Was Larry Summers Right about Women in Science and Math?
Posted on February 7th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 45 Comments »
Mmmmm…no.
As NPR reports, a childhood friend of his, Eileen Pollack, a former scientist and now a teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan, has written a book exploring why there are so few women in STEM fields relative to men.
After Summers’ infamous 2005 speech on the subject—a watershed in his disastrous Harvard presidency—Pollack, who knew Summers in high school, sat down to write him a long email explaining why he was wrong to suggest that women had less genetic aptitude for math and science than men do. Pollack, who says that she always considered Summers an admirer of smart women, thought he had gone very wrong on this one. The email grew into the book, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boys Club. (The book is blurbed, by the way, by MIT prof Nancy Hopkins, who stood up and walked out of that Summers speech, one of the main reasons why it got as much attention as did.)
Pollack argues that the primary reason for the lack of women in STEM is still a lack of support from more senior figures in those fields, and from their own peers—an explanation that certainly sounds much more credible than the idea that male and female brains are hardwired differently. (As I recall, Summers also suggested that those fields are so competitive, many women would have trouble succeeding at their highest levels because of greater family obligations, whether due to choice or social mores.)
Pollack goes on to suggest that Summers may have done women a service, drawing attention to the issue by bringing it up in such a boneheaded way. I think that’s probably true. But ten years down the road, it doesn’t sound like a lot has changed.
45 Responses
2/7/2024 7:32 am
Let me say first that I’ve always sucked at math and am not much better in physics or chemistry. Accordingly I have met many girls/women who are better or much better than me in STEM subjects.
But I have met many more boys/men who are good, very good, or brilliant in these fields.
Richard writes that “the idea that male and female brains are hardwired differently” is not credible. But what is the alternative? Surely not that everyone’s brain is wired the same — that humans are each born with a blank slate between their ears that gets written on differently over time.
There are some seven billion humans living on this planet, and every one is built differently, with a different genetic complement, and with differently wired brains. But are there specific types of wirings that predispose an individual to be good at exploring mathematics and science at the highest level? And are these wirings distributed unequally between the sexes?
As far as I know, Summers did not claim that the science is settled. But there are indications this is true. Merely mentioning them is anathema in today’s PC climate and so Summers got pilloried. The witch hunt launched on him (a champion of equal rights and equal opportunity) by the crazy uber-feminists (as well as the racial grievance mongers) demanding equal outcomes (when favorable to their interests) at Harvard was one of the ugliest sights in recent memory.
2/7/2024 8:56 am
“Pollack argues that the primary reason for the lack of women in STEM is still a lack of support from more senior figures in those fields…”
So women are just at good at STEM as men are, the only problem is that they need special help (which they apparently aren’t getting) to succeed?
If they’re truly just as good, why do they need special help?
If my brother can do 30 pull-ups, but I can only do 2 unless I have special help, I’m pretty sure that means our upper body strength is not equal.
2/7/2024 9:53 am
I don’t like that you don’t bother to quote (or link to) Summers’ argument.
Personally, I prefer Scott Alexander on this. http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/
2/7/2024 9:58 am
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2/7/2024 10:24 am
Mmmmm…maybe.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121691806472381521
2/7/2024 10:40 am
The claim is that men already receive support from senior researchers and peers, while women do not.
2/7/2024 11:32 am
The issue isn’t — or shouldn’t be — what Summers said… he made clear that he was referring to how economists, of which he is one, might try to analyze the situation.
The real issue is that at an institution of higher education, which is supposed to encourage critical thinking including unpopular ideas, and which Harvard allegedly is, forced him out as president for doing just that.
Not that any of this should come as a surprise… what else would you expect from the same crew that endorsed ObamaCare and all of the lies behind it, until they had their eyes forcibly opened to the fact that they were among those being lied to, and when, to borrow a phrase from Hillary Clinton, to believe those lies in the first place “requires the willing suspension of disbelief”…
2/7/2024 12:41 pm
There’s no women in science because it’s a shitty job and women have much tons better options for their careers.
2/7/2024 1:30 pm
Pollack argues that the primary reason for the lack of women in STEM is still a lack of support from more senior figures in those fields, and from their own peers—an explanation that certainly sounds much more credible than the idea that male and female brains are hardwired differently
I think you mean it sounds more palatable (maybe it was an auto-complete error). “Safer” might work too. But “more plausible”? As you note ten years on nothing has changed-ten years of concerted effort.
2/7/2024 1:43 pm
Don’t lose me on this blog; I was enjoying it.
Men and women are different. There is simply nothing in the world that indicates that we are the same, and that our distribution of talents and cognition is the same. It is pure blindness or pandering of the most ridiculous kind to contradict the fact that “male and female brains are hardwired differently.” In fact, please type out the alternate to that sentence. “Male and female brains are hardwired the same.” Is this really what you mean?
FWIW, my wife is a PhD economist, and a better mathematician than most PhD mathematicians. She has taught and tutored many male and female math students. She laughs when she hears claptrap like this. I do, too, but I’m a white male professional, so that doesn’t count.
2/7/2024 2:09 pm
The problem with the reasoning that girls are not as successful in STEM because of lack of support is when we look at the other side of the curve, where we find that boy outnumber girls by 2 to 1 in special needs classes, and logic dictates that this must also be because of lack of support from mentors.
There’s a zillion articles and papers discussing this, but here’s the one that popped up first on Google:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2743449/Boys-twice-likely-diagnosed-special-needs-girls-new-figures-reveal.html
2/7/2024 3:17 pm
Richard,
Please take a look at this. Steve Hsu’s blog is a wealth of information on this and similar topics.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/11/gender-differences-in-preferences.html
2/7/2024 6:58 pm
For what it’s worth, after a long career in computers, I don’t believe that there is a relevant difference in ability between men and women for most computing or technical jobs.
I have seen some data suggesting that there are some differences at the extremes of math and physics ability - and not having researched it, I consider the jury out until I look at that data - but most STEM jobs - including most computer jobs - are not in theoretical math or physics.
My personal belief is that men and women often have somewhat different styles and priorities, and that the STEM fields are sometimes less willing to consider that different work styles do not equate to better or worse employees.
I have seen relatively little deliberate discrimination, but I have heard intolerance of different styles, and I’ve heard men express opinions about male superiority in tech that, IMHO, are not remotely supported by the reality of their relative talents.
This is exacerbated by personal preferences, which are somewhat different by gender. Someone who feels that family or kids are very important; someone who would be willing to work part time to be with their kids more; someone who is more interested in doing something for the common good rather than getting extremely rich - all of those preferences may also be held by someone who is absolutely brilliant in computing and mathematics.
It’s not mutually exclusive, even though it doesn’t match the stereotype of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Different does not mean inferior. For the most part, I have been treated fairly over a long career and absolutely fairly in my current position - but I have also seen cases where unspoken assumptions about the “right” way to work and the “right” things to believe looked more at a person’s differences rather than their superior results.
Not working around someone’s need for a flexible schedule is fine if you’re in retail sales. A clerk has to be there when the store is open. If you’re throwing away technical talent because someone wants to work the same number of hours, but have a hole in the schedule to pick up and drop off their kid at school and then work late afterwards, you may be selling yourself short.
And that person may wind up in a lucrative technical management or sales position instead, when they’re perfectly capable of designing and developing that same technology.
There is not such an excess of brains and talent in this world that we can afford to write it off because of gender. If we’re disrupting the world, we should be smart enough to distinguish between “we’ve always done it this way” and “what is actually needed to get the job done.”
2/7/2024 10:27 pm
There’s an important APA study on this here:
http://sites.duke.edu/ampwis/files/2014/11/Women-in-Academic-Science-A-Changing-Landscape.pdf
Note the study concludes, exempting a few outliers, most STEM fields are gender neutral across many measure - tenure offers, article citations, etc.
The authors do acknowledge “right-tail differences” on aptitude tests as a factor driving the outcome difference, but don’t speculate much on what’s causing this or how mutable it is.
2/8/2024 1:49 am
There are doubtless a lot of ‘hard-wired’ differences, but there are also many ways to misinterpret and misuse that fact. Anyone who extrapolates from that sort of information to conclude that either sex is overall superior or inferior is, frankly, an idiot. (I recognize that no one here is doing that.) Notwithstanding that, Larry Summers isn’t the sort of person I’d be quoting, ever, in any context.
2/8/2024 8:55 am
Steve Denheyer -
The legal world has a saying - “False in one, false in all,” meaning that if someone is caught deliberately being untruthful or even trying to do so, everything they say can rightfully be viewed as suspect and even false. Normally I’d follow and read the link you provided, but given that, among other things, it’s from Duke University, it’s safe to say that it’s tainted, and to say nothing of the fact that you mention that it references tenure, which is also an indication that it is likely phoney.
Remember the ‘Duke 88’? In case you don’t, they were the 88 ‘professors’ who, before any investigation, signed their names to a public proclamation that the soccer players were guilty of rape, and who doubled down and reiterated their statement even after it was proved the whole rape story was bogus. Do you remember the school or even any of their colleagues saying anything against that travesty? Neither do I. In fact, and because of that, I’d go so far as to say that Duke isn’t a real university and that any graduate should sue for fraud because their sheepskin isn’t worth anything, never mind the inflated price they paid for it because it was from ‘Duke.’
You mention (quote?) “most STEM fields are gender neutral across many measure – tenure offers, article citations, etc.” According to statistics from ‘higher ed’ itself, only ~ 2% of professors are registered as Republicans/Conservatives, and there are countless examples of bias against those who do, including attempts — mostly successful — to deny them tenure. Are we really expected to believe that any system with that kind of bias is credible in any way, shape or form?
Note that I’m not attacking you… I’m merely pointing out that relying on statistics from any organization about itself is always a shaky proposition, and in the case of ‘higher ed’ in general and Duke in particular…
2/8/2024 10:19 am
I always find it weird how some people lamented how STEM full of men but not about how nursing and teaching full of women.
Men and women are born with different preferences. Just like how it’s mostly men love sports and mostly women love fashion. I’m sure there are lot of women out there who can do STEM if they want to, but they are just not interested in it and prefer other courses.
2/8/2024 11:38 am
Gal -
Great observation. I’ve noted previously on another thread that Canada’s RCMP (read the Canadian government) want to increase to 50% the number of females in the force. The only problem is that women already make up 29% and by the government’s own numbers, only 27% of women are interested in police work, meaning that in a very important sense — women who are interested — women are already over-represented…
2/8/2024 1:08 pm
Gal -
Postscript to my comment on your point: Perhaps it comes down to women being more interested in fields dealing with emotions and men being more interested in dealing with facts.
Michael Bloomberg was asked why he didn’t retire after leaving as mayor of New York. His reply (not a verbatim quote) was “And do what? Stay home and talk about feelings all day with Diana?” (Diana Taylor, his girlfriend.)
2/8/2024 2:16 pm
InterestedObserver, you might want to actually read the material you’re responding to. The link goes to a host at Duke - which is where the pdf file is hosted - , but the article was written by economists and psychologists at Cornell and Boston University.
So you’re dismissing an article because it came from Duke, when in fact the article itself did not come from Duke. Had you clicked on the link, that data is on the third line of the first page.
I’m also at quite a loss as to how looking at comparative rates of tenure makes a study “obviously phony.”
There is some difference in preferences between men and women - and how much of that is innate and how much is cultural isn’t really settled. I’m not basing my opinions on this study, although I thought it was was actually very good - I’m basing it on my own reading over quite a few years and on conversations with a close friend, who is a research psychologist.
Understanding preferences and differences in ability are particularly relevant in some STEM fields. Some countries, including the US, have higher differences between men and women, and some have very low differences in those preferences - in a few cases, women score better than men and have higher preferences to math than men. That suggests these preferences and scoring differences are not solely innate and do have a cultural and environmental component.
Personally, as a woman, there are few things I am less interested in than sitting home discussing my feelings, whether with my spouse or anyone else. I’d rather program for fun. I will comment that if I was single and I’d seen that quote from a boyfriend, I would be looking for another boyfriend, billionaire or not.
I think women are often more interested in team and societal outcomes, and some of that may be innate. I am reasonably certain some of that is cultural. When you get into things like programming talent, there really isn’t good evidence that talent is gender-based.
Further, after decades in the field, my first-hand observation is that, in organizations that have a purpose - education, non-profit, that sort of thing - you tend to see a high percentage of women in computer and mathematical jobs - often far higher than in the workforce as a whole. It’s not unusual to see half or more. My observation - first hand - is that they perform at a very high level, comparable to performances at top for profit firms.
I believe part of this is difference in work styles and also preferences in workplace culture. This is why, for example, you see very gifted women going into fields like epidemiology and bioinformatics, rather than the somewhat more lucrative CS or engineering majors. The former are also math-intensive, but they tend to be jobs that have a greater connection to the outcome and goals of the work.
Mis-reading this as “women just don’t like math and computers and it’s innate” is, in my personal opinion, just that - misreading the data.
2/8/2024 3:20 pm
This is just one of many claims that are made that come up because there is a difference between a demographic group percentage and the percentage of that group in a particular field or job.
The underlying assumption is that the percentage distribution in all careers, fields, or jobs should be exactly the same as the demographic distribution. So right away, I think the basic assumption is silly.
I don’t think it’s a “problem” that the percentage of women in STEM fields is below their demographic percentage any more than I think it is a “problem” that the percentage of women in college is greater than their demographic percentage.
The main point is that there are no specific legal or cultural prohibitions preventing a woman, an African American, an Asian, a gay man or lesbian, etc. from going into STEM fields. If there are such prohibitions, let’s talk about that. But if there aren’t such prohibitions, give it a rest.
Equality does not and never has meant equality of outcomes. But complaints about disparate percentages from demography to fields of study or profession are exactly all about equality of outcomes. Inequality of outcomes, in turn, do not have to be traced to some cultural norm that is preventing equality of outcomes. Equality of outcomes do not exist.
Let individual men, women, and so on do what they like. No one should subordinate their individual preferences in life to a shibboleth of equality.
2/8/2024 4:56 pm
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect exactly equal distribution of genders by jobs.
I do think that the fact that women’s % participation in computing, and their % completion of CS degrees, has dropped significantly in the past 30 years, at the same time that the career has become more lucrative, does indicate there are issues that go beyond individual preference.
My personal best guess - and I started back then, so I’ve seen some of how the field has changed - is that it’s largely work styles and a change to a more driven and less family friendly style of working - and that women who are quite capable of being outstanding in computing are instead looking at fields like bioinformatics, epidemiology, and other math-ier sides of fields like biology, health, and business.
I believe, and it’s backed by first-hand observation, that companies that work to be a bit more family friendly tend to attract more well-qualified women, who do just as much work and do it just as well as the guys do.
I think it’s quite reasonable to ask if particular ways of organizing work are utilizing the entire population to best effect, or if non-standard approaches - such as flexible hours - might get more work done and increase the potential recruit pool.
I’m not suggesting affirmative action. I am suggesting “check your assumptions” about what makes a good employee and how that good employee should work. People are different.
I don’t see that much outright discrimination towards individuals in real life - but I do see some fairly toxic stereotyping on chat lists or comments sections, such as posts boasting that the poster is a better programmer than any woman because he has a Y chromosome.
Not to put too fine a point on it, that doesn’t display the logic skills I generally associate with good programmers.
2/8/2024 7:09 pm
OW UVA Alumna -
Thanks for reading my comment and responding in a civil manner.
Before responding to your criticism, let me show my bias: I think that men and women are pretty much equal in terms of intellectual pursuits, with any differences in abilities being artificially created, and that women should be encouraged and helped to do whatever they want to do. Any differences in innate abilities are due to some combination of socialization (the environment) and genetic evolution, with those things being inter-related. We can and should change the socialization component, and the brain is certainly flexible enough to adapt to the changed environment in as little as a generation. The Canadian military has done extensive research and found women to be much better at multitasking than are men. I attribute that to the environmental variable… managing a household with a bunch of children running around is much more chaotic than is the typical job, which is typically more linear and focused on one thing at a time. To turn this discussion on its head, if my premise is correct, we should be able to teach men to be equally good at multitasking. So even though you and I use different language for some things, I think that we are really not so far apart in how we view the issue.
Ability is necessary but not sufficient, and the same is true of interest… we need both of those things together. On the surface it might appear that we can affect ability more than interest, but I don’t think that is true… I think a lack of interest is often because of a lack of ability, and as we increase women’s abilities to do STEM-type stuff, their interest in doing so will increase along with it. Again, when I say increase women’s abilities, I mean providing them with the same opportunities and encouragement and help as men.
For the record, lest you think I am wallowing in the muck with my fellow oink oinks, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had four exceptional bosses during my career (out of many less than stellar ones), and three of them were women who I had great admiration and respect for. I only mentioned Bloomberg (whom I detest because he effectively bribed some city council members to overturn term limits, thereby allowing him to run for a third term) because his comment effectively mirrors a common stereotype of males and females. Whether the stereotype is correct or not is besides the point - it exists. I mostly agree with you about women generally placing a higher value on team and societal values than do men.
To your criticism of me…
You missed my overall point, which is that unfortunately, higher education has become obsessed with indoctrinating students with and enforcing political correctness with speech codes at the expense of actually teaching things of value, including critical thinking and including unpopular ideas (unpopular in the minds of those who go around proclaiming their openness - the left, who as noted, comprise the vast majority of professors; for the record, having criticized the left, I’m happy to stipulate that the right is equally detrimental to society in its own way). As but one example of the warped sense of right and wrong in higher ed, I’ll point out that Columbia for several years thought nothing of having the president or Iran — a country that stones gays to death — speak, while prohibiting ROTC on campus because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t speak” policy. I thought that I made it abundantly clear that Duke was no different than most other schools, so your pointing out that the study came from Cornell and Boston U. hardly invalidates my observation, and if it wasn’t clear, I apologize.
My point about tenure was simply this: how do you reconcile the lip service higher ed pays to diversity with their blackballing of people they don’t agree with? If they are that blatantly dishonest about one thing, it’s a safe bet that they are similarly dishonest about other things, and who has the time (or expertise) to figure out when they are lying and when they aren’t? I’ll be glad to give you concrete examples, including names, if you ask.
And for what it’s worth, I enjoyed your post.
2/9/2024 1:30 am
This has turned out to be an amazing conversation, in spite of the inane opening post (sorry, Richard).
I would second InterestedObserver’s praise for OW UVA Alumna’s comments. In software engineering, specifically, the present culture appears to skew heavily to male-typical working styles. Crazy deadlines, caffeine and pizza-fueled all-nighters, machine-oriented instead of people-oriented outlook, etc.
This is pushing qualified women away and depriving society of much-needed talent. That women have “the right stuff” in programming is not in doubt. Speaking of which, I recommend the Fastcompany article “They Write The Right Stuff”, about the software for the space shuttle. There can be no more mission-critical project, with the penalties for errors more severe, and fewer opportunites for fixing something that goes wrong “on the fly”, than the space shuttle’s computers.
So yeah, something is wrong in software engineering that fewer women do it nowadays and it needs fixing.
But I would caution against extrapolating from there to a general statement about just any field in which women are numerically under-represented. I am going to go out on a limb and say that theoretical physics will remain a male bastion for the foreseeable future, and not due to obstacles thrown up by the culture, bias, or discrimination. There are women who do theoretical physics at the highest level, but they are few and far between.
Or take another intellectual pursuit: professional competitive chess. There has only been one woman legitimately ranked in the top ten worldwide — Judit Polgar. She has beaten not only top grandmasters but, if memory serves, every world champion and former world champion she has played against at least once. Her accomplishments are all her own and not due to any preferments or affirmative action. But unless the current female No. 1, China’s Hou Yifan, follows in her footsteps (which she may yet), her achievement stands alone.
Every individual, male or female, deserves to be evaluated on their merits. Prejudice is harmful, including to the one wielding it. But the admission committees at graduate fields in STEM fields are not idiots. They do not need to be told about such home truths. If fewer women are making it into these programs at top universites, it is not because of bias, but because there are fewer female than male interested and qualified candidates. That goes even more for professorships and tenure decisions.
Anyone who claims that graduate students, assistant and full professorships in theoretical physics, mathematics, engineering must be 50 percent female and until this is achieved we have a problem is an idiot (not to put too fine a point on it). Though I might take these people a little (just a little) more seriously once they demand 50 percent female workers in the sanitation department scrubbing sewers.
2/9/2024 1:39 am
I meant “… at graduate schools in STEM fields…”, sorry.
2/9/2024 2:12 am
… and “competitive chess” is just redundant. The Squad Squad will be coming after me!
2/9/2024 1:22 pm
Anonymous -
I believe ‘competitive chess’ is tautological, kind of like ‘the murdered man was dead’… perhaps Richard can correct me if I’m mistaken.
P.S. I am not a member of the Squad Squad… I’m a member of the ‘too much time on my hands’ squad.
2/9/2024 3:28 pm
I find it suspicious that Richard Bradley wrote something this nonsensical, and then references it as a defense in the comment thread about Emma Sulkowicz.
I wonder if he really believes that women are proportionally represented in possession of whatever inborn traits underly success in STEM fields, or if he believes that saying Amen to the feminist wisdom in that area may give him a get-out-of-lynch-mob-free card for speaking his mind in another area.
2/9/2024 5:10 pm
I have work in “STEM”for the last 30 years. Nobody mentored me. Nobody helped me unless I helped myself. I only found opportunity when I actively sought it out. I have been fired a dozen times, career in shambles. Went on to better jobs and continued skill development.
I should be interested in getting more women into tech? They can only be more competition and they never provide me opportunity.
For women are competing for jobs but are not creating them. Other than providing a mass market for their vanity products, they are not forging new industries or technologies. They are marginalizing that small percentage of men who passionately innovate, destroy, and create ideas and take the risks to drive them to actualization
Though men shank me and insult me, only men provide me with opportunity. Women can only insult me and deprive me of opportunity. Only men, and only a small fraction of them, take the risks that create industry and opportunity. Women can only serve as mere functionaries in man-created structures. When an organization becomes feminized, priority shifts from efficient and profitable production of goods and services to development of labarynthine rules for the comfort and security of women. Ossification and organizational death are inevitable.
2/9/2024 9:23 pm
I generally enjoy Richard’s blog, but he has done a real disservice on this one.
Reducing Larry Summers’ hypothesis that the sexes could exhibit a similar mean/median aptitude but different distributions at the extremes (both high and low) to “why he was wrong to suggest that women had less genetic aptitude for math and science than men do” is a gross distortion.
As for dismissing out of hand the idea that perhaps “male and female brains are hardwired differently”, I like to raise the example of propensity to violence. If the natural order is for men and women to be proportionally represented in every sphere, then law enforcement needs to get off their asses and track down all the female murderers who must be evading justice.
2/10/2024 8:02 am
Thank you for the kind words. I am really enjoying this discussion.
The paper referenced is IMHO actually quite good and appears to look at the data rather than trying to get hoped for conclusions. If I had to summarize what the data says, based on the paper and on other readings I’ve done, it would be:
Men and women have roughly equivalent mental abilities
There appear to be more men than women on the far extremes of the distribution of math abilities. Note that this does not say no women - it says fewer women in a an already very small portion of the population. Also note - male extremes are on both sides.
But that difference varies among countries and cultures, with some countries showing little or no difference between men and women in math abilities.
There does appear to be some gender difference in top scores in certain forms of spatial visualization, with men showing an advantage in some measures
That difference is also supported by data from women who had a male fraternal twin
Basically, how I have interpreted this is:
The data can’t be assumed to show that “women” are worse than “men” in any particular task
The data can’t be assumed to show that any given man is better than any given woman at any particular task
The data can’t be assumed to show that women cannot achieve in the highest ranks in any particular field
BUT the data does suggest that, at the highest end of performance in certain technical jobs, when you look at the aggregate performance, there may be more men in fields where you use high levels of some types of spatial reasoning and the extreme end of mathematical abilities, without requiring discrimination to explain it.
Examples of this might be grand master chess, theoretical physics, some areas of engineering, some areas of math
Again, that does not mean any specific man will be better than any specific woman and it does not mean that “women can’t do x well.” It does mean you may wind up with a skewed distribution without discrimination.
It also does not imply that, in usual levels of high accomplishment, women are not just as qualified There is a large difference between being a research physicist at CERN and being a programmer. I do see way too many leaps of logic between “more male Nobel Prize winners in physics” and “women can’t do programming well.” The first is demonstrably true, and the second is demonstrably untrue.
Colleges such as Harvey Mudd have identified ways to get more women interested in, and successful in, computer science without watering down the curriculum - and much of that is centered on learning styles. To me, that’s a good thing, since it’s a lucrative and enjoyable career. That still doesn’t mean you will necessarily have an even-Steven 50/50 distribution in the major.
What I think women in general object to are comments like Elmer’s. Not picking on him, but let’s look at the arguments.
I’ve also had a 30+ year career in tech, and my career isn’t in a shambles. During that time, I’ve seen women create jobs, take risks, and turn those risks into reality.
If you go into a woman-headed workplace thinking that only men take the risks that create industry and opportunity - sorry - I’ve seen differently, first-hand. On the other hand, if you feel that way, I can’t imagine a truly innovative woman wanting to hire you. They’re the boss, and they do know it.
Why would any woman driven enough to start a business hire someone who thinks “woman can only serve as mere functionaries in man-created structures”? The successful women I know would kick you to the curb if you pulled an attitude like that.
I think the term for what’s happening with Elmer is called confirmation bias.
Moving from that, I-Roller, I wasn’t really talking about super-structured 9-5 jobs, which aren’t viable for most tech work, although they can be very family friendly. I also was not thinking of discouraging creativity or innovation.
What I was thinking of - and I’ve seen it in action - was work that allows you the flexibility to come in earlier or later, work from home after the regular work day, and let you make time to pick up the kids, or go to the school play, without undue stress.
When work looks more at “what are you accomplishing” and less at “but you took an hour off to go to the school play!” (in a 60 hour work week, I might add), then you get more done.
A lot of the best work gets done in a state of flow - when you’re totally immersed in what you’re doing. That’s easier to do when you’re not guilting over “I should be at the play.”
Doesn’t mean rigid hours or rigid work - it means more flexibility and it sets a good atmosphere for more, not less, creativity.
JMHO
2/10/2024 8:15 am
I think Richard should have an award for Shots in The Dark commenter of the month and I nominate OW UVA Alumna.
Living in Europe, I have noticed that Scandinavian countries, Denmark especially, have more flexible and family-friendly work-time regimes than, say, Germany… and it seems to pay off for them, in terms of quality of life, proportion of people employed in accordance with qualifications, and per-capita income. Men benefit, too, not only women.
2/10/2024 10:24 am
Mmmmmmm, depends on whether one cares about facts or political correctness
http://www.aei.org/publication/2014-math-sat-test-results-confirm-pattern-persisted-40-years-boys-better-math-girls/
“a huge, statistically significant and persistent 30-point gender gap (and a 10 percentile gender gap) on the SAT math test in favor of boys that has persisted for more than 40 years.”
“At the highest level of math performance on the SAT test this year, there were 203 males achieving perfect scores for every 100 females.”
2/10/2024 10:54 am
he was wrong to suggest that women had less genetic aptitude for math and science than men do.
It’s no wonder Richard thinks Summers was wrong since he can’t even correctly state his hypothesis. Summers said it’s possible that the extreme over-representation of men in the highest echelons of math/science can be explained by a higher variability of aptitude among men than among women, resulting in a larger percentage of men than women in both the higher performing and lower performing tails of the bell curve. This cannot be accurately construed as “men have a greater aptitude for math and/or science than women”.
2/10/2024 8:08 pm
Stan, it has nothing to do with political correctness. The numbers do not show what the blog post claims, and are not evidence that, in general, boys are innately better than girls at math.
I’m going to show you what’s wrong with the analysis, because I’m sure you’re not going to take the word of some random Internet commenter on this, especially when I’m contradicting something you want to believe.
First and foremost, SAT scores are not scores of math aptitude, which is what people generally mean when they say someone is better at math. The SAT tests learned skills, not innate ability. Tests for aptitude are somewhat different and are often quite abstract. IIRC, they are often similar to the sample questions Mensa has on its website.
Second, even for what they measure, average SAT scores cannot be used to show average performance of boys versus girls. Why? Because they are not a random sampling. The data has about 105,000 more girls than boys - about 46.9% boys and 53.1% girls. More girls go to college, and more girls take the SAT.
Why does that matter? Because the selection is not random. If men and women have the same average intelligence, distributed similarly, and you pick the top 47 men and the top 53 women, you are going to pick the top 47 women, plus 6 women who are slightly less accomplished. You’re going down further into the talent pool with the women, which means when you average in their lower scores, the average will be lower than if you just picked the top 47 women.
At a guess, the gender difference in college attendance and grades are likely because of behavior and fit issues - there is some data of concern suggesting that our current methods of organizing public education work better for girls than they do for boys.
If you wanted to look at comparative learned skills between men and women, you would need to either sample the full data set, or randomize your sample, correcting for the skew. If you want to test for aptitude, you need to use aptitude tests.
Studies that use randomized samples of girls and boys, internationally, show that they have about the same aptitude on average, with boys having more at the far extremes (both high and low.)
Other comments about the link - as he correctly notes, at the extremes, you see more boys. That is seen with most measures of extreme math skills in US students. (It’s also seen with tests of math aptitude.) Those gender differences are common in many countries, although interestingly enough they are not uniformly seen internationally, which suggests there are cultural and environmental components even in measurements of the far tails of math ability.
Other comments - he notes that female test takers represent 56% of the students in the top 10% of their classes - which is only slightly higher than the percentage of women (53%.) That is important as he uses the differences of various measures repeatedly, without noting that there are many more women taking the tests.
If 53% of test takers are women, and it’s random by gender, you would expect to see 53% female students in the top decile of their class - not 50%. 56% indicates it’s slightly above expectations - but by 3%, not 6%.
He notes that there are more girls in AP or honors math classes (54%) which is again only slightly higher than the percentage of women (53%), but by 1%, not 4%.
He makes the same point about the number of high school students taking 4 years of mathematics - 52% versus 48% - when that actually shows a DISADVANTAGE given their relative percentages in the test pool (you would expect to see 53% if it was equally likely.). In other words, male students were MORE likely to have taken 4 years of high school math than female students.
When you have a much higher number of students of one gender than another, when you look at the raw percentage of the total that has various characteristics, you need to see if it’s higher than their representation in the sample set, not just if it’s a higher percentage.
Looking at the data you link to, girls were slightly less likely to have had 4 years of mathematics than their male counterparts. The larger number of female students suggests that they went deeper into the female talent pool.
And you’re using a skills test, not an aptitude test.
In other words, your data doesn’t show what you think it does.
Finally, I will point out that both men and women scored 800’s on the test. Saying “boys are better at math than girls” is probably news to the 4,842 girls who scored an 800 last year.
2/11/2024 11:03 am
I’m sorry, but this strikes me as PC credentials burnishing. Since Mr. Bradley is getting on the wrong side of the PC divide on rape, this reads like a deliberate signal. “Look everybody, I haven’t totally gone over to the dark side.”
“an explanation that certainly sounds much more credible than the idea that male and female brains are hardwired differently.”
What is incredible about the suggestion that male and female brains are hardwired differently? Sexual dimorphism is ubiquitous in nature and makes perfect biological sense. Why wouldn’t we expect hardwired differences since biologically and historically (until very recently in historical terms) males and females have had different roles? Biological differences is clearly what Occam’s Razor would suggest.
2/11/2024 11:36 am
I’m freelancing a bit here, but it strikes me that it is possible that there are both cognitive and temperamental reasons why men dominate STEM fields, but both would still likely relate to hardwiring. I believe the significant preponderance of men on the right tail of the curve explains the disproportionate dominance of men as innovators and leaders in their respective STEM fields. But there are enough raw numbers of women who are gifted in math and science to make up more of the rank-and-file of the fields than they do. It seems likely to me that women are just not as temperamentally inclined to want jobs in those fields, the same way men are not temperamentally inclined to become social workers. You can invoke culture and bias if you want, but then how do you tease out how much of that culture and bias is a result of temperamental hardwiring?
I spend a lot of my free time on “thinky” political websites. The commentors are almost exclusively male. As you might guess, most of those websites are conservative, so you could say that women just aren’t attracted to hard core conservatism, but the same thing is true of “thinky” liberal sites, as opposed to rant sites like Jezebel. Isn’t it entirely possible that this preponderance of males is related to innate inclinations?
In the same way, maybe there are more male engineers because there are more males temperamentally inclined to the field somewhat separate from the issue of cognitive giftedness.
2/11/2024 1:50 pm
OW UVA Alumna -
Are you available? According to your post, we are in the same age cohort. I am so enjoying your posts…
2/12/2023 3:23 pm
“Family-friendly workplaces” are anathema to many talented, hard-working, ambitious men.
All it means is that you get to work twice as hard, to cover for the gals who earn the same salary as you but are frequently absent when needed.
If anyone, male or female, wants to slow-track their career, that’s their right. But it’s a bit rich for those who have chosen the slow track to then whinge about making less than those who haven’t.
2/16/2015 9:47 am
Anonymous, that’s because you don’t appear to know what a real family-friendly workplace is.
It doesn’t mean working less. It does not mean, or should not mean, slow-tracking your career.
Properly done, a family friendly workplace means having control of your working hours, and being able to time-shift if you need to take kids to the doctor or if you want to attend the school play - or if you need to go to the doctor.
In this day and age, at least for tech jobs, there isn’t much you can’t do on off hours at home. I expect to be snowed in tomorrow with no chance of getting in to the office, but if I work less than 10 hours, it’ll be because my Internet connection went down. It probably won’t be 10 consecutive hours, but I will be working them.
We have a true family-friendly workplace, and the person who I see taking the most advantage of it is a man with young kids. He also puts in his full time and full hours - he’s not shorting anyone - and he does a great job. I think the policy helps him do a better job, because the long hours we all work are not getting in the way of his family time.
When you have control of when you work - when taking an hour break and then working an hour later is no biggie - you get a lot more done with a lot less stress.
I would agree that people who don’t work as hard aren’t going to make as much money or move ahead as quickly. This isn’t about that. This is about people who work just as hard, just as many hours, do just as good a work - but work better with the flexibility to choose which hours in a day to work.
I would also agree that many men don’t like to do this, because it’s different. However, different doesn’t mean less work gets done, or that the work is of lower quality. My argument is that if you focus on the work, the work is more important than looking busy at culturally approved times.
And yes, your reaction is very typical. It’s not a logical response, it’s emotional.
I also personally think the traditional approach makes people more likely to stay at the office past the point of diminishing returns, because they feel like they need to look committed - when driving home, eating dinner, taking a break, and THEN dialing back in would probably get more actual work done.
Looking busy and completing productive work aren’t optimized the same way.
2/23/2015 3:12 am
Interested Observer said: “We can and should change the socialization component”
Why? Why should men and women be socialised to make them identical? Should we socialise everyone to be identical? Why exactly would that be a good thing?
2/23/2015 3:24 am
It seems to me that the assumption that women should choose the same careers, and the same career paths, as men is fundamentally sexist. It’s an assumption that the only valid career is the sort of career that a man would choose. That’s the trouble with feminism today - it’s based on the idea that women should and must be just like men. That’s clearly sexist.
2/23/2015 2:40 pm
It could be good if feminists would articulate precisely why we should care that engineering is dominated by men but not that nursing is dominated by women.
3/4/2024 2:23 pm
dfordoom -
I meant that we should stop telling women that they “can’t” do something when clearly they can, and generally as well as men.
Men and women should choose to do whatever interests them… we just shouldn’t artificially limit it because of history and/or tradition.
By the same token, if you are a guy and want to stay home and look after Jr., have at it.