gendered awards are a way of inviting and encouraging participation. The author acknowledges low female participation, but purposes to abolish something that sends a clear message ("females are welcomed and encouraged to participate.")
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?
"society unwittingly steers female students into careers like health care, education, and law, and encourages male students to pursue STEM careers"
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.
I really don't think people put much weight on what post-docs will be like when choosing their career. People just pick a career that interests them. Reproduction is not a concern for a typical 18-year-old.
If that's true, maybe it is a good thing if society stirs people into the right direction. So that when they find they want children, surprise, they "accidentally" chose just the right profession for it.
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).
Tech is lucrative, but extremely unstable and hyper-competitive. In the past 6 years working in tech, both my wife and I have worked at 4 different companies. I have often wondered if this contributes to the reason that women leave tech in larger numbers than men. Sexism is unacceptable, of course, and we should root it out, but we do ourselves a disservice to dismiss other reasons tech might be hostile to women.
The author argues that the women's prize helps to perpetuate the inequalities of men and women in mathematics. I think that is completely wrong. Its existence certainly acknowledges the existing inequality. But the prize encourages greater female participation, so works to counter the inequality rather than further it. The author seems to think that if we all just stopped talking about sexism it would go away. That is simply not how it works.
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.
Anecdotally, that high variance seems to show up for a whole lot of things. I'm not sure why that would be the case, but two unfounded guesses would be biological (females spend more resources birthing children thus males are more proactively competing, and high variance is a reasonable strategy) or cultural (it's more acceptable for males, particular young and adolescent ones, to be "obsessed" with some narrow skill or hobby).
I have an anecdotal evidence related to this. In the secondary grammar school, I participated in the so-called math olympics, which consisted of three levels, school level, district level, and then country level. It was not related to "carrier choice", and both boys and girls participated in the school level . Once I managed to advance to the country level (the winners there go to the International olympics), and from around 100 participants, I hardly remember there was any girl... probably a few, but certainly less than 5%. And there wasn't any artificial discrimination, nobody cared if you are boy or girl.
It might be true, but how usefulness is it when dealing with society as a whole?. For the Puttman, it probably kicks in, but for a whole field like e.g. programing/computer science/IT, it almost certainly doesn't for the simple reason that the field isn't composed of anywhere near the top 0.001 percent of the population in terms of IQ.
> but for a whole field like e.g. programing/computer science/IT, it almost certainly doesn't for the simple reason that the field isn't composed of anywhere near the top 0.001 percent of the population in terms of IQ.
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.
With a discussion centered on ability, but no attempt to define this nebulous concept, it seems impossible for this argument to be "true" in any strong sense.
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.
The article reads as if because of political correctness it HAS to be true that there are no differences in intellectual capacity between men and women. It also misrepresents Summer's quote - I think what he said is that the distribution might be different, he never said women can not be as smart as men.
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):
> because of political correctness it HAS to be true that there are no differences in intellectual capacity between men and women
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.
Summers's point was about the distribution at the extremes, not the average. He was addressing the lack of professors in STEM at places like Harvard which manifestly select for the far end of the bell curve. Right, wrong, or otherwise, that has almost nothing to do with the average case and even he contended that the best statistical evidence showed women and men were roughly equal.
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.
A survey (published in Science[1]) of ~1800 academics across 30 disciplines in the US saw a non-significant positive correlation between estimates of how selective a department is with graduate students and the female representation in that disciplines.
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.
Assuming no difference isn't Politically Correct (by which I take it you mean a social lie that nobody actually believes). Really, there are no differences (cf Delusions of Gender http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-D...). There is no difference between a woman's brain and a man's. Give two brain scans (fMRIs/MEGs/EEGs etc) to a neuroscientist and they cannot tell which one belongs to which gender.
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.
There is no difference between a woman's brain and a man's. Give two brain scans (fMRIs/MEGs/EEGs etc) to a neuroscientist and they cannot tell which one belongs to which gender.
I kind of think the authors own bias is showing through here. There is a prize for women not because women are thought to be any less capable, but because they are thought to be equally capable.
If they were less capable they wouldn't be under-represented, and there would be no reason to encourage more women to compete.
This article is political correctness on top of political correctness. Because of good intentions in promoting diversity, lots of awards target people of underrepresented groups. E.g., College Board has awards for hispanics.
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.
"The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists."
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.
I was the 'top girl' in various mathematics contests etc. (British Maths Olympiad, Oxford entrance exam) when I was at school. It didn't really bother me and if anything was useful recognition at school. I think this was probably because I was sufficiently good at maths that it couldn't possibly occur to me that I couldn't be good at maths (plus having a mum who is a mathematician was a good role model). I think actually getting a prize for being the top would have been a bit weird though and I'm trying to put my finger on why (and when I did come top in exams at Oxford, nobody commented on who the top male was!). At that sort of level, you don't need encouragment to participate.
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!
37 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 84.8 ms ] threadyou 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.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/31/magazine/cliffhanger.html?...
sounds like a bunch of politics trolling and narcissists forcing others to see their ways as the only way
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.
[1]: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262.abstract
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.
If they were less capable they wouldn't be under-represented, and there would be no reason to encourage more women to compete.
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.
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.
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!