick google search..
http://www.womenstudies.wisc.e...
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/0...
http://psych.wisc.edu/faculty-...
The article argues we should downplay competence and merit, and uprate effort and motivation. While the latter two are important, they cannot be the apex criteria when judging someone's output. Doing so undermines individual accomplishment and motivation. It also reenforces the relatively recent cultural intolerance for truth contradicting political correctness. Societies cannot function like this long term. If women want equal treatment and respect in a given field, they have to earn it in a meritocracy just like men. Attempts at bypassing it socially or legislatively just undermine the earning process from the get go. If the authors' argument is that women stay away because they can't emotionally handle the possibility of others (esp specific men) having innate superior ability, then the implication is they are not equally capable. The logic doesn't add up.
My guess is that you have no idea about modern mining. Lots of women there. Brute strength is no longer require.
The distribution of skill and intelligence in men and women is different. Although, on average, men and women are about the same, men have a higher variance. That means that if you look at the extremes of the skill/intelligence scale, you find a lot more men than women there. That's why men are overrepresented in mental institutions and prisons, as well as in professions requiring unusual skill. No amount of affirmative action or social policy is going to change basic human biology.
My guess is that you have no idea about modern mining. Lots of women there. Brute strength is no longer require.
Same with garbage disposal. You drive a truck, and operate the joystick that controls the robot arm that lifts and dumps the curbside containers. The garbage person that comes to my house never gets out of the truck.
I can name:
Heather Couper (astronomer, who (in keeping with the conversation) received a letter from the late, great Sir Patrick Moore when she was 16 that said, among other things, that being a girl would not be detrimental to a career in astronomy. That letter she read in its entirety at his memorial service.)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (made the first direct observation of a radio pulsar)
Jane Goodall (primatologist)
Hedy LaMarr (spare-time actress, primarily an inventor who gave us spread spectrum and randomised frequency hopping through her work on torpedo guidance systems)
Marie Curie (chemist/physicist, first double Nobel winner and only double winner in two different fields)
Merit-Ptah (earliest known named female physician)
Aglaonike (Greek astronomer who developed an accurate mathematical model to predict eclipses)
Mary the Jewess (invented the double boiler)
Florence Nightingale (established the London School of Nursing and laid the framework for the NHS which wasn't to bear fruit until after her death)
There are MANY more. I don't get what the problem is except the *lack of public acknowledgement of women in science* which can be placed entirely on the shoulders of the Church.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Success in pretty much every field depends on brilliance, enthusiasm and perseverance in roughly equal measure. If you have 2 out of 3, you will probably earn a good living. It's unlikely that all 3 are significantly correlated with gender in any field, be it software development or early childhood education. If you live in United States and rule out a career path based on your gender, you likely have to do some work on yourself rather than blaming any external factors.
This so called "brilliance" is called skill. Special snowflakes like feminists have no concept of learning skills applicable to the workplace, unless it's filing superfluous sexual harassment lawsuits, or causing a stink to make her special snowflakes look superior to beta males.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
The summary, and article, are predicated on the notion that it can't be true that certain occupations require inborn ability.
The truth is, people are born with certain talents and abilities. Some are good at art, some are good at science,, some are good at teaching. Why do we keep trying to force everyone to be equally good at everything?
As Scott Adams pointed out once (or something very close), these sorts of preconceptions might be keeping 99.999% of women out, but they're also keeping 99.99% of men out too.
I sent a doe eyed freshman to the woman's studies department to see the nurseries and kitchens.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What gets consistently overlooked, intentionally by the extremist feminists (not sure about you), is that women are the only gender that can carry a baby to term and breast feed the child. In other words, this should be a decision that BOTH parents make when THEY decide to have children. Stop with the bullshit about how the women make sacrifices to have children, it's not a sacrifice. If you want to be a woman with a career then commit and do not have a family. Be honest about it with your partner, because men more often than not want to have children just like women do. Raising a family is a choice, not a sacrifice. Further, it's a much more beneficial choice for society in most cases.
This constant bullshit with us vs. them is despicable, so stop playing the extremists game. BOTH parents are essential for raising children, and mothers are essential for bringing a kid into the world and breast feeding (or bottle feeding breast milk) which is far superior in every way to formula... barring of course rare conditions. There is far more to life than sitting in an office all day and being able to afford the newest gizmos and gadgets, bragging about how big your bonus was. Those same things last forever. The legacy you leave is not how good your credit score was, it's how you bring in the next generation to hopefully improve the world.
Stop repeating the bullshit and actually investigate facts. Measure and weigh those facts, and trust me.. there are plenty of arguments to counter the extreme feminist opinion (read "bullshit) that unfortunately does not get plastered all over media. Many of these studies and opinions are from female psychologists, sociologists, and medical professionals.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Statistically, women are bad at spatial reasoning. There are many sociological and political reasons for this, of course, and there is even a natural component. Even the same woman, when at a point in her cycle where testosterone is low, performs worse at spatial reasoning than when her testosterone is high.
But regardless of the source, the good news is that spatial reasoning can be taught.
it's like, so like, unfair to women. I mean, like, we women, like, just know we can be brilliant. It's just so like, 1950s, which was, like, centuries ago.
There are many fields where everyone needs to pitch in and the collective efforts sum up to a result. Digging ditches would be an example. Teaching would be another. One brilliant teacher can't teach millions; but one brilliant teacher can raise the bar with the rest expected to follow. But in theoretical science being a hard working slightly intelligent person is only going to result in a mild contribution at best. Only a very very few extremely brilliant people move things forward. In the more applied areas of science such as food testing hard work is a perfectly viable substitute for brilliance. It really annoys me when the mediocre try and say all the great science is now done by groups. That is true in that all the mediocre science is done by groups of mediocre scientists. But it is still the Feynman sitting alone in a room who make the leaps that everyone else then follows and fills in the blanks.
I see this in Computer Science every day. There are those vast majority of programmers who are rarely using any math beyond X++ and there are those who are taking an ML and figuring out ways to take some aspect of it to the next level.
Rarely is the brilliance separate from hard work but 99% of PhD theses could be and are completely ignored. That was a whole lot of hard work that went into them. But then there are people like Higgs who's hard work + brilliance resulted in the creation of the LHC to verify his brilliance; done by groups of people who worked very hard. I suspect that many of the best bits of the LHC were created by a very very small number of very brilliant people while the rest was plodded in to place by the merely very smart.
What is with the spate of "studies" lately that are focused on assigning blame for gender disparities in certain fields on something other than free will?
That's... probably more sexist than what they're attempting to study. What they're saying is that either women are incapable of brilliance, or they're so insecure that they get scared off by big hefty expectations. Holy shit, guys. Was this found in a time capsule from the 50s or something?
There are fields such as chemistry that are now so advanced and exotic that a person needs to be at near genius level to be much good at all. And these days colleges offer a bit of social promotions and give degrees to people who should never have them. So naturally a major employer will seek credentials from select universities as well as other proofs of recognized brilliance. A slightly above average mind who plods along in a very dedicated way has little chance to succeed in certain fields even with decades of training. That is why we see places like CERN with so many students and advanced scientists mulling over problems and getting inputs from hundreds of bright minds as they inch along towards progress. This follows a certain natural order of things. Just as everyone can never hope for success as a pro basketball player everyone can not hope for success in many technical fields and there is nothing that can change that.
Why was the expectation for not just the last few hundred years, but thousands of years, that men worked to provide for the family and the mother raised the family and took care of the house? This is not a difficult question to answer, but should answered be for a rational discussion. No, it's not bias. The mother is the only parent that can give birth, and in most cases families consist of more than 1 child. This means that a woman would need to take a lot of time away from their potential career to have the family because nature designed our bodies differently. Two years of stress on their bodies, and recovery from child birth which is a huge stress on their bodies. And the two years assumes that everything goes fine with the two pregnancies and child births. The obvious choice for taking care of the home is the woman who is birthing, the only one that can feed the baby, etc.. etc.. (averages, not the select few that could afford wet nurses).
This idea that women should be working and the family paying someone else to clean the home, cook their meals, educate the kids, etc.. is new to human nature. As with above, averages and not the select few that could afford servants. As to whether or not this is progress is a matter of opinion, and I probably disagree with you since I have changed my opinion of this arrangement drastically in the last 20 years after a lot of research.
That's not to say that women should be treated differently (worse or better) in the workplace if they decide to work. It is a statement that in my opinion society has gone ass backwards with the push for this arrangement in terms of priorities. A woman being able to stay at home and take care of the home used to be a very respectable thing. Moms that worked prior to the 1900s were those in poverty that had no choice but to work. The men who's wives had to work were often looked down upon for not being able to support their family. Today, we have glamorized the same scenario and it seems like the children are the ones who suffer the most in this arrangement. We have also labeled women who decide to raise a family labels criticizing them for their choice.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I promise this will be interesting to you.
I used to have a huge ego. I still do, but I used to, too. Anyway I consider myself brilliant. I've never met anyone else in the world who is brilliant, and don't care about anyone else's thoughts - for example, I'll read them, but I don't care all that much about all of your thoughts in these comments. (You can make a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder if you would like but I provide some evidence below.)
I'll ask people their thoughts but I don't respect them very much (usually consider them obviously wrong), and if I need brilliance I have to go to my own thoughts. Of course, people can be extremely informative and have a wealth of information, which I do seek out - they're just not brilliant. For the brilliance I have to get the information from people, which takes a lot of work (people certainly know more than me), and then use it myself - I can't rely on other people's brilliance, because other than myself I've never met anyone brilliant. So, even if I don't know anything about a subject, if I need brilliance I'll need to get the facts and information from someone else and produce it myself. There is just nobody else brilliant in the world I've ever met.... With 1 exception. Some years ago I had met a second brilliant person. So, now, I do know a second brilliant person in the world.
Now, here's the thing. This person happens to be female.
So, fuck you. In my personal experience, a full 100% of all brilliant people (other than me) are female. If I want the opinion of someone brilliant other than myself, I can ONLY ask a woman, because all other brilliant people in the world (that I've met) are a woman.
(also for something for you to think about - the person with the highest recorded IQ happens to be a woman, Marilyn vos Savant. But I'm more brilliant than her, she doesn't qualify as brilliant for me and I don't care about or seek out her thoughts, even if I could be in touch with her. she's just not interesting.[1] but her IQ is highest, and of course higher than mine. She's never produced a single result though.)
So anyway, other than myself personally, the only brilliant person in the entire world that I have any access to (including email, whatever), is a woman. With those kinds of numbers, this article is silly.
--
[1]
a bit of proof. I read the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant where it says under "Errors in colum",
This is an elementary problem (as in, I learned the solution from probability in grade school). Before reading further, I simply found the answer like this. I agree that if you replace the 100 names each time, you get 25% per quarter. To find the probability that someone isn't drawn for 4 quarters, you are supposed to simply subtract from 1 the chance that they repeatedly aren't chosen: so, I put into google 1 - 0.75*0.75*0.75*0.75 and got 68.35%, which is the chance that they will be drawn at least once. (Conversely, and obviously, they have a 0.75*0.75*0.75*0.75 chance of not being drawn at all. This is pretty obvious and intuitive. To not get tails 4 times in a row is 0.5^4 (you have to keep getting heads), and so to get tails at least once is the rest of the cases, i.e. 1 - 0.5^4). This is something you DO have to learn, it's sort of a trick. If you didn't know it you wouldn't know how to figure out the chances of getting at least 1 tails if you fli
One of the supposed gender differences that I think does ring true is the idea that men can focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else more than women typically do. Thus, gamers/coders/hackers/etc who would forego food, water, sleep, changes of clothing to pursue what they are interested in. For things that are done by individuals, rather than cooperatively, this matters.
History is replete with examples of men who were like this, Thomas Edison, Karl Marx, early Bill Gates, etc... - I don't see as many women who were like this.
It's not so much brilliance that makes for success in technical fields as it is the willingness to focus - completely - on something.
Not sure why you left out something so obvious.
The small number of women that made it as far as enrolling in engineering at the same time as I did well once they managed to get into University. For a variety of reasons many girls that had at least as much potential as the boys in the class didn't get to study enough, maths, physics etc to get in.
We still get it today, for instance my nieces son is going to be enroled in an expensive school while her daughter has to put up with the local government school. The government school may be quite good but that situation is an example of allocating more resources to the son who is expected to follow in the footsteps of his conservative lawyer father while the daughter's education is not seen to matter.
Young boys today are being taught terrifying things about competition and quotas that should only happen in some kind of communist planned-society.
Schools, testing, curricula -- everything is increasingly oriented towards girls.
| Not only are these scientific fields sexist, but this study comes to sexist conclusions as well. I'm sad to see slashdot has chosen to post it. No idea why was this modded as a troll. You might not like it, but it is the reality.
So, how do you explain the lack of men in fields like Therapy, Counseling, Teaching, Nursing, etc?
Could it possibly be that women value socially oriented work more than men, you know, because that would be backed up by the sex differences we see in introversion/outgoingness in the Big Five Personality Traits studies. Oh, but don't cite that, because those researchers' cross cultural studies show that more egalitarian countries have even greater gender differences. Yep. That means if there are few women in some fields and few men in other fields, that the society is actually better off -- Probably because men and women are different and they're freer to express these differences in freer societies.
Could it be that the bogie man of sexism in tech that everyone is jumping at is just their own evolutionary shadows? Couldn't it be that men and women just LIKE different things? 40 years of feminism and they've not done ONE study to disprove the null hypothesis? Where's the ONE fucking study to poll women and men about what jobs they ACTUALLY like doing? You know, to see if that matches up with the actual numbers of people in those jobs? Norway (voted the most equal country) knows what's up: This SJW nonsense is just that.
Equal opportunity does not yield equal results. It would be moronic to think that the biggest and most complex and expensive organ (the brain) has been immune to the sexual dimorphism that gave men and women incredibly different bodies. Yeah, fun fact, Social Justice Warriors have been censoring MEDICAL SCIENCE to further their "equality" agenda, even if it means incorrect drug dosages for men and women, girls and boys.
Women are just as brilliant as men in about the same percentage. And to advance sate of the art in many fields of science does in fact require brilliance. I don't know if the sexism or ignorance is more offensive.
Statistically women excel at intuition and non-linear thinking which can be much more useful is say theoretical physics that high spatial ability. Guys don't perform well when there testosterone is low either.
Depends where you are in the world, here in the UK domestic bin collection is done typically with a crew of three or four, one to drive, two to collect the main bins and one to collect the ancillary bins (food waste). No other way to do it, British residential streets just aren't built for a truck that can grab bins itself, as there will almost always be parked cars in the way.
"He and his colleagues also conclude that their findings help explain why African-Americans are underrepresented in STEM professions while Asian-Americans are not."
But isn't the stereotype (not without basis) of the Asian-American an average or slightly above average student who is driven (perhaps by his "tiger mom") to excel through hard work and practice rather than innate brilliance?
This would seem to argue against their findings, not be supported by them.
Endless stories about women not getting into given careers. Enough. If you want women to join those careers then stop giving them the choice not to join those careers. Because they are not in these careers because of their CHOICES.
if you don't like the choices women are making then whine at THEM. Neither men, nor companies, nor the universities are excluding women. They simply do not exist in these fields in the numbers that the stats weenies desire. End of discussion.
No really. Shut the hell up unless you can show systematic CAUSAL gender bias. Not just "well women aren't here so clearly it must be sexism". That is bullshit for same reason that there are lots of jobs that women tend to dominate and men don't say "well that's clearly sexism"... it isn't. Some jobs women don't want to do and some jobs men don't want to do. Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Well, if that was true, then they wouldn't feel so insecure about their abilities that they fear competing with them in the market place.
Zero out of twenty-nine women made it through the U.S. Marine Corp. combat officer training course. Now there is talk about lowering the standards. Gynocentric gender-leveling is destroying excellence, even to the point of endangering our ability to fight and win future wars. It won't surprise me if there are quotas imposed in science and technology to the detriment of advance in all subject areas.
E Proelio Veritas.
Maybe you need to play more sega cd. Sewer shark makes you smarter.
It's much the same in Chicago, except that is not the reason for three/four man crews.
It's called labor unions.
Yeah, not so much here. Unions here get to bitch and moan a bit, perhaps call a strike, but generally get nowhere.
Oh, and if your name is Mick Cash, and you speak for the RMT Union, you also get to make up bullshit conspiracy theories and claim that a national package delivery company is equal in importance to the country as banks, so why isn't the government rescuing them? Despite the fact that everyone in the UK went "yay, finally" when said package delivery company went under, and no one has stopped receiving parcels since.
Where did you get that from? Did anybody say that brilliance is not possible within women?
... round up women at gunpoint and MAKE them enter under represented fields.
I mean, Equality is ore important than Liberty, right?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
If your level of standards is that then it's not really very high. Maybe you should meet more people?
Toronto outsourced half the garbage collection, crew size stayed the same, except the private company doing it now demands the wheelie bins be positioned in one exact certain way as they sit on the curb. The unionized workers never demanded any such thing. Oh, and it didn't save nearly the money that our former outsourcing-crazed mayor claimed it would. I'm sure he got a nice kickback from the company though.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If you listen to people who tell you that your are dumb, maybe you are dumb.
sounds legit
no, it's not my level of standard just an example so it doesn't come off as a troll. I meet thousands of people and am in touch with dozens of quite famous thinkers. I just don't as a rule value their "brilliance" and can't ask for it on demand. Contrary to my writing above the truth I do respect their thoughts and seek them out often. They just can't produce brilliance on the spot and none of them is one that I specifically have to go to for brilliance. that can only come from me, or the 1 other person I've mentioned so far. Of course I'm open to meeting more :)
In my experience "genius" and "brilliance" tend to necessarily involve the ability to monomanically focus on things in a way which, socially speaking, is 'self centered'. We socialize that tendency out of most people, and particularly out of women.
Seriously, seems legit.
Was that Rob Ford you're talking about?
Toronto outsourced half the garbage collection, crew size stayed the same, except the private company doing it now demands the wheelie bins be positioned in one exact certain way as they sit on the curb. The unionized workers never demanded any such thing. Oh, and it didn't save nearly the money that our former outsourcing-crazed mayor claimed it would. I'm sure he got a nice kickback from the company though. [emphasis added]
That was cocaine, not outsourcing that your mayor was crazed on.
Wild guess - mid 90s?