Shocking that 55/56 Fields Medals have been awarded to men.
Maryam Mirzakhani has been the only female recipient. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/us/maryam-mirzakhani-dead...
Maryam Mirzakhani has been the only female recipient. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/us/maryam-mirzakhani-dead...
That would seem rather detached from reality.
[1] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/2008/response/10670
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...
I'm on my phone right now and can't redo it for the gender ratio of Fields medalists, but I expect that the effect would cover most of the difference, since the cutoff for the award does seem quite high.
Fields medals are not awarded based on "penchant for math" though. And it surely isn't exactly fault of the prize committee that there aren't very many female mathematicians to choose from.
Note: I don't know if 55/56 is "correct" from the point of the actual numbers.
The sex ratio gets progressively more extreme as you go further out in the tails.
EX: Women live significantly longer on average and the oldest women lived 6 years longer than the oldest man. Yet, the 16th oldest person was a man and 6% of oldest 100 people where men. And 6% of the top 100 living people are men https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people
And even if you presume something like a Pareto distribution, the likelihood ratio between two distributions grow through the tails if their variance is not identical.
edit: I see you bring up longevity, but I don't see why this is relevant to a discussion about variance in mathematical ability or intelligence? See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188690...
Granted, we can't measure very high ability very well due to sampling bias. I am simply saying even if there is a modest bias that's not enough it would have to be huge to account for these numbers.
So, I am bringing up something else with the kind of distribution we are talking about which has more accurate data. Women live ~ 5% longer both looking at the average lifespans and oldest examples which is a very significant difference. Yet, the oldest population has more men in it than you would think.
Edit: Math: 6 year longer lifespan + 50% risk of death per year = you would expect ~1% of top 100 oldest people to be men.
If it’s affected by things like work place deaths because men are more likely to take on dangerous jobs, e.g. sea fisherman, military service, etc. would that overlap with the section of the population likely to be working on pure mathematics?
Suicide, another cause of that difference in average life span, would overlap though I guess.
It would be worth properly investigating as I suspect there’s a lot of complexity hidden here.
What kind of ability? Mathematical? IQ?
I don't know how well done those studies are though.
EDIT: I doubt it is that big though.
And at the Fields medal level it's less about "pretend you're not smart" and more about "we just don't think it's a good idea for you to skip grades".
[0] https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598 (admittedly a bit old; maybe a lot has changed in ~10 years?)
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-few-females-in-competiti...
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-boys-outperform-girls-in-math-c...
As politically difficult as it is to say, intelligence is NOT distributed randomly among all people.
Not by sex, not by race.
The hard part is not the evidence, it's dealing with the social result. Do we as a culture decide "Yes, it might be true, but it's too harmful, so we will act as if it's false?"
Give extra tutoring to those lower on the scale, and withhold it from those higher, to try to even the balance?
Give special advantage to those lower? Is there a way to do that without disadvantaging others? What sort of advantage?
Something else?
Each of those options has pros and cons.
It should be discussed, but like I said, it's politically difficult, so people try not to talk about it.
Unsure. But you're the one making the claim.
Lots of room for explanation from many angles here.
Like, it would not even justified by women being "somewhat" less good at maths at the high level than men. Women would have to be really, really bad at maths for that to be a natural result.
There are many, many obviously trainable skills where the best men are very obviously superior to the best women, sports and athletics providing endless examples. I would be very happy just to finish a marathon but the Irish men’s world record is almost ten minutes faster than the woman’s world record.
But all that is overshadowed by the fact that culturally and societally women are heavily discouraged from entering and succeeding in fields like math. This begins right from childhood, where an abacus may make a good toy for a boy, while the appropriate toy for a girl would be a mini kitchen set.
Fortunately a lot of this is changing, however, the benefits of no longer discouraging 50% of the population from entering science/engineering won't be felt for another couple of generations.
> The penchant for math is probably randomly distributed
between men and women.
> But all that is overshadowed by the fact that culturally and
> societally women are heavily discouraged from entering and succeeding
> in fields like math.
> This begins right from childhood, where an abacus may make a good toy for a boy,
> while the appropriate toy for a girl would be a mini kitchen set.
You mis-quoted; the original comment said:
> If you accept the idea that a penchant..
which was a response to:
> why is it shocking?
i.e. It answers the question, "Why might [someone] find this shocking?" - Note that user 'Hasz' was not the user that found it shocking.
Is there any experimental support for such an assumption?
Women are vastly underrepresented in math.