[chesser]

"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields."

I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth.

Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one.

Further, this is an introductory course.

The overwhelming number of top scientists are male. IQ tests (FWIW) also place more males at both the top and bottom ends, with females clustered more around the middle. One interpretation there is that nature can afford to take more chances with males, so there are more extremes.

I can think of at least one factor that is physical, even though it doesn't have to do with mental capacity per se. A major impediment to learning tends to be psychological laziness; anything that gets us to push past this means we are using more of our capacity. Testosterone increases risk-taking behaviors and reduces complacency. This drive to constantly seek out the new and challenge the old might be sufficient by itself, even if there are no relevant neurological differences otherwise.

I also don't understand this push to try to equalize gender distribution. Even if the ONLY differences are social, it doesn't follow that it's better to socialize females in ANY given arbitrary manner just because they're female.

Clearly any field should be open to any individual who wishes to pursue it. Trying to equalize the numbers, given the current disparity, means pushing a lot of females into pursuing subjects they aren't interested in. Even if we posit that these fields have been traditionally male-biased, the majority of males are not interested in them.

This has to be open on an individual level, and whichever way it shakes out with regard to gender, it shakes out.

It's profoundly unfair to cite social differences and then blame colleges who only get people after 18 years of social indoctrination.

[pbhjpbhj]

>"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields."

I just thought more men preferred Physics.

Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them - like "damn that ToE is pretty compelling with great predictive powers and a beauty akin to the Maxwell equations but, y'know, we can't let it stand it's been formulated by a woman" ...

[Gianteye]

I'm sure a decent proportion of scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and folks in fields that tend to be dominated by men that couldn't give a toss for the gender of their fellow researchers. They couldn't care in the least who's publishing and who else inhabits their labs. They care about the truth.

Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women. If you look through James D. Watson's book The Double Helix, you'll see dozens of disparaging references to Rosalind Franklin[1], inditing her for such crimes as not wearing enough makeup, and being a woman running a chem lab.

I think the flavor of a field can be tinted strongly by edge cases. Although it is a form of confirmation bias, I believe people can't help applying extreme behaviors by individuals to their understanding of the group. I'm sure if I heard the president of some college spouting racial epithets, I'd look a little more sternly on the college as a whole and question how it treats its students. I would make the association that if someone with these views was allowed to become an authority, if it had taken a number of people who shared these views to allow them to get there.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin Rosalind Franklin had an incredibly fascinating life, and most likely would have been credited with a Nobel prize for the discovery of the DNA helix if she hadn't died before it was awarded. She actually died of ovarian cancer, caused by the xray machinery she operated in investigating the composition of the DNA crystal.

[chesser]

> Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women.

They are simply reflecting the social mores of their day. IBM had the socks and garter police -- for men! In addition, men tend to tease each other much worse than ragging on someone for not wearing enough makeup.

Additionally, we all carry the evolutionary legacy -- or baggage -- of the past. EVERY species with sexual reproduction discriminates according to gender!

Sexual competition enters the picture unavoidably as soon as you introduce a member of the opposite gender to a single-gender group.

If I have 5 guys in a room working on a startup, and I add a "cute girl", it will immediately change the dynamic and become a distraction and likely become divisive.

You're NOT going to be able to counter both biological and social factors built up over time.

I would hypothesize that if you took any productive small startup, and swapped out a male for a female of equal ability, it would probably destroy the cohesion.

[hugh3]

Y'know, I think it would be very interesting to answer the question of whether the observed gender gap in ability in the hard sciences is due to genetics or some other factor.

However it's a damn-near-impossible to do decent research on this question. There are only two possible answers, A and B, but if your results show A then you'll be lauded and become the subject of approving articles like this one, and if your results show B then you'll be condemned and possibly hounded out of your job like Larry Summers. When there's such an incentive to get the socially-approved answer rather than the scientifically correct answer, lousy research tends to proliferate.

[chesser]

In my above comment I worked out that there MUST be genetic differences.

Even if you start from a point of complete genetic equality in aptitude, all it takes is any kind of cultural or social bias to create a selection pressure which will lead to genetic difference.

Given the historically different roles of men and women, it would be vanishingly unlikely for there not to be genetic differences.

If being very good at a task leads to more reproductive success, and only one gender performs that task, then only one gender receives the benefits of that selection pressure (to the extent of sex-chromosome-specific loci).

On the flip side, there is evidence that being TOO much of an outlier is negative. The smartest people tend to be more socially marginalized, both voluntarily and involuntarily. So it's possible that the top people are essentially evolutionary mistakes (as they are LESS likely to reproduce), and as evolution seems to roll the dice more with males than females, more males will turn out like this.

In a post-Darwinian society, this all goes out the window. It's just a historical relic of not being able to tinker with our genome directly, and having to rely on sexual reproduction.

[aptimpropriety]

I am taking a class taught by the professor who wrote this book about the economics of higher education: http://www.amazon.com/Tuition-Rising-College-Costs-preface/d...

One of the more interesting things he went over from the book was the discrepancy between males and females in PhD in the hard sciences. While many claimed discrimination, what it turned out to be a slew of different issues. Except from his lecture, taken without permission:

Why Are Female Faculty Members Underrepresented at Research Universities Relative to Liberal Arts Colleges 1. Gender differences in preferences for teaching vs. research 2. Perceptions by female PhDs that research universities are not hospitable environments for them 3. Perceptions by female PhDs that there is more gender discrimination against female faculty at research universities 4. Actual gender discrimination against female PhDs in the hiring process and against female faculty in salary, tenure, promotion and resource allocation decisions at research universities 5. The difficulty of combining family and career at research universities

The remainder of my discussion is going to focus on the last explanation and discuss some policies designed to reduce these difficulties that have been implemented at the University of California. However, before doing so, I want to stress that issues relating to the conflict between family and career that professional women face are not unique to academia. For example, 1. Why are female lawyers underrepresented among the partners of large law firms? 2. Why are female doctors underrepresented among neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons and overrepresented among family practice physicians and pediatricians?

National Research Council Committee (that I served on) Survey In 2004-2005 the National Research Council Committee on Gender Differences in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics

Faculty surveyed departments in research universities in six disciplines – biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. A second survey surveyed over 1,800 faculty in these departments. Among its major findings were: 1. If a male and a female apply for the a position, the female is more likely to be invited for an interview 2. If a male and female are both interviewed for a position, the female is more likely to receive the job offer. Hence 3. Female under representation relative to their share of the new PhD pool is due primarily to their not applying for jobs at research universities as often as males do. Furthermore 4. Female assistant professors in these fields are more likely to leave their positions than their male colleagues prior to being considered for tenure. Given that they are considered for tenure, they are more likely to be promoted and receive tenure than their male colleagues, but their average time until receiving tenure is longer than their male colleagues’ average time 5. There were no differences in the probabilities of being promoted to full professor or the time it took to receive this promotion. Source: National Research Council, Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2009)

/end quote Granted, this does not directly apply to top scientists but I think many of you would agree that the fact that the volume of highly trained (read: PhD.) women scientists is significantly lower than that of men probably leads, in part, to the discrepancy among top scientists.

[chesser]

It's very plausible that older generations are much more sexist in certain ways. For example, Feynman getting the nearest "girl" to fetch his soup. http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-mac...

There is also the issue of having children. One article I read ascribed a great deal of disparity at the top simply to time: If you take time off from your career to raise children, you have thousands fewer hours to devote to your profession. Even if the male partner is willing and able to do the child-rearing, it doesn't follow that the female partner will therefore abdicate.

Assuming reproductive opportunities as a major driver of behavior, professional success leading to increased social status is a far larger differentiator in males. People are lazy and if they don't have to try hard in a certain category, they generally won't. This says nothing about males being smarter; simply that they try harder because they have to in order to get laid. (Or think they do.)

This is somewhat akin to an evolutionary arms race with predators and prey getting better each generation because their counterpart was better in a previous generation.

If a guy is a gamer, so what; everyone knows guys who are gamers. If a guy is a scientist, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. If a guy makes $100k a year, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. You have to do even better in order to stand out. (Note the attention you'd get, however, if you were a female in any of these categories.)

Likewise, nobody is surprised when Grandma can cook, to take a traditional gender example. But a guy who can cook like Grandma? Now that stands out.

So to some extent it doesn't even matter which gender did which thing -- divvied up randomly, whichever category is overrepresented may start a self-feeding evolutionary cycle within that category.

This could mean that something which was purely social ends up leading to a genetic difference. For example, male 3D spatial relation ability.

By the same token, I would expect female lions to be better at this than male lions!

By contrast, there is nothing about a female being predisposed to be a good scientist which would make you stand out as a good mate in, say, Saudi Arabia. And it could be downright dangerous in Afghanistan under the Taliban. If your abilities aren't recognized as a positive then they won't result in positive selection pressure.

All it takes is selection pressure and you eventually get a noticeable genetic difference. Social differences are a huge selection pressure, so it would be astounding if there WEREN'T genetic gender differences in aptitude for certain subjects.

Hmm, I think I just shot down the political correctness lobby by working from first principles.

[thisduck]

This also means that we can't necessarily derive what is good for X by what has generally happened with X. Or by genetic reasons either. If it's cyclical, it's cyclical both ways.