Today I learned that Pythagoras observed, 2,500 years ago, that men are better at math than women. To me, this is powerful evidence that men are either innately better at math or innately psychologically better suited to studying math. This explains why there are so few women doing computer programming.
Once I intereviewed an attractive young woman for a computer programming job. Believe me, I would have hired her were it not for that fact that I gave her a simple programming task which she was unable to accomplish even though she stared at the computer for two hours. The guy we did hire was able to perform the task in a few minutes.
The writer of the NY Times article, completely dense to the obvious evidence to the contrary, insists that the reason why women are underrepresented among top scientists is because of thousands of years of pervasive societal discrmination.
The societal discrimination explanation makes no sense. There is nothing manly about doing math. Academic pursuits among young people these days are all considered effeminate compared to the more manly athletic activities. Girls probably study harder at math than boys because the general rule is that girls spend more time studying for all their school subjects.
From the NY Times Article:
"While there may indeed be subtle biological differences contributing to the scarcity of women in the top ranks of science, interviews make clear that many female scientists continue to experience both overt and covert discrimination."
Question: Now, how in the hell does a person know when he (or she) is experiencing "covert" discrimination?
Answer: Whenever things don't go his (or her) way.
The NY Times falls ridiculously short simply as a source of information, much less as a source of insight. (We all remember Jason Blair, Janet Malcolm, and that gasbag Howell Raines.)
Timid, patronizing, obvious in the worst sense of the word, and yet willfully overlooking unsettling (and potentially interesting) realities in favor of the most shopworn PC orthodoxies, that's the Times house style.
I reach the third page of some grossly overblown piece that screams of journalistic padding, and I can feel the brain cells in my frontal cortex (or whatever is left of it) slowly dying from lack of stimulation.
And yet I look at Times almost every day. Well, at least I don't subscribe.
Posted by: Fred | October 04, 2006 at 10:46 AM
Are you good at math? That you seem to believe that an anecdote about a woman you interviewed & that citing an observation of Pythagoras constitutes a good argument makes me think that you are not, or at least have trouble constructing logical arguments. I'm actually sympathetic to your overall point, but your way of "proving" it leaves a lot to be desired.
Posted by: Dave | October 04, 2006 at 11:17 AM
HS is correct about social explanations being mostly bunk. On the Larry Summer brou-ha-ha: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003491.html
On women in science in general: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/07/women-in-science-part-3595726061058.php
On the recent NAS article:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/09/women-in-science-again.php
There is no study with great statistical power showing discrimination against women: the one mentioned by Ben Barres a few months ago looked at the awarding of just 20 grants, while another larger study showed no discrimination at the level of hiring tenure-track profs in psychology.
Pythagoras probably noticed a greater sex-gap since his math was mostly visuospatial stuff like geometry. Currently, the male-female difference in means for visuospatial intelligence is about 0.6 SD, which is the largest intelligence gap between sexes (overall gap is either nonexistent or at most 0.2 SD).
Posted by: Agnostic | October 04, 2006 at 12:00 PM
The second link should end in .php
Posted by: Agnostic | October 04, 2006 at 12:01 PM
That "visuospatial" stuff is why women are bad drivers too.
Posted by: Frank N Stein | October 04, 2006 at 02:43 PM
See also Pinker vs Spelke at Edge, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
Posted by: Tim Lundeen | October 04, 2006 at 02:45 PM
You guys never met my wife. She scored well over 700 on the math portion of the GRE. She had a 4.0 GPA in both undergraduate and graduate engineering school.
You should see her do Soduku.
I guess she is in the tail of the distribution for women.
Her problem with engineering wasn't that she was overtly or covertly discriminated against (although in one case she thinks that she was). It was that engineering is not a family friendly profession for women. For example, her engineering license was revoked because she isn't practicing engineering while staying home with our children. In order to get it back, she needs to take the licensing exam all over again. So, more than likely, when and if she returns to the workforce, it won't be as an engineer.
The professions that allow you to still work after taking time off to have kids are the ones that attract women (think nursing and teaching). Science and engineering are incompatible with child rearing, thus they don't attract many women.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 04, 2006 at 03:22 PM
Engineer,
Medicine is more family unfriendly than engineering. A physician has to perform a certain number of procedures every year or lose the ability to bill for the procedures. Pharmacist, optomotrist, physical therapist, and speech pathologist (all heavily female and all requiring annual continuing education.
I do not think that engineering is any more family unfriendly than most of medicine (including the nurses who work nights, weekends, and holidays).
I think one of the biggest problems with engineering and the hard sciences is that the culture just does not appeal to middle class and upper middle class white females.
Women from India, Iran, Korea, and China are all over represented in the sciences versus the percentage of the US population. It is the blond haired, blue eyed white women who, generally, do not want to spend four or more years in classes filled with people named Patel, Kim, and Zhou.
Posted by: superdestroyer | October 04, 2006 at 03:37 PM
The Engineer says:
The professions that allow you to still work after taking time off to have kids are the ones that attract women (think nursing and teaching). Science and engineering are incompatible with child rearing, thus they don't attract many women.
Well, with all due respect, that is bullshit :-)
Any woman can take time off for children and still get back into engineering or science. However, she should not expect things to have stayed the same and her skills to still be as useful as they were. Nor should she expect to retain seniority as if she was still at work.
My oldest daughter got a 750 on the math portion of the SAT a couple of years ago, and my youngest daughter got 800 on SAT II math recently (where 800 was in the 88th percentile). However, they are both half Chinese.
I bet if that pretty young thing HS had interviewed was Chinese (or Japanese or Korean or Jewish) she would have done better :-)
Posted by: Loki on the run | October 04, 2006 at 03:40 PM
Let me give another example of what I was getting at.
My friend's wife is a nutritionist. My friend is a web developer. They both quit thier jobs and hiked around Europe for 6 months.
My friend had a damn difficult time explaining why he had quit and not worked for 6 months. His wife was never even questioned as to why she had quit and not worked for 6 months.
Woman dominated professions have flexibility. Nurses can work part time, or second shift, or whatever they need to do to accomodate family life. There are no part time engineers.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 04, 2006 at 04:15 PM
Steven Pinker posed an ingenuous test of discrimination, in his debate with a feminist on that panel, Elizabeth Spelke. From Steve Sailer's column (which quotes the debate):
In April 2005, two Harvard psychology professors, Steven Pinker, author of the bestseller The Blank Slate, and Elizabeth Spelke, squared off in a debate over Larry Summers's contentions:
SPELKE: In science, the judgments are subjective, every step of the way. … Who should get promoted to tenure? These decisions are not based on clear and objective criteria…
PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it's the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women. [My February 2005 American Conservative article " The Education of Larry Summers" quantified this.] This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it's physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success.
Unable to come up with a reply, Spelke changed the subject.
So, was Pinker, the knockout victor in the debate, put on the 18 person panel by the National Academy?
No - Ms. Spelke was. [Endquote]
Engineer, the only engineering field that MAY require a license to practice is civil engineering.
Loki, she'd be a different person then...
I suspect that after controlling for math ability, culture is responsible for the differing attitudes among the women of different races. For instance, in India and China, engineering is seen as the most prestigious (eg, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200404/06/eng20040406_139575.shtml) while in America it verges on the blue-collar (although computer science/programming escapes this classification). The white girls may also be less inclined to take such a risk and burden as studying engineering.
Posted by: The Superfluous Man | October 04, 2006 at 04:18 PM
"In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm."
Half Sigma, nowhere does the article quote Pythagorus as saying men were *better* at math. He merely believed such studies were appropriate for men's spiritual nature. He would not have known what women's abilities were at math, because the ancient Greeks did not teach women.
Aside from that, your argument relies upon a gratuitous reminiscence of the time an attractive young woman had to care what you thought. Have you never, ever, dealt with any other women in your career as a computer programmer?
Superfluous: Pinker deserved to lose that debate. Just because the science itself is "hard" does not mean its tenure process is. That was the subject of contention -- whether the tenure and grant processes, being highly political, are *always* "soft." That the soft sciences have been kinder to women could be due to a variety of factors, including their relative unattractiveness to men.
But let's assume arguendo that there is some support for HS's contention. How would this possibly be an evolutionary benefit, for women to be worse at math and spatial orientation? In hunter-gatherer societies, women had to find their way through the berry patches and figure out how much food to bring home.
And, if humans had somehow evolved so that their females were less able in these areas, then wouldn't women particularly prize these abilities in men? Yet, you guys are always complaining it's the opposite -- that women discriminate sexually against men whose careers are in math, science and technology.
Posted by: Spungen | October 04, 2006 at 05:03 PM
Superdestroyer,
One interesting thing about the medical profession, or at least as it relates to family practice physicians, is that while there's a lot of hoops to jump through to get back in to the profession, it's easier to not fully leave it. My wife is an FP and one of the things we're looking for is a place that she can switch to part-time work when need-be. For a handful of reasons (shortage of FP docs, more women in the profession) quite a few places are willing to be flexible. In the IT field, I encounter no such flexibility from potential employers.
I agree with the proposition that men are more hardwired towards the sciences, though that does not disclude the possibility that otherwise qualified women are not at a disadvantage. It's easy to be dismissive of discrimination when the closest thing you experience to it is affirmative action. Having been a non-Mormon in Mormon Idaho, and seeing my financial future somewhat dependent on a lack of sexism (as my wife is the primary breadwinner) in others changed my perspective on the matter.
Relatedly, one of my former employers had a tendency to put entry-level girls on the half of our web development team that would promote into account management while the entry-level guys would be put in to the other half, which primarily promoted people into software development and testing. I don't think it was intentional as much as it was just that they would see a guy and say "future software engineer" and they saw a young woman and thought "account manager".
Another factor is that once a department is male-dominated, it can be socially off-putting to young women. When the two halfs of our web development team were consolidated, even the girls that were doing well - as they were the cream of the crop of the half that was phased out - became less and less comfortable amidst conversations of Battlestar Galactica, anime, and sports and sought transfers.
Anyone that is an engineer that wants respect should relocating to Utah or eastern Idaho. You're the next best thing to a doctor out there. I wouldn't recommend it if you don't like Mormons, though.
Posted by: R. Alex | October 04, 2006 at 05:05 PM
Doesn't the account manager position lead to management and more money and power while the software engineer position just leads to ten years and then being outsourced? If anything, the men should complain... Of course the guys sending people in the directions were probably right, but I don't think the favored class is what you think it is.
I've met math-nerd women too. But there were never as many of them as the math-nerd guys. Not unlike science fiction conventions. There are girls there, just not enough to go around.
"And, if humans had somehow evolved so that their females were less able in these areas, then wouldn't women particularly prize these abilities in men? Yet, you guys are always complaining it's the opposite -- that women discriminate sexually against men whose careers are in math, science and technology."
Naaah. Just because women don't want to do it doesn't mean they'll chase after men who do, unless it means lots of cash (in which case they're after the cash). not a lot of women want to be garbage collectors but you don't see them chasing men who are.
Yes, I think the difference is genetic in origin. But that doesn't exclude sexism as a partial explanation. If men are 20% more science-y, the predominance of men will increase over the initial genetically determined distribution as the men start acting like men in a group and talking about football or Star Trek. Similarly, if too many women go into a field, the men become uncomfortable. The answer to just about every nurture vs. nature question is usually 'both'. Sure women are equipped to use nine months of their lives taking care of the kid by genetics, but that just makes it more convenient for society to stick them with the job afterward. Just like you have to do twin studies to see if traits are inherited--if nerdy parents raise nerdy kids, is that because they have nerdy genes or because there are too many books in the home?
Posted by: SFG | October 04, 2006 at 06:03 PM
I also want to add that Aristotle claimed that men live longer than women on account of the sutures in the head, so don't claim the ancient Greeks as an authority on everything. They may have gotten the scientific ball rolling, but they were wrong about a lot of stuff.
Posted by: SFG | October 04, 2006 at 06:04 PM
Once again Spungen demonstrates her inability to think when she says:
But let's assume arguendo that there is some support for HS's contention. How would this possibly be an evolutionary benefit, for women to be worse at math and spatial orientation? In hunter-gatherer societies, women had to find their way through the berry patches and figure out how much food to bring home.
Men can't have babies. Never been done. How could that possibly be an evolutionary benefit?
The majority of men can't breast feed their offspring (the weasel words here are due to reports that some individual males do, in fact, lactate). How can that possibly be an evolutionary benefit?
Posted by: Loki on the run | October 04, 2006 at 06:54 PM
SFG,
Whether account management or software development was preferable is largely a point-of-view. You couldn't pay me enough to do the former, but there are certainly advantages. The point, though, is that assumptions were (unconsciously, for the most part) made on the basis of gender that ended up flushing girls - some of whom had tech backgrounds - out of IS/IT and directing guys - some with no particular tech background - into it.
If they're anything like anime conventions, the good thing about scifi conventions is that competition is exceedingly light if you're reasonably well-adjusted.
Posted by: R. Alex | October 04, 2006 at 07:32 PM
Any woman can take time off for children and still get back into engineering or science. However, she should not expect things to have stayed the same and her skills to still be as useful as they were. Nor should she expect to retain seniority as if she was still at work.
That's one of the biggest complaints that feminists have. Women in our culture are expected to do most of the child-rearing in our culture, and many women are forced to choose between having children and having a good career. Those that do choose a career are taunted for their choice and made to believe that they are not true women. Those who choose children are belittled, and never taken seriously in some cases.
Posted by: David Alexander | October 04, 2006 at 08:59 PM
"Those that do choose a career are taunted for their choice and made to believe that they are not true women. Those who choose children are belittled, and never taken seriously in some cases."
Um, yeah.
We can talk all day about the possible evolutionary origins of sex differences (without any real background) but ultimately, it's the magnitude that matters. I'd take Agnostic on his word (and for that matter, anyone at GNXP on the science, generally speaking, if I'm too lazy to check the science myself).
" Pinker deserved to lose that debate. "
I don't recall that he did. You mistake Pinker's position; Pinker said Spelke, your theory makes some predictions (barring adhoc adjustments) that the softer the science the more men there would be, due to discrimination. That simply isn't true. Not that it proves Pinker's case, but it weakens Spelke's, necessitating implausible adhoc'ing to keep it afloat. That's why she changed the subject.
Posted by: | October 04, 2006 at 09:29 PM
Women needed to navigate, but they didn't have to hunt -- try chasing after and launching a projectile at a moving target. No one knew how to build a machine that did this until the early 20th C, when warships either had to do so or would be obliterated. Ditto for hand-to-hand combat: there's an odd blob moving and rotating some of its parts in 3 dimensions, and you have to do likewise in such a way that your parts hit it but its parts don't hit you. So, mental rotation tests show the greatest sex difference -- that's not arguendo, it's documented (Jensen mentions it in *The g Factor*).
The anti-family argument sort of works, but it clearly can't be much of a reason. The prediction is that fields with the greatest female participation should attract females who are the least interested in families, nurturing, social relations, feelings, etc., who therefore won't be sucked away from academia by their compulsion to raise a family or interact with people; whereas the fields least populated by females should, in their subject matter, attract the women who are most interested in pro-people things.
Concretely, physics, math, & engingineering should show the highest participation, since these don't have anything to do with people, relations, or anything close. Psychology, education, social work, biology should show the least participation, since these are the most people-friendly fields. But this is the opposite of reality.
Posted by: Agnostic | October 04, 2006 at 09:40 PM
Engineer,
I work as an engineer at an electronics company. I have a respected female co-worker who has two kids. For the past couple of years she has worked only afternoons, from 1:00-7:00. It is a great deal and fits perfectly with her life choices. I never hear complaints at work from others about her arrangement.
I can't say that every company would be this flexible. But from my experiences you can't conclude "science and engineering are incompatible with child rearing".
Posted by: Dan Morgan | October 04, 2006 at 10:34 PM
I've never had a job in the IT industry where I was expected to work much more than 40 hours a week. So I don't see long hours in IT as being a reason why there are so few women.
Posted by: Half Sigma | October 04, 2006 at 11:42 PM
Somebody said:
That's one of the biggest complaints that feminists have. Women in our culture are expected to do most of the child-rearing in our culture, and many women are forced to choose between having children and having a good career.
Well, not everyone in our culture expects that. My wife went back to work within weeks after our first and within a few months for our second. In addition we hired a baby sitter and I did all the feeding, bathing, changing of daipers and washing of the daipers when the children were not at the baby sitter. Then I read to them when they got older.
I enjoyed doing much of that stuff and it had little if any effect on my career.
Posted by: Loki on the run | October 05, 2006 at 12:20 AM
If anyone is interested, an article in Reason related to this topic:
http://www.reason.com/cy/cy100306.shtml
Posted by: Fred | October 05, 2006 at 02:43 AM
To make it easy to access that article:
Math on the X-Y Axis: Women, science, and the gender gap
Note that it is by Cathy Young. She seems to be anathema to mainstream feminists.
Posted by: Loki on the run | October 05, 2006 at 03:03 AM
>>So I don't see long hours in IT as being a reason why there are so few women.
Can you take two years off and then come right back in, with no questions asked?
Let me give you one example.
My buddy is a web developer, his wife is a nutritionist. They quit their jobs and hiked around Europe for 6 months. When they came back, my buddy had a hard time explaining to potential employers why he had left his former employer, and why he was unemployed for so long. His wife was never even asked those questions.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 05, 2006 at 12:04 PM
"Can you take two years off and then come right back in, with no questions asked?"
Not in IT for two reasons:
(1) Stuff changes in two year.
(2) The middle class work ethic is very strong in IT--taking time off for no reason is seen as weird behavior and a red flag.
I suppose in female dominated fields it's more normal for people to take time off, so it's not seen by employers as scary.
Posted by: Half Sigma | October 05, 2006 at 12:15 PM
>>I suppose in female dominated fields it's more normal for people to take time off, so it's not seen by employers as scary.
Exactly my point. Female dominated professions are flexible. Male dominated professions are not. Females desire flexibility because that is what is required for raising children.
We should not be surprised that women are not drawn to inflexible professions.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 05, 2006 at 02:57 PM
I got near perfect on my Math SAT and GRE, but I never wanted to be an engineer. My reservations were confirmed when I got my current job. I work with mostly engineers, and they aren't bad people, but the office is boring and lifeless. I have a sociable personality and I can't stand it. This is not against engineers, who are really nice people, but I can understand why white girls don't want to do it.
And what is wrong with taking 6 months off? I mean I can see 6 years is a little much, but 6 months? With the paltry vacation time in this country, I'm considering quitting my job, mainly to have a much needed vacation. I like working in an office with lots of females; besides the obvious, I like that their attitude isn't all about the "productivity". They want to have a balance, which all of us could use.
Posted by: Jack | October 05, 2006 at 07:20 PM
Jack says:
They want to have a balance, which all of us could use.
Don't presume to tell me how to run my life, Jack!
Posted by: Loki on the run | October 05, 2006 at 09:34 PM
Today I learned that Pythagoras observed, 2,500 years ago, that men are better at math than women.
And Aristotle observed that women have fewer teeth than men.
One thing to be said for the IQ crowd is that they were willing to believe their data when it said that women were as smart as men.
Posted by: Douglas Knight | October 05, 2006 at 09:39 PM
Jack, I'm not defending the employers that questioned my buddy's 6 month abscence from the work force, I'm just reporting it. In fact, he came up with a credible story (said he had to take care of an ill father) and eventually got a job. That job evolved into a consulting business that is becoming extremely successful (like, retire before you're 40 successful).
I don't think most employers care a whit for work life balance.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 06, 2006 at 09:33 AM
>>I work with mostly engineers, and they aren't bad people, but the office is boring and lifeless.
That's because you don't make enough Monty Python references. Try quoting "Fletch" (it's all ball bearings these days). That always gets us engineers going.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 06, 2006 at 09:36 AM
>>I work with mostly engineers, and they aren't bad people, but the office is boring and lifeless.
That's because you don't make enough Monty Python references. Try quoting "Fletch" (it's all ball bearings these days). That always gets us engineers going.
Posted by: The Engineer | October 06, 2006 at 09:37 AM
"They want to have a balance, which all of us could use."
Ah, but see, if some people care about balance and some people don't, the employer can fire those who do and force everyone to work harder. Unless you have strong unions like in Europe making laws that make it very hard to fire people. Worker versus employer class power produces different tradeoffs of wealth versus leisure for the population at large.
"I don't think most employers care a whit for work life balance."
Why on earth would they? If you can exploit the hell out of your slaves and get away with it, why not? And if you don't, your competition will, and will produce a cheaper product and put you out of business.
Posted by: SFG | October 06, 2006 at 05:47 PM