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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
That's so original! Anyone who questions IQ must have a low IQ! Never heard that one before.
Or you could grow a brain and realize that attacking the IQ I have in your imagination is not actually going to debunk anything I said; only putting forth a logical counterargument/evidence would do that. Put I suppose your critical thinking skills are a bit too low for you to figure out that spewing forth logical fallacies won't debunk people's statements.