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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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I have seen all of that. But when I say "speak" math, I don't mean "speak knowledgeably about math". I mean "speak it like a native speaker speaking in his own language". When I was a student I was a musician as well. I played in a couple of working bands and had a few solo gigs. I received several full ride offers to college. But it was because I worked my ass off. I was only modestly talented. When I started meeting people who were really destined to be musicians, the difference was trivial to spot. Where I was feverishly doing math in my head and transposing like a madman, they could do all of that deep in the background. When they played music, they were simply expressing ideas. Those thoughts came out through their hands as easily as you form your thoughts into words. It was both humbling and frustrating.
If you meet real math people, they are the same way. They have an intuitive understanding of the language of math that allows them to explore the world of physics and mathematics the way that you might explore the mall. A lot of it is practice - the hours of hard work that go in to reaching a certain level. But there is something more in a small percentage of people who are particularly gifted for the topic. Their ability to speak math as easily as you speak english allows them to explore their ideas much more rapidly and in a different way than I would. While I am busy translating from english to math and back again, they speak math in the native language. If you ever work with them, you'll know. There is no way to fake your way through it.... any more than Michael Jordan could fake his 44" vertical or Charlie Parker could fake his improv skills. If you are knowledgeable in the field it only takes a few moments to spot a virtuoso.
But you could be right about the kind of people who don't care about such things. Many people reach success because they ignore obstacles, perhaps they are even blind to them. People like Donald Trump come to mind.
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.
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.