Study: Belief That Some Fields Require "Brilliance" May Keep Women Out 218
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.
Families (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Families (Score:5, Insightful)
Men should, but historically (or at least the last ~200 years) men were expected to work outside the house (i.e., for money) and provide food and shelter for his family, and women were expected to keep the house in order and raise the kids. But it's been a common complaint of men - as long as people have been asking, anyway - that they weren't around for more of their kids' lives. The damage of social expectations cuts both ways here.
It's foolish and offensive to suggest that women weren't working all those years - of course they were, and hard, too. Someone has to do this work, though, and when both parents work it's left to cleaning services and daycare and so on, which has its own concerns. Companies are starting to get better about paternity leave, though, which is helping a bit. Men are actually picking up these "domestic" tasks at an increasing rate - though unfortunately it's more because men were disproportionately hurt in the workplace these past few years than an actual conscious choice. Still, there's biological factors that mean that women will likely outnumber men in their children's care - between breastfeeding, the rigors of childbirth, and hormonal effects that we call "bonding", mothers tend to be more attached than fathers. Not that fathers aren't strongly attached to their children, but oxytocin is a powerful hormone and most of its effects are female-specific...
I think more people would be at home with the kids if they could be, actually. Usually 2 parents need to work nowadays just to break into the middle class... Now that the stigma of "house-husband" is deteriorating somewhat, one wonders if men wouldn't prefer to stay home if their wife could provide for the whole family. I know I'd consider it, playing video games while the kids are at school and the housework is done... or if I got bored I could freelance with no pressure to actually make lots of money....
Re:Families (Score:5, Interesting)
THIS!
Tons of my female friends, all extremely smart and hard working, decided to or are deciding to leave the workforce because they want to be the one to raise their kids. As one friend said, once your kids hit elementary school they will have their own friends and social circle and will be busy; the time until their 5 is precious, and you only get to go around once.
Every friend who had a chance to stay at home has done it. Do I (a man) feel jealous? You bet your ass. All my female friends have been able to find work after 3-7 years out of the work force. Sure, they aren't as senior as they could have been, but there was very little negative association with their choice. Could I do that? Not in any country I Have lived so far. Everyone would assume I was wasting my time. I've been lucky, I've been in the midst of changing careers, had have been able to take quite a bit of time at home while my first born is really young but I know I won't be able to do that with his brothers and sisters. If I could just push pause on my career for the next several years and stay at home, I'd happily do that.
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All my female friends have been able to find work after 3-7 years out of the work force. Sure, they aren't as senior as they could have been, but there was very little negative association with their choice.
The whole point of TFA is that in certain fields there are negative associations for women, and presumably for men if they were to take a few years off. Wanting to have time off for a family, or any kind of sane family/work balance while employed is seen as being incompatible with "brilliance".
This is a real and quite common issue for women and men. Wanting to have a work/life balance is seen as weak or a lack of dedication. Some people abuse this by working longer to get ahead, and a lot of people see that
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wow, you didn't even read the article then. The point of the article, to summarize is:
Fields in which inborn ability or unteachable talents are prized produce fewer female PhDs than those where sustained effort and hardwork are valued (believed to be important by participants in that field).
The study in no way links brilliance or that inborn talent with long work hours.
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the time until their 5 is precious, and you only get to go around once.
And since many people have two children a few years apart, that means about 6-10 years missing during the woman's most productive years. Definitely hurts their chances at higher jobs.
mostly, but you miss something (Score:2)
Why was the expectation for not just the last few hundred years, but thousands of years, that men worked to provide for the family and the mother raised the family and took care of the house? This is not a difficult question to answer, but should answered be for a rational discussion. No, it's not bias. The mother is the only parent that can give birth, and in most cases families consist of more than 1 child. This means that a woman would need to take a lot of time away from their potential career to ha
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come to Sweden where we moved out of the jurassic era a long time ago. I share the 18 months parental leave equally with my wife, since in Sweden we place value on raising our children and in involving both parents, partly for the sake of the parents and childs relationship but partly to avoid the trap of women automatically suffering from the career downsides and reduction in pension later in life.
Re:Families (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but the effect is that both parents are in full-time work by the time the child is two, who is then raised 7-8 hours a day in daycare. This is not exactly improving the child-parent relationship compared to one full-time carer until they reach school age.
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Yeah, but the effect is that both parents are in full-time work by the time the child is two, who is then raised 7-8 hours a day in daycare. This is not exactly improving the child-parent relationship compared to one full-time carer until they reach school age.
As an educationalist I have to mention that this is simply untrue. The quality of the child-parent relationship doesn't correlate with daycare. At all. That relationship is mainly synonymous with a strong sense of trust (or successfull bonding, the e.g. the attachment theory by Bowlby, if you want to read more).
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I can't quote directly as my phone is playing up, but is the evidence really that clear cut? I found three studies that claimed the opposite: famous controversial one from the 80s, a Canadian one from the 90s and a later American one. I also remember that when we were finding a place for our child there were specific guidelines limiting hours per week at different ages to prevent developmental problems.
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It would stop employers discriminating against women of childbearing age, because the risk would then apply equally to men. Such discrimination might be illegal now, but it won't actually stop until the economic incentive is removed.
If men are paid more (due to historical sexism or whatever) they are actually likely to take a GREATER share of paid parental leave so that their partner can be the one to take an unpaid career break when t
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Won't happen because the N.O.W. and major feminist groups oppose it. Also in order there is no wage gap and Sweden's basically a country where tumblr has a political party, they've got plenty of problems in the other direction.
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It's a statistical fact that many women make career choices that will or do give them time to take care of a family.
That has been my experience in the workplace. It sits with career/life choices. There are also men who make similar choices. But largely since we cannot get away from the physical apparatus of sex, the female has a larger share for good or evil.
This results in them earning lower pay and avoiding highly technical fields.
This is really two things in my judgement. Yes indeed, if you choose to take a lot of time off to have a family, then stay at home for the max time allowed, you simply are not at work as
Biology (Score:2, Insightful)
What gets consistently overlooked, intentionally by the extremist feminists (not sure about you), is that women are the only gender that can carry a baby to term and breast feed the child. In other words, this should be a decision that BOTH parents make when THEY decide to have children. Stop with the bullshit about how the women make sacrifices to have children, it's not a sacrifice. If you want to be a woman with a career then commit and do not have a family. Be honest about it with your partner, beca
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This is true, but also misses a key point.
What you say would make perfect sense in some kind of libertarian paradise.
But let's consider something.
Most of the world has labor laws of some kind. But let's talk about the western world which has more labor laws. Everything for overtime pay, 40 hour work week, vacation, sick pay...
We have these to ensure a 'decent' life and the net result is we actually PREVENT people from competing in these areas. I'm not here to debate the effectiveness of these policies, but
Sounds fishy... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds fishy... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not quite. Average IQ is the same for men and women, but the bell curve is flatter for men, with a longer tail. More women than men are close-to-average IQ, more men than women are far-from average IQ (in both directions).
How important IQ is is a different question, but the measure is repeatable across a population - there's a real effect here.
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IQ tests may or may not be good but none of the things he said tell us that.
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This effect isn't just about IQ - across many species and across many traits, males have more variance than females. This applies for tournament species, which are species where one winning male gets to procreate with many females, as opposed to a pair-bonding species where one male gets to bond with only one female. In tournament species, males that don't win over the other males in the area are a complete loss evolutionarily speaking. Winning requires being significantly better than average and higher var
What a bunch of fucking bullshit this is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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yes, that Hedy Lamarr. She gave us spread spectrum (which is why your computer works) and frequency hopping (which is why your cellphone works).
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No, Hedy Lamarr invented a particular mechanical way to achieve frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) using paper player piano rolls.
FHSS was actually invented by Tesla, who patented the idea in 1903, and there were various implementations of it by WWI.
Moreover, direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) was actually only made practical through the "noise wheel" work of Mortimer Rogoff around 1950. His work was kept secret for over 30 years, which is part of the reason why few people know of him.
Hedy Lamarr
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FHSS patent: 1942: http://www.google.com/patents/... [google.com], Lamarr/Antheil.
Wasn't actually implemented by the US Navy until after the patent expired.
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Oh boy. (Score:2)
Cimpian, Leslie, and their co-authors say that their analysis considered other factors believed to depress female representation in academia, including women having different academic preferences and working fewer hours than men, and found them to be much less significant than the field’s believed importance of genius.
Why are there not as many women geniuses?
Right or wrong in perceived importance.
Isn't this worse than saying women just have different preferences?
Response Rate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I'd be curious about the response rate for the different fields of study. Did Humanities and Social fields have greater response rates then others; becuase that would introduce an unaccounted for bias?
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An N of 1800 isn't unacceptable, but the thing is studies like this very often use rigged questions designed to produce the answer the authors want.
Re:Response Rate (Score:4, Informative)
An N of 1800 isn't unacceptable, but the thing is studies like this very often use rigged questions designed to produce the answer the authors want.
The N of the study isn't the only thing affecting the statistical significance. A response rate that low tells you that you very likely have hidden selection bias. In this case, the only people responding might well have been blowhard assholes with nothing better to do than respond to random surveys somebody emailed to them.
Re:Response Rate (Score:5, Insightful)
I've noticed that typically when scientists attempt to do a survey, surveying not being their area of expertise, they frequently make serious mistakes. Looks like that was the case here, too.
It worked on me (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It worked on me (Score:5, Insightful)
What in the world that has to do with gender, I don't know.
Actually, your response exemplifies the issue...
You mentioned that you met folks and felt you didn't measure up.
In my experience, many men in the same situation wouldn't factor in if they thought they measured up in their decision making.
If they wanted to get into that field and they thought they had some aptitude, they would simply adopt a fake it until they made it approach.
I think that is the part has to do with gender.
Not that it's totally of biological gender origin, but probably mostly gender social conditioning in our society (although there may be some statistical gender bias when it comes to risk taking or blind confidence that is inherent in the fake it until you make it approach to life).
As I've come to realize over time, there are quite a few people that appear to speak a language (say like math, or computer science) but sometimes are just faking their way through it with only a cursory understanding... Sadly, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between them in a general conversation (say like a 45 minute interview or in a social siutation)...
Re:It worked on me (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I have seen all of that. But when I say "speak" math, I don't mean "speak knowledgeably about math". I mean "speak it like a native speaker speaking in his own language". When I was a student I was a musician as well. I played in a couple of working bands and had a few solo gigs. I received several full ride offers to college. But it was because I worked my ass off. I was only modestly talented. When I started meeting people who were really destined to be musicians, the difference was trivial to spot. Where I was feverishly doing math in my head and transposing like a madman, they could do all of that deep in the background. When they played music, they were simply expressing ideas. Those thoughts came out through their hands as easily as you form your thoughts into words. It was both humbling and frustrating.
If you meet real math people, they are the same way. They have an intuitive understanding of the language of math that allows them to explore the world of physics and mathematics the way that you might explore the mall. A lot of it is practice - the hours of hard work that go in to reaching a certain level. But there is something more in a small percentage of people who are particularly gifted for the topic. Their ability to speak math as easily as you speak english allows them to explore their ideas much more rapidly and in a different way than I would. While I am busy translating from english to math and back again, they speak math in the native language. If you ever work with them, you'll know. There is no way to fake your way through it.... any more than Michael Jordan could fake his 44" vertical or Charlie Parker could fake his improv skills. If you are knowledgeable in the field it only takes a few moments to spot a virtuoso.
But you could be right about the kind of people who don't care about such things. Many people reach success because they ignore obstacles, perhaps they are even blind to them. People like Donald Trump come to mind.
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I don't think the OP has ever met a real 1%, or maybe even a real 10%... because you're spot on, if you're in the 60%, they stand out almost immediately (as do the fakers).
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It isn't as easy to spot the "fakers" as you might imagine. Especially if you don't speak the same "language".
A personal example come to mind when I say this. A very good friend of mine has a very deep background in math and statistics, but from an economics background. My math and statistics background is mostly physics and control theory based. Over time we've worked with quite a few people and although I was quite able to tell people that were faking through the math when we talked an engineering lang
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I don't know. I meet a lot of folks (even physics PhDs) who are just super impressed with my ability to see mathematical answers. I've always been very good, but then, when I was 2 or 3 I wanted to learn how to count to a million in different languages and I was lucky to be surrounded by people who here and there helped nurture that interest.
Then I have met a few folks who are so unbelievably fluent that I just fall over watching them work. But after years of going both ways, I have realized that ability
Re:It worked on me (Score:4, Insightful)
Gender factors in because women are preyed on by an ideology which floods them with messages of how weak, incompetent, and incapable they are and how desperately they need that exact ideology to solve all of their life's difficulties for them because anytime they feel challenged or face hardship it's actually because the world is completely rigged against them.
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Yeah, I have no idea why gender is relevant here specifically. But in my experience women are more put off by the threat of mediocrity, so perhaps being told "you'll probably never truly excel in this" is more off-putting to them. Men are generally fairly mulish as well, and will (in my experience, of myself as well as others) generally take discouragement as a challenge. It's a cliche, but there's some truth to the idea that "you tell a man not to do something, that's the first thing he wants to do" while
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Some people fear math too much. Yes, it requires work to master, but it can be done by anyone.
Fully agree.
As far as things like programming are concerned learning underlying theory(in this case mathematics) will save you time, because without it you'll end up reinventing things that were already discovered in middle ages.
Such as? De Morgan's Theorem is the only semi-mathematical concept that I remembering getting benefit from in general programming.
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Like a supermodel (Score:2, Troll)
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It's not. How could it be? What is prized is your ability to do math or model clothes. No one knows or cares if that ability was a result of natural talent, hard work or a blood pact with the devil.
Better things to do.... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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It's got to be the tweed and corduroy. Women are fine with BS, I'd go so far as to say they love BS. They sure demand a buttload (do some black box testing, don't call me a sexist until you do).
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take my wife... please (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:take my wife... please (Score:5, Insightful)
She can take 3 months off when we have a child and organize her work to be compatible with having a young child.
You know you live in the states when you think 3 months is a lot.
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Re:take my wife... please (Score:4, Funny)
FYI Mods, parent is not a troll, just European (Scandinavian I assume).
Could be a Scandinavian troll [wikipedia.org].
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..or Canadian, ~1 year is normal here, next door.
Americans have strange ideas about work hours.
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Precisely the issue that TFA is getting at. Taking time off for a newborn should not be a disadvantage if the company wants to hire the best engineers. If the work/life balance is bad or punished they will have a smaller pool of candidates to choose from, and thus a lower overall ability level.
self esteem is not competence (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [wisc.edu]
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/0... [nymag.com]
http://psych.wisc.edu/faculty-... [wisc.edu]
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.
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No. You seem to have failed at reading my response. It's not an all or nothing statement so I don't know why you thought that.
The bottom line is, you better be damned smart if you plan to make a career in theoretical physics. Mediocre gets you a degree (maybe), but not a job (besides teaching something physics related at community college). Being damned smart is an example of innate ability, which this 'study' dumps on. It operates from the common feminist (and socialist) assumption that we are all intrinsi
that shouldn't be surprising either (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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No amount of affirmative action or social policy is going to change basic human biology.
That won't stop them from trying.
women in science (Score:4, Informative)
I can name:
Heather Couper (astronomer, who (in keeping with the conversation) received a letter from the late, great Sir Patrick Moore when she was 16 that said, among other things, that being a girl would not be detrimental to a career in astronomy. That letter she read in its entirety at his memorial service.)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (made the first direct observation of a radio pulsar)
Jane Goodall (primatologist)
Hedy LaMarr (spare-time actress, primarily an inventor who gave us spread spectrum and randomised frequency hopping through her work on torpedo guidance systems)
Marie Curie (chemist/physicist, first double Nobel winner and only double winner in two different fields)
Merit-Ptah (earliest known named female physician)
Aglaonike (Greek astronomer who developed an accurate mathematical model to predict eclipses)
Mary the Jewess (invented the double boiler)
Florence Nightingale (established the London School of Nursing and laid the framework for the NHS which wasn't to bear fruit until after her death)
There are MANY more. I don't get what the problem is except the *lack of public acknowledgement of women in science* which can be placed entirely on the shoulders of the Church.
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Not to be a pedant. (start pedantic complaint)
Linus Pauling won two Nobels: Chemistry and Peace.
He went to his grave dreaming of a third in Medicine for his vitamin C quackery.
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ooh, interesting, and I stand corrected :)
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I've always found the story of Rosalind Franklin [wikipedia.org] both encouraging and a little sad. I had always thought of her as the unrecognized discovery of the structure of DNA, but she did so much more in atomic structure and viral studies. She died at 37.
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I think you're trying to refer to Ada Lovelace, author of the first purpose-written computer algorithm (for Babbage's Analytical Engine). Linda Lovelace was a porn actress who died in a car crash.
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No, sorry...GP is referring to this brilliant woman - Grace Hopper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
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Dammit..stupid slashdot threading....disregard my post since I thought you had replied to a different thread (but do read the article on Grace Hopper).
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yeah, name sounded familiar :)
Don't know if title is troubling or insulting (Score:3)
Success in pretty much every field depends on brilliance, enthusiasm and perseverance in roughly equal measure. If you have 2 out of 3, you will probably earn a good living. It's unlikely that all 3 are significantly correlated with gender in any field, be it software development or early childhood education. If you live in United States and rule out a career path based on your gender, you likely have to do some work on yourself rather than blaming any external factors.
Number four - opportunity (Score:2)
The small number of women that made it as far as enrolling in engineering at the same time as I did well once they managed to get into University. For a variety of reasons many girls that had at least as much potential as the boys in the class didn't get to study enough, maths, physics etc to get in.
We still get it today, for instance my nieces son is going to be enroled in an expensive school while her daughter has to put up with the local government school.
Belief? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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..because society values economically certain skills more than others, and if we're not all equal bunny rabbits bustling with potential, that wouldn't be FAIR.
A shocking statistical insight (Score:4, Interesting)
As Scott Adams pointed out once (or something very close), these sorts of preconceptions might be keeping 99.999% of women out, but they're also keeping 99.99% of men out too.
Women Bad at Spatial Relations; But Can Be Taught (Score:3)
Statistically, women are bad at spatial reasoning. There are many sociological and political reasons for this, of course, and there is even a natural component. Even the same woman, when at a point in her cycle where testosterone is low, performs worse at spatial reasoning than when her testosterone is high.
But regardless of the source, the good news is that spatial reasoning can be taught [datascienceassn.org].
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Statistically women excel at intuition and non-linear thinking which can be much more useful is say theoretical physics that high spatial ability. Guys don't perform well when there testosterone is low either.
Hello most fields do require brilliance (Score:3)
I see this in Computer Science every day. There are those vast majority of programmers who are rarely using any math beyond X++ and there are those who are taking an ML and figuring out ways to take some aspect of it to the next level.
Rarely is the brilliance separate from hard work but 99% of PhD theses could be and are completely ignored. That was a whole lot of hard work that went into them. But then there are people like Higgs who's hard work + brilliance resulted in the creation of the LHC to verify his brilliance; done by groups of people who worked very hard. I suspect that many of the best bits of the LHC were created by a very very small number of very brilliant people while the rest was plodded in to place by the merely very smart.
That title... (Score:2)
Genius Is Required (Score:3)
WTF? (Score:2)
Women are just as brilliant as men in about the same percentage. And to advance sate of the art in many fields of science does in fact require brilliance. I don't know if the sexism or ignorance is more offensive.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
"He and his colleagues also conclude that their findings help explain why African-Americans are underrepresented in STEM professions while Asian-Americans are not."
But isn't the stereotype (not without basis) of the Asian-American an average or slightly above average student who is driven (perhaps by his "tiger mom") to excel through hard work and practice rather than innate brilliance?
This would seem to argue against their findings, not be supported by them.
Enough of the gender whine (Score:3)
Endless stories about women not getting into given careers. Enough. If you want women to join those careers then stop giving them the choice not to join those careers. Because they are not in these careers because of their CHOICES.
if you don't like the choices women are making then whine at THEM. Neither men, nor companies, nor the universities are excluding women. They simply do not exist in these fields in the numbers that the stats weenies desire. End of discussion.
No really. Shut the hell up unless you can show systematic CAUSAL gender bias. Not just "well women aren't here so clearly it must be sexism". That is bullshit for same reason that there are lots of jobs that women tend to dominate and men don't say "well that's clearly sexism"... it isn't. Some jobs women don't want to do and some jobs men don't want to do. Get over it.
More propagandistic nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
So let's (Score:3)
... round up women at gunpoint and MAKE them enter under represented fields.
I mean, Equality is ore important than Liberty, right?
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Basically what I'm thinking. I'm really getting bored with the latest ZOMFG WIMMINZ ARE UNDERREPRESENTATED equalist hivemind groupthink crowd.
Genius requires being self-centered (Score:2)
In my experience "genius" and "brilliance" tend to necessarily involve the ability to monomanically focus on things in a way which, socially speaking, is 'self centered'. We socialize that tendency out of most people, and particularly out of women.
No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
We think (and so define in IQ calibration) that mean intelligence is the same for men and women.
And it's that calibration that's problematic here. The brains of men and women are typically very different, making them excel at different types of tasks. The modern IQ calibration manipulates weights for these tasks to give both an average score of 100. The result is politically correct, but makes IQ an even more worthless measure than it was before gender-balance calibration was introduced.
The other problem lies in people assuming that the average for a gender tells you anything about a particular individual. If women are better/worse at task X, this doesn't mean a woman who applied for a position that requires X is better or worse than a man whom you can pick or not over that woman.
The result? Giving preferential treatment to either group is wrong, and will hurt not only the group you discriminate against, but your profits as well. No matter whether your task is a biology researcher, a lumberjack or a kindergarten teacher, the only valid method of choosing is being totally gender- (and race-, and so on)-blind. That woman who applied for that lumberjack job? She probably has a clue what she does, and thus deserves a try at the chainsaw. This kind of self-selection is not free of biases, but it makes comparing averages for men-vs-women (or blacks-vs-whites-vs-polka-dotted) pointless.
Yes, such selection of merits will make your team not represent the diversity ratios of the general population -- that's expected.
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They picked lumberjack because they like the song; sleeping all night and working all day, suspenders and a bra, also pressing wild flowers.
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Some fields really do require IQ >= 110 (one std above mean).
IQ is pseudoscience nonsense to begin with, but it appeals to simpletons due to its simplicity. Wouldn't it be convenient if we could tell how "intelligent" someone is by looking at a single number? Unfortunately, simplicity is not the same as truth.
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There are plenty of well paid jobs that are advertised as only requiring hard work and no particular brilliance.
Typically those jobs are in garbage disposal, the mining industry and such. Turns out men are vastly overrepresented there too.
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My guess is that you have no idea about modern mining. Lots of women there. Brute strength is no longer require.
Same with garbage disposal. You drive a truck, and operate the joystick that controls the robot arm that lifts and dumps the curbside containers. The garbage person that comes to my house never gets out of the truck.
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Depends where you are in the world, here in the UK domestic bin collection is done typically with a crew of three or four, one to drive, two to collect the main bins and one to collect the ancillary bins (food waste). No other way to do it, British residential streets just aren't built for a truck that can grab bins itself, as there will almost always be parked cars in the way.
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It's much the same in Chicago, except that is not the reason for three/four man crews.
It's called labor unions.
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Yeah, not so much here. Unions here get to bitch and moan a bit, perhaps call a strike, but generally get nowhere.
Oh, and if your name is Mick Cash, and you speak for the RMT Union, you also get to make up bullshit conspiracy theories and claim that a national package delivery company is equal in importance to the country as banks, so why isn't the government rescuing them? Despite the fact that everyone in the UK went "yay, finally" when said package delivery company went under, and no one has stopped re
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Toronto outsourced half the garbage collection, crew size stayed the same, except the private company doing it now demands the wheelie bins be positioned in one exact certain way as they sit on the curb. The unionized workers never demanded any such thing. Oh, and it didn't save nearly the money that our former outsourcing-crazed mayor claimed it would. I'm sure he got a nice kickback from the company though.
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