[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.