Women and Mathematics
micromath.wordpress.com
micromath.wordpress.com
With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming are relatively precarious. That though probably is easily overcome, since women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.
So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy.
(Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink? Because they don’t have a fucking choice.)
Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be an idiot), or have a vested interest in promoting these views (typically racial).
Here's the first Google hit I could find disproving your joke. Someone else can find a blog post where a lesbian buys her daughter a firetruck and the girl begins to nurse the firetruck.
The world evolves in a certain way for a reason. Do you think this is the first era in which people thought that everyone might be equal? This is the first era in which we've had the luxury to attempt the experiment. The results are in: people aren't equal. Pack it up and go home. We're all tired of hearing this drivel.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/boys-like-blue-gir...
And by the way, on color?
"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century"
Frankly, I like to try and buck this kind of thing. I have long hair (longer than most of the women I know), and carry around a pink DS... not much, but it's a start.
It would be interesting if this phenomenon were correlated with 2D:4D ratio, wouldn't it? http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+sailer+finger+length
Brilliance. To be cited in Nature, surely.
Did you check the references cited by that paragraph?
Really, what it comes down to in my book isn't that people are equal because it's politically correct, or even that people are equal at all. It's that we should judge people for their acts, not their gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever else. If a particular woman is worse at mathematics than average, then so be it. If another particular woman is better than average, let's celebrate that for what it is.
And then we have one generation of childless hedonistic professionals, call Western civilization a wrap, and hand over the landmasses to the Latin Americans, Chinese, and Muslims (many of whom are very intelligent and successful scientists and engineers!) who did not view tradition as the enemy.
Indian culture interests me. I see a lot of Indian women in Grad school, but from my interaction with them they seem to respect cultural traditions and family values. I don't know how they manage to find time in their lives to be Mathematicians and wives and mothers, maybe the ones I know are just far to the right on the bell curve. But maybe the problem isn't with culture and tradition, maybe it's just the culture and tradition we've inherited needs tweaking.
There are some reasons to think that. But they are not beyond doubt. There are smart, educated people who disagree, and even if there weren't, one of the important things about science is keeping the ideas open to doubt.
Many of the women physicists I've become friends with spoke fondly of the first time they encountered a female scientist, either on screen, in print, or in person. They said it was the first time they realized that one could be a woman, and a scientist. It sounds absurd, but remember, this happened when they were kids. No imagine it happened just two years later. A few year's head start on knowing what you want to be can make the difference on what becomes your professional identity, and what you explore and do, ie: your training.
I was only speaking last night about this with my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She placed the turning point on when she heard about Jane Goodall, who wasn't just 'in' science, but revolutionizing it. I encountered science (and a notion of utilitarianism) through Marie Curie, what she discovered, what a revolution she sparked, and how it lead to her death. It was difficult emotionally, but I decided that to discover something so valuable, and so important, paying with one's life would have been worth it.
http://www.google.com/search?q=princeton+affirmative+action+...
http://www.google.com/search?q=berkeley+affirmative+action+g...
Please post your friend's relevant scores (SAT, GRE, etc.).
She must have the longest ring finger on the planet, yeah, that's it.
I don't think any of us have asserted that women can't be brilliant and compete head to head with men, but if you are looking at any field of expertise, with equal numbers of male and female participants, the top one to five percent of people will almost always be disproportionately men, consistently across fields, over time, and it seems to continue despite changing social and cultural norms.
I think the comment above calls into question the merit of your friends achievement, which will always be the result of affirmative action programs. It is well documented that affirmative action often (but not always) results in lesser skilled candidates from preferred disadvantaged classes (race, gender, etc) earning admission or appointments.
How can you say that? Do you know her or what she is capable of? It seems pure idiocy to me to suggest that every woman graduating from a premier science program is never achieving it through merit.
As far as bell curves and distributions, who the hell knows? People tried to predict housing prices and stock portfolios on gaussians, and they seem to work until they don't. You cannot project your platonic ideal of how you think the world works because it seems to and then handwave on outliers.
It is more likely that society/tradition/etc... do matter after all.
My point taken to an extreme is:
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines consciousness." - Karl Marx
5 paragraphs of how mathematics has higher standards of rigour. Completed by a muddled argument supported only by a quote and apocryphal reports.
Also, "snow" falling over text makes it hard to read, as would be obvious.
Unfortunately, mathematicians still fit this mold, as much as I wish it weren't so.
This alone largely explains the absence of women in math, much as it explains the absence of women in my field, IT.
If there's a lack of women in IT, it's probably because they don't enjoy it, or aren't encouraged to pursue it. Most women don't make professional decisions hoping to increase their chances of havin' a cutie in the next cubicle.
Not consciously, anyway. And it doesn't have anything to do with "havin' a cutie," it's more to avoid going into fields with a social stigma associated with them and their typical practitioners.
This social stigma is decreasing (even in IT -- "geek" is no longer an insult), but nevertheless it is still there.
For whatever reason, women seem to be more influenced by social cues -- or perhaps just influenced differently than men. It's not wrong -- it just is. Therefore, my guess is that a lot of the gender disparity is still extant for social stigma reasons and the concomitant avoidance of that stigma.
Anyway, at 14, I remember that my double-science class was almost entirely male, perhaps 5/25 girls (about 100 people in my year in total). Drama and English had the opposite ratio. Only those 5 girls would even have had the option to take a science or engineering degree, 10% of the females in the year. Now we all know you don't need one of those to work in IT, but still, if you want girls in the field, that's where you've got to catch them.
Has anyone had experience (or their kids) with online study groups, particularly with collaborative aids?