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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.
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.
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.
We think (and so define in IQ calibration) that mean intelligence is the same for men and women.
And it's that calibration that's problematic here. The brains of men and women are typically very different, making them excel at different types of tasks. The modern IQ calibration manipulates weights for these tasks to give both an average score of 100. The result is politically correct, but makes IQ an even more worthless measure than it was before gender-balance calibration was introduced.
The other problem lies in people assuming that the average for a gender tells you anything about a particular individual. If women are better/worse at task X, this doesn't mean a woman who applied for a position that requires X is better or worse than a man whom you can pick or not over that woman.
The result? Giving preferential treatment to either group is wrong, and will hurt not only the group you discriminate against, but your profits as well. No matter whether your task is a biology researcher, a lumberjack or a kindergarten teacher, the only valid method of choosing is being totally gender- (and race-, and so on)-blind. That woman who applied for that lumberjack job? She probably has a clue what she does, and thus deserves a try at the chainsaw. This kind of self-selection is not free of biases, but it makes comparing averages for men-vs-women (or blacks-vs-whites-vs-polka-dotted) pointless.
Yes, such selection of merits will make your team not represent the diversity ratios of the general population -- that's expected.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
So men don't have to take care of a family?
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.
Men should, but historically (or at least the last ~200 years) men were expected to work outside the house (i.e., for money) and provide food and shelter for his family, and women were expected to keep the house in order and raise the kids. But it's been a common complaint of men - as long as people have been asking, anyway - that they weren't around for more of their kids' lives. The damage of social expectations cuts both ways here.
It's foolish and offensive to suggest that women weren't working all those years - of course they were, and hard, too. Someone has to do this work, though, and when both parents work it's left to cleaning services and daycare and so on, which has its own concerns. Companies are starting to get better about paternity leave, though, which is helping a bit. Men are actually picking up these "domestic" tasks at an increasing rate - though unfortunately it's more because men were disproportionately hurt in the workplace these past few years than an actual conscious choice. Still, there's biological factors that mean that women will likely outnumber men in their children's care - between breastfeeding, the rigors of childbirth, and hormonal effects that we call "bonding", mothers tend to be more attached than fathers. Not that fathers aren't strongly attached to their children, but oxytocin is a powerful hormone and most of its effects are female-specific...
I think more people would be at home with the kids if they could be, actually. Usually 2 parents need to work nowadays just to break into the middle class... Now that the stigma of "house-husband" is deteriorating somewhat, one wonders if men wouldn't prefer to stay home if their wife could provide for the whole family. I know I'd consider it, playing video games while the kids are at school and the housework is done... or if I got bored I could freelance with no pressure to actually make lots of money....
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
She can take 3 months off when we have a child and organize her work to be compatible with having a young child.
You know you live in the states when you think 3 months is a lot.
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?
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.
This effect isn't just about IQ - across many species and across many traits, males have more variance than females. This applies for tournament species, which are species where one winning male gets to procreate with many females, as opposed to a pair-bonding species where one male gets to bond with only one female. In tournament species, males that don't win over the other males in the area are a complete loss evolutionarily speaking. Winning requires being significantly better than average and higher variance makes that more likely. Humans are, which is unusual, in-between those two, so partly a tournament species and partly a pair-bonding species. So we do get more variance for males in various traits like IQ, but not to the same extent as in pure tournament species. That this isn't widely known is a total failure of education. ... uh, I mean, that's just science, of course everyone is precisely equal in every way, so there can be no such thing as variance, as we all know and no one would ever question.
Some fields really do require IQ >= 110 (one std above mean).
IQ is pseudoscience nonsense to begin with, but it appeals to simpletons due to its simplicity. Wouldn't it be convenient if we could tell how "intelligent" someone is by looking at a single number? Unfortunately, simplicity is not the same as truth.
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.
The problem now is, your voice of reason is drowned out by the thousands of feminazi websites, books, blogs, etc. etc.
Yeah, but the effect is that both parents are in full-time work by the time the child is two, who is then raised 7-8 hours a day in daycare. This is not exactly improving the child-parent relationship compared to one full-time carer until they reach school age.
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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.