How Nations Fare in PhDs by Sex | Hacker News Reader

How Nations Fare in PhDs by Sex

scientificamerican.com

34 pointssamclemens11 comments

Exploring the country differences by different academic disciplines (grouped in categories by a control on the Web graphic) is interesting. It seems to show that the male preponderance is much greater in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines than in humanities disciplines, which is not a big surprise. Countries vary in their proportions of students pursuing each academic discipline, so a country with a lot of STEM Ph.D. holders will skew to showing an especially big disparity favoring males.

There's at least two countries, Bulgaria and Turkey, where there isn't any significant discrepancy in the rate of male vs female PhDs between the "Non-Science" and "All Science & Engineering" categories. Probably other countries too, but I didn't attempt a systematic check.

I’d be curious to see what the gender breakdown looks like for native-born vs. immigrant PhD students, by field.

The source of the data also contains many interesting comparisons and conclusions, particularly with respect to time.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/chapter-5/c5...

This data isn't all that useful since the gender distribution of the countries isn't considered. Latvia, for example, seems to favor women in most fields, but there are 8% more women than men which I am sure could account for some of the differences.

Some interesting differences:

Thailand and Mongolia versus South Korea and Taiwan. Canada versus the US. Portugal versus Spain.

Once you select specific disciplines a lot of the countries have extremely small relevant populations though.

This is silly.

Ukraine have more women than men in term of sex ratio. So of course there is more phd awarded to women than men.

There are tons of debates on how there are less female in engineering and such but I have yet to see a reason why that is. It could be anything including something innoculous. If there is a systematically evil group that is trying to prevent women from going into CS then I am all for stopping them. But if because the women themselves just chose to do other things than CS than who am I to try to change their mind?

I doubt there is a major group of deliberately evil people. But there are unconscious biases that we pretty well documented, and should be fought just as much. That's a third option between your two.

I find it funny that nobody is pushing for more women in coal mining and truck driving.

wish I'd known, mine was by exam... ;-)

Awaiting the alternative article:

"How Nations Fare in Sex by PhDs"

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