If you accept the idea that a penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people, then the odds of 55/56 men winning by chance are very, very, very low.
That gap also exists in the middle-school and high-school levels [0] (at least in the US), so it fully reduces to the simpler question of why that's true. We should be able to agree that by the time we're discussing professional mathematics there's no expectation that it would be randomly distributed among genders.
Still true globally at the high school level. Found some quora answers with perspectives on IOI(programming olympiad) and IMO(math olympiad) which both have low single digit percentage female participants:
All it would require is just that the standard deviation for math ability in men (whether by nature or nurture, I am making no judgment either way) is only very slightly higher than for women. Since we are looking at the tail of the distribution, the result would not be surprising.
I'm on my phone right now and can't redo it for the gender ratio of Fields medalists, but I expect that the effect would cover most of the difference, since the cutoff for the award does seem quite high.
> penchant for math is randomly distributed among all people
Fields medals are not awarded based on "penchant for math" though. And it surely isn't exactly fault of the prize committee that there aren't very many female mathematicians to choose from.
Note: I don't know if 55/56 is "correct" from the point of the actual numbers.
For the last 30 years over 40% of graduating math majors where where women. That drops to 15% of tenure track mathematicians being women, but again that's a long way to sub 2%.
This is the exactly the pattern you would expect to see though if the variance of mathematical ability is higher in men than in women, even if mean ability is precisely identical.
The sex ratio gets progressively more extreme as you go further out in the tails.
Not really, you get a fat tail effect at extreme ability reducing the differences. A more likely cause are highly capable women bailing on the field.
EX: Women live significantly longer on average and the oldest women lived 6 years longer than the oldest man. Yet, the 16th oldest person was a man and 6% of oldest 100 people where men. And 6% of the top 100 living people are men https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people
I'm not sure what you mean—why would you assume there is a fat tail expect in the first place, and not something approximating a normal distribution?
And even if you presume something like a Pareto distribution, the likelihood ratio between two distributions grow through the tails if their variance is not identical.
Based on a wide range of ability testing we see fat tails (edit: more black swans than expected), it would be more surprising if they where skinny.
Granted, we can't measure very high ability very well due to sampling bias. I am simply saying even if there is a modest bias that's not enough it would have to be huge to account for these numbers.
So, I am bringing up something else with the kind of distribution we are talking about which has more accurate data. Women live ~ 5% longer both looking at the average lifespans and oldest examples which is a very significant difference. Yet, the oldest population has more men in it than you would think.
Edit: Math: 6 year longer lifespan + 50% risk of death per year = you would expect ~1% of top 100 oldest people to be men.
One argument that some have is that men have a more extreme distribution of IQ and mathematical ability and when it comes to things like the Fields medal it is the few extreme ones that make an impact.
I don't know how well done those studies are though.
Ok, I can get you can somehow socialize a person to pretend be dumber than they are, but how do you socialize someone away from being dumb? And why does that not work for boys?
I think poor achool performance is more a function of behavioral issues than "being dumb" -- not because everyone is smart, but because the bar in your average American school is more about following directions than anything else. Boys lagging behind girls in social development is well-documented, right?
And at the Fields medal level it's less about "pretend you're not smart" and more about "we just don't think it's a good idea for you to skip grades".
There's tons of evidence. You can google as easily as I can.
The hard part is not the evidence, it's dealing with the social result. Do we as a culture decide "Yes, it might be true, but it's too harmful, so we will act as if it's false?"
Give extra tutoring to those lower on the scale, and withhold it from those higher, to try to even the balance?
Give special advantage to those lower? Is there a way to do that without disadvantaging others? What sort of advantage?
Something else?
Each of those options has pros and cons.
It should be discussed, but like I said, it's politically difficult, so people try not to talk about it.
The penchant for math is probably randomly distributed between men and women.
But all that is overshadowed by the fact that culturally and societally women are heavily discouraged from entering and succeeding in fields like math. This begins right from childhood, where an abacus may make a good toy for a boy, while the appropriate toy for a girl would be a mini kitchen set.
Fortunately a lot of this is changing, however, the benefits of no longer discouraging 50% of the population from entering science/engineering won't be felt for another couple of generations.
> The penchant for math is probably randomly distributed
between men and women.
Source?
> But all that is overshadowed by the fact that culturally and
> societally women are heavily discouraged from entering and succeeding
> in fields like math.
Source?
> This begins right from childhood, where an abacus may make a good toy for a boy,
> while the appropriate toy for a girl would be a mini kitchen set.
If you think about it, a 55/56 ratio (.98) is only commensurate with a distribution of mathematical talent by which the vast majority of women can't add 2 and 2 together.
Like, it would not even justified by women being "somewhat" less good at maths at the high level than men. Women would have to be really, really bad at maths for that to be a natural result.
To see why this is not true think about the average difference in men and women’s height and the relative prevalence of men and women among people 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9m tall, etc.
The difference with height is that you can train mathematical skill. For women
to be trying, presumably as hard as the men, to become good enough to be
elligible for a Fields medal, but (almost) never achieving it- they have to
really suck at maths to begin with.
Mathematical skill can be trainable without a huge difference in male/female representation implying women are unable to add two and two, your original bar for sucking at math.
There are many, many obviously trainable skills where the best men are very obviously superior to the best women, sports and athletics providing endless examples. I would be very happy just to finish a marathon but the Irish men’s world record is almost ten minutes faster than the woman’s world record.
[0] https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598 (admittedly a bit old; maybe a lot has changed in ~10 years?)