Daring to Discuss Women in Science

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.<p>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.<p>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 &#38; decisions made in regards to all this.<p>edit: cummon, if you're gonna downmod, please leave a reason.<p>edit2: I use equal in the sense of 'the same', not 'superior'/'inferior'.

<i>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. </i><p>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.

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

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 <i>want</i> to learn math and science at a younger age - and that will do far more than any gender bias elimination ever will.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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

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 -&#62; <a href="http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-rubygems/" rel="nofollow">http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/men-and-women-on-r...</a> ) 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.

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.<p>On the face of it, a pretty shaky premise.