[BretLudwig]

Who knew?

"Here's a funny article from the Boston Globe on the Larry Summers
Quandary: Why have women professors made so much more progress at
Harvard's Law, Business, and Medical schools than in its mathematics and
engineering departments? It's a good article, but what's amusing and
depressing is how hard the journalist has to work to explain concepts that
should be bleeding obvious to any college student, much less the college
professors who will be most professionally interested in this topic.

The freedom to say 'no'

Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial
new research suggests: They just aren't interested.

Elaine McArdle

WHEN IT COMES to the huge and persistent gender gap in science and
technology jobs, the finger of blame has pointed in many directions:
sexist companies, boy-friendly science and math classes, differences in
aptitude. ...

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a
perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the
gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves.
When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial
numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those
careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women's own
preferences are the single most important factor in that field's dramatic
gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted
students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to
avoid physics and the other "hard" sciences in favor of work in medicine
and biosciences.

It's important to note that these findings involve averages and do not
apply to all women or men; indeed, there is wide variety within each
gender.

Wouldn't it be great if supposedly educated people knew that goes without
saying?

The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures
on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the
way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for
instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant
sexism in the workplace.

But if these researchers are right, then a certain amount of gender
gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women
finally can forge their own vocational paths. And understanding how
individual choices shape the gender balance of some of the most important,
financially rewarding careers will be critical in fashioning effective
solutions for a problem that has vexed people for more than a generation.

A few years ago, Joshua Rosenbloom, an economist at the University of
Kansas, became intrigued by a new campaign by the National Science
Foundation to root out what it saw as pervasive gender discrimination in
science and engineering. The agency was spending $19 million a year to
encourage mentoring programs, gender-bias workshops, and cooperative work
environments.

Rosenbloom had no quarrel with the goal of gender equity. But as he
saw it, the federal government was spending all that money without any
idea what would work, because there was no solid data on what caused the
disparity between men and women in scientific fields.

Perhaps spending $19 million was the point of spending $19 million?
Economists are supposed to think about self-interest and incentives, but
they tend to act as if a disinterested pursuit of truth is all that
matters in academic politics.

To help answer the question, Rosenbloom surveyed hundreds of
professionals in information technology, a career in which women are
significantly underrepresented. He also surveyed hundreds in comparable
careers more evenly balanced between men and women. ...

Personal preference, Rosenbloom and his group concluded, was the
single largest determinative factor in whether women went into IT. They
calculated that preference accounted for about two-thirds of the gender
imbalance in the field. The study was published in November in the Journal
of Economic Psychology.

It may seem like a cliche - or rank sexism - to say women like to work
with people, and men prefer to work with things. Rosenbloom acknowledges
that, but says that whether due to socialization or "more basic
differences," the genders on average demonstrate different vocational
interests.

"It sounds like stereotypes," he said in an interview, "but these
stereotypes have a germ of truth."

What exactly does the word "stereotype" mean these days among the
educated? Something that we all know is true on average but only bad
people mention? But do people really know that they are lying? I don't
think so.
By the way, what I'm increasingly fascinated by how unrebellious, how
credulously trusting of authority the post-1960s generations have turned
out to be. They go to school, get told obvious lies, then they go out and
repeat them over and over and over. The idea that you can't trust anybody
over 30 is totally foreign to the youth of recent decades. Perhaps the
reason for this stability is because the schools are run by 1960s People,
and the 1960s People discovered exactly what callow youths want to hear.

In the language of the social sciences, Rosenbloom found that the
women were "self-selecting" out of IT careers. The concept of
self-selection has long interested social scientists as an explanation for
how groups sort themselves over time. Since human beings are heterogeneous,
self-selection predicts that when offered a menu of options and freedom of
choice, people will make diverse choices and sort themselves out in
nonrandom ways. In other words, even given the same opportunities, not
everybody will do the same thing - and there are measurable reasons that
they will act differently from one another.


It's striking how the concept of "self-selection" has to be spelled out as
if it's some conceptual breakthrough in String Theory, rather than the most
obvious thing in the whole entire world. This shows how lacking in basic
tools our intellectual discourse is these days. My best guess is that the
stupidity of modern intellectual life largely has its roots in group
differences in IQ, crime rates, and the like.

The concept of self-selection sets off alarms for many feminists.

Indeed. Rational thought in general terrifies feminists ... and rightly
so.

But self-selection has also emerged as the chief explanation in other
recent studies of gender imbalance, including a long-term survey done by
two Vanderbilt researchers, Camilla Persson Benbow and David Lubinski.

Starting more than 30 years ago, the Study of Mathematically
Precocious Youth began following nearly 2,000 mathematically gifted
adolescents, boys and girls, tracking their education and careers in
ensuing decades. (It has since been expanded to 5,000 participants, many
from more recent graduating classes.) Both men and women in the study
achieved advanced credentials in about the same numbers. But when it came
to their career paths, there was a striking divergence.

Math-precocious men were much more likely to go into engineering or
physical sciences than women. Math-precocious women, by contrast, were
more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences,
humanities, and social sciences. Both sexes scored high on the math SAT,
and the data showed the women weren't discouraged from certain career
paths.

The survey data showed a notable disparity on one point: That men,
relative to women, prefer to work with inorganic materials; women, in
general, prefer to work with organic or living things. This gender
disparity was apparent very early in life, and it continued to hold steady
over the course of the participants' careers.

Wow. Who knew?

Here's something more interesting:

Benbow and Lubinski also found something else intriguing: Women who
are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal
abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as
well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious
women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become
scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this
range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of
certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

So, if you are, say, Margaret Thatcher, and have an Oxford degree in
Chemistry, well, that's nice but you have other options in life.

Why this difference? There's a big surplus of males in Benbow and
Lubinski's sample of the mathematically gifted, so this suggests that
women who are good at math tend to be good at math because they have a
high overall g factor. In contrast, males tend to have more specialized
mental skills useful in math, such as 3-d imagination skills, which
doesn't correlate as highly with the g factor as most other cognitive
traits."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/who-knew.html

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