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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.
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.
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?