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Study: Belief That Some Fields Require "Brilliance" May Keep Women Out

Posted by samzenpus on from the you-can-go-it dept.

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.

30 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. No surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:No surprise by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    2. Re:No surprise by Slashjones · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. Families by Iamthecheese · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Families by vinod4linux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So men don't have to take care of a family?

    2. Re:Families by slimjim8094 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    3. Re:Families by gordo3000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      THIS!

      Tons of my female friends, all extremely smart and hard working, decided to or are deciding to leave the workforce because they want to be the one to raise their kids. As one friend said, once your kids hit elementary school they will have their own friends and social circle and will be busy; the time until their 5 is precious, and you only get to go around once.

      Every friend who had a chance to stay at home has done it. Do I (a man) feel jealous? You bet your ass. All my female friends have been able to find work after 3-7 years out of the work force. Sure, they aren't as senior as they could have been, but there was very little negative association with their choice. Could I do that? Not in any country I Have lived so far. Everyone would assume I was wasting my time. I've been lucky, I've been in the midst of changing careers, had have been able to take quite a bit of time at home while my first born is really young but I know I won't be able to do that with his brothers and sisters. If I could just push pause on my career for the next several years and stay at home, I'd happily do that.

    4. Re:Families by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      come to Sweden where we moved out of the jurassic era a long time ago. I share the 18 months parental leave equally with my wife, since in Sweden we place value on raising our children and in involving both parents, partly for the sake of the parents and childs relationship but partly to avoid the trap of women automatically suffering from the career downsides and reduction in pension later in life.

    5. Re:Families by smallfries · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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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  3. Sounds fishy... by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Sounds fishy... by lgw · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      Not quite. Average IQ is the same for men and women, but the bell curve is flatter for men, with a longer tail. More women than men are close-to-average IQ, more men than women are far-from average IQ (in both directions).

      How important IQ is is a different question, but the measure is repeatable across a population - there's a real effect here.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  4. Re:Easy solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. What a bunch of fucking bullshit this is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Response Rate by PvtVoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Response Rate by PvtVoid · · Score: 3, Informative

      An N of 1800 isn't unacceptable, but the thing is studies like this very often use rigged questions designed to produce the answer the authors want.

      The N of the study isn't the only thing affecting the statistical significance. A response rate that low tells you that you very likely have hidden selection bias. In this case, the only people responding might well have been blowhard assholes with nothing better to do than respond to random surveys somebody emailed to them.

    2. Re:Response Rate by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Doing a survey is hard. There are so many subtle ways to mess it up (if you've taken a statistics class, you probably know at least a few).

      I've noticed that typically when scientists attempt to do a survey, surveying not being their area of expertise, they frequently make serious mistakes. Looks like that was the case here, too.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  7. It worked on me by Cytotoxic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It worked on me by slew · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What in the world that has to do with gender, I don't know.

      Actually, your response exemplifies the issue...

      You mentioned that you met folks and felt you didn't measure up.
      In my experience, many men in the same situation wouldn't factor in if they thought they measured up in their decision making.
      If they wanted to get into that field and they thought they had some aptitude, they would simply adopt a fake it until they made it approach.

      I think that is the part has to do with gender.

      Not that it's totally of biological gender origin, but probably mostly gender social conditioning in our society (although there may be some statistical gender bias when it comes to risk taking or blind confidence that is inherent in the fake it until you make it approach to life).

      As I've come to realize over time, there are quite a few people that appear to speak a language (say like math, or computer science) but sometimes are just faking their way through it with only a cursory understanding... Sadly, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between them in a general conversation (say like a 45 minute interview or in a social siutation)...

    2. Re:It worked on me by Shadow+of+Eternity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Gender factors in because women are preyed on by an ideology which floods them with messages of how weak, incompetent, and incapable they are and how desperately they need that exact ideology to solve all of their life's difficulties for them because anytime they feel challenged or face hardship it's actually because the world is completely rigged against them.

      --
      A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
    3. Re:It worked on me by Cytotoxic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  8. Better things to do.... by vanye · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  9. take my wife... please by crgrace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:take my wife... please by danbob999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:take my wife... please by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Funny

      FYI Mods, parent is not a troll, just European (Scandinavian I assume).

      Could be a Scandinavian troll.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  10. self esteem is not competence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. that shouldn't be surprising either by silfen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. women in science by ihtoit · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  13. Belief? by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  14. A shocking statistical insight by Livius · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  15. More propagandistic nonsense by Sqreater · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.