Daring to Discuss Women in Science

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/science/08tier.html

by d4ft • 16 years ago

38 55 16 years ago

yafujifide• 16 years ago

The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale.

And for that reason, therefore men are more common in science and engineering (STEM).

But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM? Because I was under the impression that they don't; at least not more often than, say, Wall Street, or something else.

What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level. And then how to we explain why there are fewer women than men go into STEM?

camccann• 16 years ago

The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale.

At both ends, actually, but that's largely irrelevant to the argument. Actually, I think the idea is that males have higher variance on a variety of attributes, due to higher expected utility, in an evolutionary sense, from trying high-risk, high-reward strategies (standard disclaimer: do not anthropomorphize evolution, do not equate evolutionary goals with conscious goals).

But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM?

That's not necessary--only that success in STEM fields is more strongly correlated with intelligence than with unspecified other attributes. It doesn't matter what very smart people in general do; only that higher intelligence confers an advantage. Intra-field competition will take it from there.

It is not, I think, controversial that intelligence correlates with success in STEM fields, seeing as it correlates with success (to some degree) in almost every area of life, but as always, the details are complicated.

Not necessarily--that depends on the shape of all three intelligence distributions (both sexes, and STEM fields).

That said, though, the whole article was basically fluff--lots of raising questions, not much in the way of relevant research, and virtually nothing in the way of concrete predictions or testable hypotheses. Now, as far as I know, there is some established research behind the "wider variance" idea... but to be honest the article raises all kinds of red flags; it feels like something written by picking a conclusion, then looking for science-y-sounding things to support it.

scotty79• 16 years ago

> Actually, I think the idea is that males have higher variance on a variety of attributes, due to higher expected utility, in an evolutionary sense, from trying high-risk, high-reward strategies (standard disclaimer: do not anthropomorphize evolution, do not equate evolutionary goals with conscious goals).

I think if anything it can be attributed to lower evolutionary obligation of males rather than to higher expected utility. Breeding for males is fairly easy so you can have a kid even if your IQ is 60. Child of woman of such low IQ would have much higher probability of dying.

Also males having single X chromosome have higher variability in traits influenced by genes on X chromosome as the defect of some gene of X chromosome won't be alleviated by correct gene at the other X (because there is no other X in males).

Personally I don't care if all Einsteins and Newtons will be male but since more and more scientific discovery rely on joint venture of tens or hundreds of scientists I really think that you should not pass up on opportunity to encourage half of the population to go into science just because there might be some relevant skewing in right tail of distribution.

philwelch• 16 years ago

"What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level."

Superimpose two Gaussian distributions. There's a very narrow point where they're actually the same (well, two), but there's always more of one than the other at any other point.

snikolov2• 16 years ago

I have a feeling that the variability is at least partially modulated by factors such as (lack of) encouragement and gender bias. Imagine a spinning flywheel (this is a terrible analogy but I think it will illustrate my point) with particles on it that jump off the edge at random velocities. The added velocity of the flywheel eventually makes them end up at a certain radial distance on the ground. Regardless of the speed at which the flywheel spins, the average position of the particles on the ground will be at the center of the flywheel. But if the flywheel is spinning fast, the variability will be greater than if it is spinning slowly.

I think in a similar way, encouragement and bias -- like the speed of the flywheel -- can account for this variability, rather than intrinsic differences in the capacity for mathematical reasoning.

That said, it is interesting why the gap seemed to bottom out at 4 to 1 despite supposed programs to encourage young women to go into mathematics and science.

Perceval• 16 years ago

I can see why "encouragement and bias" might account for higher male achievement, but not why that would at the same time account for lower male achievement.

snikolov2• 16 years ago

That's a very good point. This seems to be a major point against an explanation based solely on encouragement/bias.

In a solely encouragement/discouragement based theory, it might be that for some reason, males are encouraged as well as discouraged more strongly than females. I don't know of any (even anecdotal) evidence of this happening, so I wouldn't bet on it.

In any case, the underlying origins of these statistics are no doubt complex, messy and controversial.

m-photonic• 16 years ago

Males are not a homogenous group. There's no reason why some subgroups of males couldn't be negatively affected by social pressures just because other subgroups are positively affected.

pmccool• 16 years ago

One important issue the article doesn't address: do these scores have any meaningful correlation with success in the sciences? The ability to do research and the ability to do well in exams are two quite different things.

On the face of it, a pretty shaky premise.

sorbus• 16 years ago

From the second page of the article:

"Other studies have shown that these differences in extreme test scores correlate with later achievements in science and academia. Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university.

"Of course, a high score on a test is hardly the only factor important for a successful career in science, and no one claims that the right-tail disparity is the sole reason for the relatively low number of female professors in math-oriented sciences. There are other potentially more important explanations, both biological and cultural, including possible social bias against women."

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

Feminists face an interesting challenge here; STEM seem to be their Waterloo (I believe that's the right phrase). They stand upon the claim that women are totally equal to men.

This means that for their cause to survive, they have to prove that they are totally equal in every way, which means being proven wrong when it comes to STEM would be disastrous. Thus they can never acknowledge the possibility, and will likely do their best to tear down anyone who suggests it. This is, of course, not particularly any different from anything else political, though it seems to be more savage thus far.

I personally wish someone would just figure out a truly unbiased test and get the answer already. I don't care what the answer is, I just want cold hard fact to back up them claims & decisions made in regards to all this.

edit: cummon, if you're gonna downmod, please leave a reason.

edit2: I use equal in the sense of 'the same', not 'superior'/'inferior'.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

I have a feeling that STEM isn't going to change anything, people want to believe whatever they want to believe and they are not going to let the facts stand in between them.

Take Intelligent Design as an example. There is a shit ton of evidence that proves that it is all a bunch of bullshit, but it doesn't matter because a lot of people want to believe it, so that is what they do.

So sure it would be nice to know the answer, but it isn't going to change anything.

SnydenBitchy• 16 years ago

I’m not sure that’s a fair representation of mainstream feminism (“They stand upon the claim that women are totally equal [in the sense of ‘the same’] to men”). Obviously, biology differs between the sexes. It’s not at all controversial, under the umbrella of feminism and gender studies, to explore the influence of brain chemistry in the assignment and acceptance of gender roles. Few will dispute that hormones affect the expression of, say, aggression and empathy, on average characteristic of men and women respectively.

The more pressing and socially current matter is how these differences (rooted in biology or not) are respected or disrespected by institutions, including the social institutions of our prevailing cultural norms. For example: is it fair to demand that female scientists jockey for position in academia as ruthlessly as male scientists are accustomed to doing? Would it not benefit us if our scientific institutions were more accepting of “non-masculine” approaches to research, however those might be defined?

In short, the argument is for accepting diversity, not blindly insisting on exact sameness between genders. That’s also why feminists will argue there’s no such thing as the “truly unbiased test” you seek: testing, by attempting to quantify the qualitative (scientific aptitude), will naturally privilege the testmaker’s perspective to the exclusion of alternatives. I think there’s room to argue that science would benefit from encouraging a diversity of perspectives.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

I believe the difficulty is this particular topic is discussing ability rather than characteristic. Even when they acknowledge that there are differences in disposition, character, etc, no feminist I've met has been willing to entertain the idea that either gender might be better at (more able to do) something than the other (even though they are undoubtedly better at giving birth than men! :). I think the discussion usually gets hung up on a miscommunication though- they assume I am asking them to consider it is impossible for all women to do a certain task, when the question is only ever, is it possible one gender (not even necessarily males) might have greater potential at something.

This is a valid question, no argument here.

How does one address diversity in a field whose first concerns are (or should be, damnit) results and/or answers? IMHO you get answers/results, I don't give a darn who or what you are- you could be a squirrel for all I care. By the same token, if you don't, I'm not going to give you preferential treatment just because you are diverse. Though, I realize this is a very black and white position that probably fails to take into account some important realities.

yummyfajitas7• 16 years ago

That’s also why feminists will argue there’s no such thing as the "truly unbiased test" you seek: testing, by attempting to quantify the qualitative (scientific aptitude), will naturally privilege the testmaker’s perspective to the exclusion of alternatives.

Feminists are against quantifying stuff. Not so many feminists in science. Could there be a connection?

I dunno, sounds too hard to figure out. I'll just go write some critical theory instead.

zasz• 16 years ago

No, I don't think feminism implies that feminists have to show women are the same as men in every way. It's perfectly feminist to say that women deserve to be judged as individuals on their own merits, as men are. I'm sure there's no feminist who would disagree that women are physically weaker, but they don't need to concoct studies asserting that women are physically equal to men just so they can advocate for suffrage and property rights.

My understanding that the claim women are totally equal to men is that they are equal in some moral sense, which should be disconnected from natural ability anyway.

I suppose if women were empirically shown to be twenty times dumber than men, and that women capable of learning to read and write were as rare as Einstein, then feminism really has no case to stand on and women's suffrage would be ludicrous, but the average woman is as smart as the average man, and that's sufficient to give men and women equal moral standing. So I don't see why feminism would fall over if it was shown that fewer women were ever going to win a Fields Medal. Unusual cases like that don't matter much for day to day morality.

pbhjpbhj5• 16 years ago

>I suppose if women were empirically shown to be twenty times dumber than men, and that women capable of learning to read and write were as rare as Einstein, then feminism really has no case to stand on and women's suffrage would be ludicrous, but the average woman is as smart as the average man, and that's sufficient to give men and women equal moral standing.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_study_claims_men_have_higher_..., states:

"In a study accepted for publication by the British Journal of Psychology, Dr. Paul Irwing (Manchester Business School, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Psychology) and Prof. Richard Lynn (University of Ulster, Professor Emeritus) conclude that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests. The study also found that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees. When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman."

But also notes that:

"Several subtle points popularized by the Pinker vs. Spelke debate are relevant to the Irwing & Lynn study. First, females benefit significantly from single sex education, but single sex education has little impact upon males. As a consequence, the Irwing & Lynn study can not lay claim to a biological difference in intelligence, unless it restricts itself to women attending all girls schools. Secondly, the process of natural selection leads males of any species to have more variance in most traits. As a result, Stephen Pinker suggests that one should find "more geniuses and more idiots" among human males (see Pinker slide 41). As a consequence, any omission of people at the lower end of the IQ spectrum would bias the average male IQ upward, relative to the average female IQ ."

DaniFong4• 16 years ago

Problem 1: You're impute a rather radical belief onto all feminists. You are constructing a straw feminist.

Problem 2: How is a person supposed to choose an unbiased test? What do you even mean?

Problem 3: The most obvious fact should be that people are complicated, and aren't so easily reducible to a neat pile of normally distributed aptitudes dependent on a binary gender variable. The cold hard fact you should be aware of is that those who are trying to make this sound simple or concrete or objectively determined are deceiving themselves. The counterfactual you'd look for -- if everyone were gender blind, how would women fair in science and technology? -- hasn't come close to true. And as long as people continue to slam their fights and debate over whether women are innately unsuited to this kind of work, they won't be -- the nature of the stereotype threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat) will ensure it.

jlm382• 16 years ago

This could be optimizing on the wrong thing... sure, we want more women in math and science, but instead of focusing on eliminating gender bias among researchers, we should be thinking more about increasing the number of women who want to learn math and science at a younger age - and that will do far more than any gender bias elimination ever will.

Not to mention, as a woman in computer science, this workshop just seems like a waste of time. I wouldn't be happy if I were forced to go.

miri3• 16 years ago

Bingo. I'm female, and a comp eng student. The problem might not be the gender bias among researchers so much, but the attitudes little girls face when learning. If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. "Encouraging workshops" sounds a bit condescending to me. If they'd treat people the same from the start and let it go on a bit so that even a parental generation has grown up with it, it'll probably even out the numbers a bit. Okay, so more boys than girls have good abilities in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't treat everyone the same.

DaniFong4• 16 years ago

Definitely. My bet is that the biggest issue is peer pressure which, honestly, is why I think top down efforts from parents and teachers and governments to boost girl's involvement in STEM are so ineffective. Most of the early development kids do in whatever field, be it sports or science, is driven by a need for approval (so are most other things at school). Unless you have a group of peers that you'd like to emulate and that you want to impress and engage with who are also doing science, you're probably not going to learn science. If the kids that are interested in science are otherwise not interested in anything you like (you like country, they like rock, you like comedies, they like sci-fi), then you're way less likely to end up studying what they do. A possible answer might be to make science clubs for girls, with awesome field-trips and awesome teachers. Physics can lead to, say, kinesiology and dancing, instead of making robots. Biology class can get outside of cell studies and into living animals. Chemistry can lead to molecular gastronomy, the development of organic hairdyes -- these kinds of things. These are the seeds from which the other studies can sprout: unless their planted, girls just won't be engaged.

In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)

pbhjpbhj5• 16 years ago

>If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors.

Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences").

Are women also worried that they are under-represented in autism figures, something which appears to closely related to the generalised male ability with mathematics and disability in respect of social aptitude.

>If they'd treat people the same from the start [...]

You mean ignore that people are different and want different things?

frossie2• 16 years ago

Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university.

This sentence is very important to the point he is trying to make but I can't find it in the research that he quotes earlier and I have no idea where it comes from. Moreover it is contradicted by my own personal experience; anybody who thinks the ability to obtain a doctorate is so tightly correlated with such fine variations in intelligence has not spent much time around PhDs.

TheEzEzz• 16 years ago

Getting tenure at a top university is orders of magnitude more difficult than simply getting a PhD.

frossie2• 16 years ago

Indeed tenure at a top university is much harder, and therefore small number statistics, and so I would be even more surprised to see it linked to a sub-one percentile spread in seventh grade scores.

dagw2• 16 years ago

Getting a PhD in science (or anything else really), has very little to do with being intelligent and everything to do with really really wanting it and being willing to put in the hard work. I know several very intelligent people who failed to get their PhD because they found it more work than they where willing to do, and I know several people with fairly mediocre grades who got PhDs because it was what they really wanted and they where willing to do the work and not give up.

jamesash• 16 years ago

Agree. As far as the tenure debate, becoming a candidate for being science professor at a top university requires INCREDIBLE single-minded focus, from college through Ph.D. through postdoc. And for that, you get a chance at an academic job, because only a handful are up for grabs in any given year. It's an incredibly high-risk proposition, with a lot of opportunity cost. Your chances are helped immensely if you're not interested in any other activities beyond working in your field. It's a monotonous life in many ways. Not many people would want it to begin with - that's why the Aspbergers types are often the only ones who make it through the filter.

geebee• 16 years ago

Yeah, I have trouble believing that there is good research supporting this assertion.

I think that the author meant to distinguish between someone who is 1 in 100 and someone who is 1 in 10,000.

My problem here is that I suspect that it's stupid to use 7th grade SAT math scores to make this distinction. In fact, I doubt that any standardized test can make that distinction - I suspect that they top out around the 99%ile (actually, an 800/800 on the GRE math was only about 96%ile when I took it).

When a test is tedious, irritating, and consists primarily of solving simple geometry and algebra problems and choosing answers from a multiple choice menu, and when the difference between 99.9%ile and 98.7%ile is a couple of missed answers, I suspect you're measuring noise.n I'm not saying the tests are useless, they're probably pretty good. But to identify why the few great mathematical minds come from one group or another? Seriously?

The only real way to measure this kind of talent is to provide opportunities to learn, step back, wait 20 years, and see what they've done.

As for the gender question, well I guess I'm just begging the question with my "opportunity to learn" statement, because the whole question is whether this imbalance is in itself strong evidence of differing opportunities for men and women.

How do you measure something that is obscure and present in only a miniscule fraction of the population? Our indicators can tell us who is 1/100, maybe kinda. This whole approach is fubar.

random_guy• 16 years ago

I've collected and studied data from rubygems a while ago and I came to the exact same conclusion. (you can find the post here -> http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-r... ) While at the time I wasn't so sure about my thoughts, since the amount of lynching i received in the comments, not I'm totally sure that this issue needs serious and unbiased scientific studies.

DaniFong4• 16 years ago

I almost wrote yet another in a long series of posts bringing the evidence I encountered on the flip side to this discussion. I thought, once again, that doing so might have enabled a few more people to release that it's just too darned hard to disentangle cultural effects from innate attributes, talent and motivation, confidence and skill. I thought that I could detach the certainty from the minds of those who wished to propound stereotypic ordinals as if they were biological, scientific fact, and perhaps get parents to question what sort of encouragement -- in any sense -- their children get when their first experience upon birth is a pronouncement of their gender.

And then I realized that I tried that before, and it went nowhere. Not gonna fan these flames.

calibraxis• 16 years ago

Evidence is always welcome by some people, even if you happen to get downvotes and indignant replies.

A hacker would probably view sexism institutionally. Institutions generally have gatekeepers. When the gatekeepers believe that your race/gender is inferior or unsuited to their workplace, then it's even harder to enter the institution, through no fault of your own.

(For example, if you're female, they may scrutinize you extra closely to find masculine traits like aggressiveness. Their reasoning may be that a certain "assertiveness" is important to survive in their masculine workplace.)

This sets up a feedback loop: your teachers may be more active in dissuading you from studying technical subjects, because they predict that gatekeepers will require you to jump a higher bar of skill and attitudes. Even when many of the gatekeepers relax, the news of this doesn't propagate instantly through the system -- there may be a lag before other parts of the system catch up.

I think this means there needs to be outreach to the public about how workplaces are wanting to improve. (If they are.)

MikeTaylor• 16 years ago

I am a publishing academic scientist. I observe that women in my particular field take one of two paths. A certain proportion invest a lot of their time blogging about how hard it is to be a Woman In Science. The rest get on with doing research, presenting at conferences, writing papers, and generally being scientists.

In most aspects, women in science (at least in my field) no longer face significant discrimination. I am not saying it never happens, but it's much less common now than it used to be a few decades ago. We are now, happily, at a point where women in science can better advance their cause by doing science than by complaining about the status quo. It's simply a better way to invest time and energy towards making up whatever prestige gap may still exist.

To summarise: shut up and write the damned paper. (This is good advice to all scientists, male or female, black or white.)

MichaelSalib10• 16 years ago

women in science (at least in my field) no longer face significant discrimination.

I wouldn't be surprised if women in your field no longer faced outright prejudice. But discrimination involves systemic effects beyond just individual prejudice. Do the women in your field have wives? You know what a wife is I'm sure: the kind of spouse who spends more time with the children and doing all the drudgery of running a house so that their science-doing spouse can spend all their time at work doing exciting important science. Sometimes wives have jobs, but we all know that such jobs aren't really important and must be given up if the important science research has to move to get a better professorship.

If your female colleagues don't have wives, do you think that might, in any way, be connected with societal expectations for how marriages should work? I mean, having an unpaid personal assistant is surely a boon to research productivity, so it seems that differential assignment of said assistants to scientists of different genders might bring about discriminatory effects. Even in the absence of individual prejudice by any scientist in your field.

MichaelSalib10• 16 years ago

Downvoters: any particular reason for downvoting this comment?

Daring to Discuss Women in Science

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