Why Does the Putnam Math Competition Give a Separate Prize to Women?
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I don't know if there are differences, but I think it's very wrong to assume there aren't just because it seems modern and politically correct. Especially since the alternative theories put forward to explain lack of women in maths or CS are usually harmful, heavily prejudiced and inflammatory. And barking up the wrong tree is unlikely to solve the problem (for example if billions are spent to fight assumed sexism and sexism isn't even the cause).
It's also funny that whenever there is a job which seems to call for "women's strengths" nobody has qualms to claim "women are better at x" (say empathy, risk management, relationships, whatever). I wish people would at least make up their mind, do they believe there are no differences or not? Then if they go praising papers that seem to show female CEOs are more successful, how do they explain it if they don't believe in differences?
There is also little debate about physical differences - I think few would suggest it is sexist to have separate football leagues for men and women. Although, to be sure, women can be stronger than most men - but most simply aren't.
Edit: HN doesn't let me comment atm. To the comment accusing me of sexism: I said it's wrong to assume there are no differences for PC reason. You say it's sexist to assume differences. That's something entirely different. It's always wrong to assume something without evidence (and then there are just degrees of belief):
So, unless one seriously thinks that the entire field of programming/IT/computer science as a whole requires that level of talent, Summer's point doesn't apply and there are certainly other reasons for the gender gap in computer science.
In other words a field that was more selective (as measured by the proportion of applicants being admitted) might have more women in it.
This evidence is is not compatible with any reasonable prediction from the "different high tail" theory.
Saying that women are in principle as smart as men is not a statement from political correctness, I didn't get that angle from the article at all. The thesis brought forth by the article states that the separate female award is a lesser prize, and it's difficult to argue with that. The rationale for having such a lesser award might even have been honorable, they might have instituted it to encourage participation, but in the long run this is a self-defeating measure.
> I don't know if there are differences, but I think it's very wrong to assume there aren't just because it seems modern and politically correct.
As I read this I'm having painful flashbacks to threads where commenters claimed it was never proven that black people as intelligent as white people. And some even less cautious users flatly asserted that black people are dumber as a known medical fact, and everybody who disagreed was just doing it to be politically correct. This was racism then, as this is sexism now, there's no doubt about it.
Even if you really didn't know the answer, wouldn't the default assumption have to be equality?
> nobody has qualms to claim "women are better at x" (say empathy, risk management, relationships, whatever).
I'm highly suspicious of such claims, and I think most other people who don't match the "political correctness advocate" pattern are, as well.
> I think few would suggest it is sexist to have separate football leagues for men and women
You don't get to claim differences in any area where it might be convenient just on the basis that there are some known physical differences. The assertion "it's not sexist to assume men are physically stronger than women on average, so it cannot be sexist to assume men are also more intelligent" is a non sequitur.
And people do have qualms saying women are better at empathy. "Women's strengths" justifies sexism and boxing women into specific roles. In the 50's it was keeping women in the kitchen, "because they were naturally better at it and want to do it", now it's empathy and relationships which justifies them having to raise children and doing emotional labor.
Regardless, the article is bad, it makes a false dichotomy. First, Putnam should increase participation in girls, then it can remove the special women's prize.
This claim sounded fishy enough to me to warrant more research for sources, and the first Google result was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences It does seem to clearly contradict your claim. Further research directed me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_dimorphic_nucleus http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.abstract Generally, searching for "sexual dimorphism human brain" brings up a lot of results. It seems that you should update your data.
Perhaps this is dong wittingly. Health care, education, and law are all fields that offer secure, local, long-term employment with excellent maternity benefits. Physicists, mathematicians, and other hard science fields often provide much less reliable employment, frequently with travel requirements (academics typically do not get to spend their careers in one place) and excessive time commitments required. Put simply, women steer clear of STEM jobs because they stink if you want to reproduce.
Want to make STEM jobs attractive to women? Start rewarding scientists in measure with their education investment. Stop treating grad students and post-docs worse than pipe-fitters and welders.
Personally I thought about income prospects when choosing a career. In my experience women are less likely to do so, which makes sense.
(Edit: can't write more comments - it makes sense because women have the option to have children and are not expected to provide for the family financially).
Basically the article claims that while girls have a slightly higher average IQ than boys, boys have greater variance in IQ than girls. So while there is not much difference in average boys' and girls' mathematical abilities, the super smart top 0.001% will consist predominantly of boys.
To begin with, this discussion is almost totally void of even the mention of education (the word not appearing once), acting like all children are objects in in the global school array, with a method called "getIntrinsicScore" that gets called a few times in their life before the are casted into adult objects.
However, a simple recollection of your time in school will tell you that not everyone was treated equally by the teacher and the other students, and also that school was a pretty big deal in your life at the time.
So to talk about the correlations in test scores of children and neglecting to mention the influence of the school is not very informed. But since the influence of a school on the test scores of a child is not particularly well understood (witness the debate on "how to fix the schools"), it is really hard to make any firm claims if you include it.
It is also remarkable how the text underlies that the gap in scores appears with age, but does not attempt to explain this observation while advocating a static theory of "ability". The author states outright that there a property fixed at birth that determines your "ability", and then always talks like "ability" and test-score are perfectly correlated.
(For effect I will here do the semantic simplification the "ability" and "test-score" are perfectly interchangeable,because if the implied perfect correlation.)
So, the thesis is that the test-scores are fixed at birth, but the author also accepts as empirical fact that the difference of test-scores appears first around puberty. This is a curious behavior for something that is "fixed". It is highly worrying that this is not addressed at all in the exposition of the theory.
If programming requires significantly higher IQ than average, then if male and female IQ variance are disparate then males and females will be differently represented in the programming field.
It's not really an issue of 'kicking in'; in any normally-distributed function, differences in variance are always relevant, and can rapidly be more important than the mean the further one gets from the 50th percentile.
you can frame sexism in a ton of different ways. these awards are sure to spike debate even among entrenched feminists. the phenomena is not specific to the pmc though--Oscars, anyone?
Awards attempt to celebrate something.
Somehow the author applauds "Organizations such as TechWomen [...] working together with initiatives like Girls Who Code, and Million Women Mentors" yet doesn't see how these organizations exist probably for the same reason this award does. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if so the article should have certainly discussed it.
Prizes for maths are a bit of a weird thing anyway - ultimately you are doing this stuff because you enjoy solving the problems. While I think maths contests are great - I got so much out of attending the training session they held at Cambridge to choose the IMO team and meeting other people like me, even though it was an intimidating experience at first - they are competitive enough without over-emphasising it.
All of which isn't to say that there aren't massive gender issues that need to be addressed somehow or that stereotype threat isn't real. Those are horribly thorny problems to deal with though and so engrained in our culture generally - a whole other essay!
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/31/magazine/cliffhanger.html?...
If they were less capable they wouldn't be under-represented, and there would be no reason to encourage more women to compete.
The reason is, that programming changed from a badly payed women job in the 70s to a highly payed men job in the 80s. Nearly no man would work as a coder today, if we assume old female salaries. The personal computer created the lony male computer autistic - and this culture change, together with the male elbow and sexism drove women out of coding.
sounds like a bunch of politics trolling and narcissists forcing others to see their ways as the only way