[angryprofessor]

>So I don't know specifically why it is that parents, and others, discourage girls from business and technical areas in particular.

Not only technical areas, but also particular technical areas. What makes experimental physics less technical than theoretical, and chemistry less technical than physics?

Also, if you look at the percentage of women in technical fields, it does look like cultural barriers dropped. I.e., over the same timeframe that cultural barriers dropped in medicine, they dropped similarly in physics/engineering, causing women to increase from about 1970-1990. After 1990, the % women was roughly flat in all fields: in medicine at 50%, in physics at 20%.

Basically, womens liberation had the same qualtitative effect on physics that it had on medicine; only the magnitudes differ.

This strongly suggests that some other factor is keeping women out of technical fields. It could be cultural, but it's a completely different type of cultural barrier than the one that kept women out of medicine and physics up until the 1990's. It could also be biological, I don't see much evidence for or against that.

>One thing I can tell you is that women working in a field does not imply the problem is solved. First, they might be less skillful, on average. But second, they might have had to put in more effort to achieve the same level of skill, and that could be very hard to detect.

Lots of difficult to measure things are possible. I'll wait for evidence of them.

(*) By the way, I'm using physics/EE as a proxy for all technical fields, since I've been forced to sit through lots of meetings on that topic. Speaking openly in those meetings was frowned upon...

[curi]

It's easy to make up and describe a cultural factor that would explain the data. For example, the previous shift was about how adult women were treated in public -- open discrimination. The second shift will come when parents (and others) treat young children more equally in subtle ways. That's one possible cultural explanation, of many.

But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.

[angryprofessor]

>It's easy to make up and describe a cultural factor that would explain the data. For example, the previous shift was about how adult women were treated in public -- open discrimination. The second shift will come when parents (and others) treat young children more equally in subtle ways. That's one possible cultural explanation, of many.

You still need to explain why this affects physics, but not law.

This idea seems very weak when you look at gender gaps within fields. Most people barely know the difference between physics and chemistry (let alone theoretical vs experimental, or condensed matter vs high energy), yet there are gender gaps between them. Compare also web design to programming.

How can culture cause a disparity between things that the culture doesn't even know about?

>But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.

For business, aggression would be my best guess. Testosterone is known to cause aggression, and it is also known that men have more of it.

[curi]

> How can culture cause a disparity between things that the culture doesn't even know about?

There is all sorts of knowledge in our traditions, which no individual person understands. So, for example, suppose culture contains a trigger which causes parents to be more discouraging of one type of children's book than another, for girls. They could do this without understanding what's going on at all -- all they have to know consciously is that they like one book more than another.

Even if we don't know what kinds of books encourage people to become chemists, certainly we can imagine some books pull more in that direction than others. Because, for example, the skills they help create are more useful to doing chemistry, or lead to more trains of thought that bring up chemistry, or are more useful to understanding explanations of why chemistry is interesting and important. This is all very plausible, because we already know that books can help learn skills, help bring up trains of thought, etc, and already know that there are skills which help one become a chemist, there are trains of thought which help one see why becoming a chemist would be nice, etc And 'book' and 'chemistry' can be substituted with other things, like game, toy, activity, law, physics, etc, and still have similar effects.

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By what mechanism does testosterone cause aggressive personalities?

[angryprofessor]

>...So, for example, suppose culture contains a trigger which causes parents to be more discouraging of one type of children's book than another, for girls. ...

I could consider such explanations plausible for explaining gender gaps between law and chemistry.

But theoretical high energy physics vs experimental condensed matter physics? That sounds way too specific for a diffuse cultural cue that no one can identify.

>By what mechanism does testosterone cause aggressive personalities?

Hmm, I thought testosterone increased aggression, but a quick google search suggests the correlation goes the other way.

Nevertheless, it is known that most male mammals are more aggressive than females. Whatever the biochemical cause, this trait (in humans) could explain greater success/participation in business.

[curi]

But theoretical high energy physics vs experimental condensed matter physics? That sounds way too specific for a diffuse cultural cue that no one can identify.

That is hard to explain, with any method. (i.e., the correct explanation appears likely to depend on the complex relationship between lots of details). But I think at least our culture contains knowledge of what different types of physics are, whereas our genes don't.

Edit: And we know our culture created different types of physics and has mechanisms for people to learn about them, and to become interested in learning about them. it wouldn't be a huge shock if they had some quirks and biases in them.

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@testosterone: animals don't have personalities in the sense humans do. I'm asking for an explanation of a mechanism that would work on humans.

The primary issue is that humans have general intelligence, by which they normally make decisions. So the mechanism by which testosterone (or something else) works needs to either bypass intelligence somehow (but then you'd have to explain why it still constitutes part of someone's personality), or harness intelligence and work with/through it. No such issues arise in the animal case.

[angryprofessor]

The best explanation I've seen for the disparities within science is reasoning/mathematical ability. String theory () requires the most (all difficult math), experimental condensed matter requires much less.

By the way, I should have mentioned that these disparities exist after grad school, not among first year students. They appear after qualifying exams/coursework has weeded out the people who aren't super smart.

() I'm not a snobby string theorist, I do computational E&M. But string theorists are the smartest, for reasons I can explain another time.

As for hormones:

First, animals do have personalities, though they are different from humans.

Second, it doesn't need to bypass intelligence. Humans aren't computers with an "emotion" screensaver on the front. Humans make most decisions (partially) emotionally. Starting a business or choosing a field is not a purely rational decision, no matter what most business owners want to think.