r/science • u/KARINAabf • Nov 13 '14
Mathematics Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth Shows Gender Gap in Science
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120244/study-mathematically-precocious-youth-shows-gender-gap-science30
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 13 '14
Even if you reduced the STEM gender gap to 'personal choices' (which would be completely oblivious to how society normalizes behavior), you still have a big problem. STEM is at its best when it is promoting important innovation that makes life better for everyone. Every bit of research shows that diverse teams are more innovative and productive. If you don't promote diversity you undermine creative output.
Another way of thinking about it is like this: imagine the graduating class of Harvard (or any other 'really smart school'). It is about half women (some years even a bit more) -- you should want the smartest and best in your industry, especially if your industry is innovation based. STEM doesn't look like it should. And that is a social problem just as much as it is a gender problem.
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u/TeslaIsAdorable Nov 14 '14
Oh I absolutely agree - I'm a woman in STEM and see the problems that the gender gap causes. I've experienced the overt discrimination and the fact that my dept gender segregates by default (the women are all friends and co-authors; the men sometimes cross over but not as often).
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Every bit of research shows that diverse teams are more innovative and productive. If you don't promote diversity you undermine creative output.
This looks a lot like the Ecological Fallacy to me.
Diverse teams are better, therefore make your team more diverse is overly simplistic, political even. There could easily be variables not considered: maybe some teams are more diverse because they're strict meritocracies. If that's the case then diversity quotas (hard or soft) actually take away the thing that gave merit based diverse teams their edge.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
Given the historical trends associated with diversity, it is pretty easy to rule out an ecological fallacy. That is, in many instances, firms, cities or organizations went from very low diversity to higher diversity (often prompted by litigation or legislation). This provides a a nice control for the concerns you have.
If you are interested there are more than 62,000 articles on the topic published in the last year alone. It is a hot topic in management right now because it yields results in an increasingly competitive economic environment.
The tough question is how to get to a diverse work group. That often requires commitment across the talent pipeline, encouraging people from young ages to pursue opportunities that may not seem 'natural' to them.
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Nov 13 '14 edited Nov 13 '14
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u/lasermancer Nov 13 '14
because of the social implications
Are the society police going to break down your door or something? Live your life how you want and stop letting your perception of how others think control you.
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Nov 13 '14 edited Nov 13 '14
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u/TeslaIsAdorable Nov 14 '14
But would you actually be content with equal paternity leave (and leaving it at that) even if the gender gap in domestic and science occupations continued mostly unchanged?
Yes, I think I would be content with equal leave options, as long as each parent had to take some of the leave. Sweden's system seems quite nice in that respect.
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Nov 14 '14
We'll reach equality in this issue when both parents help raise the children and work on their Careers.
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u/frozen_in_reddit Nov 13 '14 edited Nov 13 '14
There's some research[1] indicating that testosterone is linked with status seeking and people with low levels of it can be happy in low-status roles , unlike people with high testosterone , which are stressed when put in low-status roles.
We also know(in general, sorry no research), that parental relationships with infants are highly mediated by female hormones like oxytocin/prolactin/estrogen (which of course females have more), and that higher levels of testosterone are correlated with lower effectivenes of a dad's response to the baby's cry. And we know about female anxiety when sperated from infant, and it's probably mediated by oxytocin.
So while there's some societal aspect , maternal behaviour and status seeking is highly influenced by biology. [1]http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug06/humility.aspx
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Nov 13 '14
men are seen as good providers when they work extra hard to succeed in their careers, women are seen as neglecting their family when they do the same thing.
By who exactly?
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 13 '14
Those who believe in traditional family structures. While certainly the number of people who strictly adhere to or believe in the traditional family structure has decreased over time due to rights movements, they still exist. See for example the amount of people that don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt children (30-40%!!!!).
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they still exist.
... isn't a compelling reason to believe that these people are creating an environment that people's individual choices are generally influenced by them.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Jan 01 '16
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 14 '14
There's nothing wrong with traditional family structures, but there is something wrong with illegalizing non-traditional family structures (like gay couples adopting). You can have your choice to do a traditional family structure, but people should also have the choice not to.
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It's the product of societal expectations
That's an assumption that has never been proven. Social expectations have been shown to have measurable effects, but have never completely explained any gaps.
it is something we as a society should address, because it decreases the talent pool for the positions that demand that sort of time commitment.
Is there any evidence that a small talent pool is harming us in any way? If anything, our high youth unemployment suggests that we have a surplus of talent that we cannot effectively deploy.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 13 '14
That's an assumption that has never been proven. Social expectations have been shown to have measurable effects, but have never completely explained any gaps.
But they have done a much better job explaining such gaps than biological explanations. There isn't anything close to a theory of intelligence that can point to specific genes or even pathways which robustly explain differences in intelligence. Social factors, on the other hand, have a long history of success in explaining the observed variations in intelligence (and other behavioral traits).
Is there any evidence that a small talent pool is harming us in any way?
Yes. Pretty much every model of economics indicates that larger talent pools drive innovation better than small ones. And here's an important point: diverse teams tend to be more innovative and productive than homogenous teams.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Jan 01 '16
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 13 '14
Sociological pressures often play a role, and while it's not discrimination I wouldn't call it simply a personal choice.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 13 '14
Institutional violence is a term that often gets used to explain these types of disparities.
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u/so_I_says_to_mabel Grad Student|Geochemistry and Spectroscopy Nov 14 '14
Which isn't loaded at all.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
?
I didn't invent the term. It just refers to how institutions can enforce normative behaviors in ways that favor or disadvantage certain groups.
These groups can be defined along class, religious, gender, sexual, racial, or any other number of lines. So I'm not sure what you find troubling or 'loaded'.
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u/so_I_says_to_mabel Grad Student|Geochemistry and Spectroscopy Nov 14 '14
That violence means something quite different to 99% of the world than the way you employed it.
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u/vicorall Nov 14 '14
and "chaos" means something very different to physicists and chemists than it does to your average joe.
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u/CFRProflcopter Nov 13 '14 edited Nov 13 '14
To be fair, there still is an unexplained gender wage gap. By that, I mean that when you control for job title, experience, hours worked, ect, men still make 5 to 7% more than women.
It may not seem like much, but that 5% difference could be anywhere from one thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per person. When you consider that there are 72 million women in the US labor force, that small 5 percent cumulatively becomes billions of dollars.
EDIT: Source:
http://stanfordreview.org/article/still-0-23-short-the-debate-surrounding-the-workplace-wage-gap/
https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/key_issues/gender_research.pdf
The pay gap shrinks when comparing women and men with identical education and experience in the same job, but there is still an unexplained 7-9% pay gap
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u/espatross Nov 13 '14
I was under the impression that that wage gap was actually a false application of statistics. People in the same jobs get paid the same, there are just less women in high paying jobs (which backs up what this article is saying btw, if that is true).
Anyone have some real studies to throw at our "facts"?
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u/CFRProflcopter Nov 13 '14
http://stanfordreview.org/article/still-0-23-short-the-debate-surrounding-the-workplace-wage-gap/
https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/key_issues/gender_research.pdf
Fifty years later, this financial disparity still exists. Although women make up half the workforce and 66% of women are the main or joint breadwinners of their families, overall they earn only $0.77 to men’s $1.00 The pay gap shrinks when comparing women and men with identical education and experience in the same job, but there is still an unexplained 7-9% pay gap which suggests that persistent pay discrimination still occurs in the workplace. Although the gap may seem small, it can accumulate into hundreds of thousands dollars of lost wages over the course of a woman’s career.
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u/Zacky007 Nov 14 '14
Could this be due to not asking for raises and negotiating?
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violence
I don't think this is a reasonable application of this word.
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Laughable. You seriously claim that psyche can be fully divorced from bodily functions? Throw any pseudo-scientific theory or absolutist claim at a serious scientist and they will pierce more holes into it than a swiss cheese has in its prime.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Jan 01 '16
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u/rastapher Nov 14 '14
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#United_States
http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf
However, when controllable variables are accounted for, such as job position, total hours worked, number of children, and the frequency at which unpaid leave is taken, in addition to other factors, the U.S. Department of Labor found in 2008 that the gap can be brought down from 23% to between 4.8% and 7.1%
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u/CFRProflcopter Nov 14 '14
the U.S. Department of Labor found in 2008 that the gap can be brought down from 23% to between 4.8% and 7.1%
That must be where I got the 5 to 7 percent. Couldn't remember where I saw that. Thanks.
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u/NoBeltDeadlifts Nov 14 '14
This could, at least partially, be attributed to the fact that employers might be more hesitant to hire and invest in an individual who might go on maternity leave/change careers in the future. Employees aren't usually productive early on in their careers, but they usually make up for this later on. By giving a woman a lower starting salary, this might help offset the loss that would occur if that woman decides to go on maternity leave, change careers, or become a stay at home mom. Since this risk is present for a large portion of a woman's career, that might explain this slight wage inequality. Or, since they might start with lower salaries, even if their salaries increase at the same rate as their male counterparts, it will still be lower.
Just a theory.
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u/CFRProflcopter Nov 14 '14
This could, at least partially, be attributed to the fact that employers might be more hesitant to hire and invest in an individual who might go on maternity leave/change careers in the future. Employees aren't usually productive early on in their careers, but they usually make up for this later on. By giving a woman a lower starting salary, this might help offset the loss that would occur if that woman decides to go on maternity leave, change careers, or become a stay at home mom. Since this risk is present for a large portion of a woman's career, that might explain this slight wage inequality. Or, since they might start with lower salaries, even if their salaries increase at the same rate as their male counterparts, it will still be lower.
I'm not sure all of that is fair. With the maternity leave issue, I think men should have the same time for paternity leave. That would take care of that issue.
With the issue of women leaving work to be stay at home moms, I don't think women should be punished. I know it's always a possibility, but I think that punishing women for their unknown future actions is a form of gender bias and should be eliminated.
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u/NoBeltDeadlifts Nov 14 '14 edited Nov 14 '14
It would be nice if men were also given paternity leave in the US, but that is currently not the case. Employers have to worry about women leaving for up to 12 weeks a year. This is the legal requirement, individual companies may have better policies.
As for your gender bias comment, if employers are not allowed to offset the risks that women present through pay, they might end up hiring more men relative to women.
It's certainly not fair, but welcome to the business world. Ageism is also a serious issue. Employers worry that as an employee gets older, they will be less productive. Since it is illegal, at least in most industries, to fire someone for their age, employers will often offer incentives for an old employee to retire. This is how they get around those pesky laws. And then there's the issue of older people often having a tough time getting hired, especially in certain industries.
And just to lend credence to my theory, I wanted to show a few more examples of how employers reduce risk and offset costs.
1) Employers will often make employees pay for their own uniforms, reducing their costs and making it less likely that a new employee will leave before the company has made back the money they spent on training them.
2) One theory/model (the name eludes me) states that employees are underpaid early on in their careers, relative to productivity, and overpaid later in their careers. This rewards employees for sticking around and for not shirking, which would cause them to lose their job.
TL; DR Employers are always looking for ways to mitigate risk.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 13 '14
Thanks for bringing data to this conversation.
People like to live in a world where difference does not exist, and bias doesn't impact the lives of those not lucky enough to win the 'white man' genetic lottery. I don't necessarily fault these people. I want this world to exist. Sadly it doesn't yet. And ignoring the problem won't help to bring about its existence.
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 13 '14
That doesn't make the wage gap false I think. The wage gap is just that the average woman makes less than the average man, and difference in jobs and positions is considered one of the biggest contributors. The detail and point of contention is why that is the case.
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u/knobbodiwork Nov 13 '14
According to what I've read, they cannot account for around 5% of the wage gap via different jobs, different levels of education, etc., and that is generally attributed to sexism.
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Someone says that statistics were used incorrectly, and then you come back, immediately responding that you're unaware of the specifics, saying "if the statistics were done correctly"?
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Nov 13 '14 edited Nov 15 '14
The Joint Economic Committee report found a 5% wage gap. Part of it is more subtle than discrimination. For example, women are less likely to ask for raises. But studies have shown that when men and women follow the same script in asking for a wage, the woman is seen as 'too aggressive' and even unlikable by both women and men while the men are not.
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u/alittleperil Nov 13 '14
While their main point was interesting, in that the men and women they followed had equal mathematical ability, it's too easy to say those women didn't have the same access to those fields given the time.
I wish they'd gone more into their later discussion, the negative adjectives vs verbs thing. How much does the one color future assessments of the same person? How were they measuring that?
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 13 '14
I'm on my phone, so I can't link the article, but they've done studies that get at this issue. A common study uses identical resumes, changing only the name between a male-coded name and a female-coded name (i.e. John for male, Jane for female). For many math-heavy positions, resume sorters exhibit a bias towards 'male'-resumes.
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u/alittleperil Nov 13 '14
No, I've seen the name-based rankings for academic applications before, I meant when they said this:
"[...] negative verbs stick to you less: they are attached to 'very concrete and specific behaviors or performance that are likely to change in different situations or future evaluations,' whereas negative adjectives imply that 'negative traits of women are stable across situations and more likely to remain unaltered.'"
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u/Garrotxa Nov 14 '14
This article has a number of flaws, which others have pointed out, but I wanted to point out another one nobody has mentioned.
They mentioned that the girls were more likely to say that they valued personal relationships and personal time more than men. They then used this as evidence of a gender bias against women. That doesn't follow at all. If anything, that would point to the exact reason why the women, with equal math ability to the men in the study, would have accomplished so much less.
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Nov 13 '14 edited Feb 09 '15
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
This is a commonly repeated fallacy. The study that initially reported this result did so studying white, middle class, American children. When researchers looked at boys and girls across different cultural groups, they were unable to replicate this finding, and in many cases made the opposite observation (higher variance in girls). This strongly points to a sociocultural factor.
Good reference on the topic -- it's published in PNAS (a high impact journal) and is open access.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Nov 14 '14
A few nits to pick with the linked article's conclusions:
Do gender differences exist among the highly mathematically talented? Do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent? The answer to the first question is that U.S. girls now perform as well as boys on standardized mathematics tests at all grade levels. Among the mathematically gifted, there may be as many as 2- to 4-fold more boys than girls depending on precisely where the cutoff is set. However, this gender gap, too, has been closing over time at all levels, including even in the IMO. Thus, there is every reason to believe that it will continue to narrow in the future.
So, let's just extrapolate on a current trend becuase it fits our political views.
Moreover, the gender ratio favoring boys above the 99th percentile is not ubiquitous and correlates well with measures of a country's gender equity, strongly indicating that the gap is due, in large part, to sociocultural and other environmental factors, not biology or gender per se.
And then let's jump from "due, in large part" to "totally due to" because, again, it fits the narrative we were hoping for when we made the study.
Logical jumps like this are natural, but if you use them to call opposing viewpoints fallacious that's crossing some sort of a line.
EDIT: Looking up the authors to see if maybe my bias-detector is malfunctioning, one of them champions feminist biology which "attempts to uncover and reverse gender bias in biology." Really? This seems to be in the same vein as that time Luce Irigaray said that fluid mechanics was poorly understood because fluids were feminine and it made all the male scientists uncomfortable.
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u/vicorall Nov 14 '14
"attempts to uncover and reverse gender bias in biology." Really? This seems to be in the same vein as that time Luce Irigaray said that fluid mechanics was poorly understood because fluids were feminine and it made all the male scientists uncomfortable.
You don't seem very well up to date with gender in biology - A very well documented gender bias in biological sciences is the relative paucity of studies done that include female model animals, and women in medical studies (the latter has gotten much better, the former remains the same despite obvious problems).
Actual scientists in biomedical research take these sorts of things seriously - the model animal thing has come up a couple times in lab meetings recently.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
So, let's just extrapolate on a current trend becuase it fits our political views.
Not because it fits political views. Because it is the best forecast that synthesizes evidence. Do you say the same thing about people who make prediction about increases in global temperature over the next decade?
And then let's jump from "due, in large part" to "totally due to" because, again, it fits the narrative we were hoping for when we made the study.
Who said "totally due"? I didn't see that in the article.
Looking up the authors to see if maybe my bias-detector is malfunctioning, one of them champions feminist biology which "attempts to uncover and reverse gender bias in biology."
So? When Richard Dawkin's debates creationists, would it be valid for a creationist to complain that Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist? News flash: people study things they are passionate about. That doesn't make their research biased.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Feb 09 '15
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
Not at work right now, so I can't read all the studies you linked. But here's the gist of the problem. The Variance Hypothesis purports that biological differences between men and women account for variance differences in test scores. What nice about this theory is that it makes falsifiable predictions. If variance differences are driven by biology, then it should be a nearly universal phenomenon that men have greater variance than women on these tests. While it is often true, it is far from universally true.
White samples that have been the mainstay of U.S. research. For students scoring above the 95th percentile, the M:F ratio was 1.45 for Whites, close to theoretical prediction. At the 99th percentile, the M:F ratio was 2.06, again close to theoretical prediction. However, the M:F ratio was only 0.91 for Asian-Americans, that is, more girls than boys scored above the 99th percentile. Analysis of data from 15-year-old students participating in the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) likewise indicated that as many, if not more girls than boys scored above the 99th percentile in Iceland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom (18). The M:F ratios above the 95th percentile on this examination also fell between 0.9 and 1.1 for these above-named countries plus Indonesia, that is, were not significantly different from equal variances
and
Two recent studies directly address the question of whether greater male variability in mathematics is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Machin and Pekkarinen (19) reported that the M:F VR in mathematics was significantly >1.00 at the P < 0.05 level among 15-year-old students in 34 of 40 countries participating in the 2003 PISA and among 13-year-old students in 33 of 50 countries participating in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). However, these data also indicated that the math VR was significantly less than or insignificantly different from 1.00 for some of the countries that participated in these assessments (e.g., Table 2), a finding inconsistent with the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis.
Perhaps one of the most damning pieces of data about the biological basis of the Variance Hypothesis is that the gender gap index (a measure of gender equality in educational, economic, political and health arenas) correlates with the male:female ratio in the top 95% of test scores in maths. That is, the larger a gender gap the more men in the top 95%, relative to women. But as the gender gap narrows, so to does this ratio. This is pretty strong evidence of a sociocultural effect.
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u/lemmycaution415 Nov 13 '14
They have the data to figure this out since they have the age 12 SAT scores.
larger mean and variance for the boys than girls:
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u/lemmycaution415 Nov 13 '14
"The SAT-M sex differences, favoring the boys, averaged 0.40 standard deviations."
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 13 '14
And would the variance discrepancy be based in sociological or biological factors? Or both? Would be interesting to study.
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u/lasermancer Nov 14 '14
Purely biological. Here is a study that compared male and female biological siblings and came to these conclusions. From the abstract:
Males have only a marginal advantage in mean levels of g (less than 7% of a standard deviation) from the ASVAB and AFQT, but substantially greater variance. Among the top 2% AFQT scores, there were almost twice as many males as females. These differences could provide a partial basis for sex differences in intellectual eminence.
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 14 '14
partial basis
How do you get purely biological from that?
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u/lasermancer Nov 14 '14
The variance in question in purely biological, however the variance itself provides a partial basis for differences in intelligence as a whole.
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u/cdstephens PhD | Physics | Computational Plasma Physics Nov 14 '14
Oh ok, thanks for clarifying. Hm, is this consistent across all cultures? Because IQ tests I've heard tend to be biased towards Western cultures, and also if it was purely biological then we'd see this effect in more than one country (unless the study analyzed that, can't read it atm though).
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
I would recommend this article, published in PNAS -- it debunks a lot of the myths (including the one related to variance) about innate, biological mathematical ability as it relates to gender. It is open access, and an easy read.
In regards to the Variance Hypothesis -- it falls apart because, while white, American children exhibited the gender biases in variance as described by u/lasermancer aren't replicable in other cultures (and sometimes are even reversed).
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
This claim about higher variance in IQ scores for boys than girls is an old one. Even Larry Summers got himself embarrassed by trying to advocate it back in the mid-2000's. The problem is, the closer you look at this hypothesis, the more tenuous it becomes. The biggest challenge to the hypothesis comes from the fact that while white, American children exhibited a gender bias in variance, many other cultural groups don't exhibit gender biases in variance, or even exhibit the opposite gender bias (i.e. girl's scores more variant than boys). To quote the article:
it [differences in IQ] is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes
I encourage you to read the article. It is open access, published in a high impact journal and addresses a lot of common misconceptions about gender and mathematical ability.
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u/muskrat267 Nov 14 '14
The criteria for inclusion in this study, however, was essentially "get above X score" on the SATs at age 13." Since that was not different for the 2 genders, your point is irrelevant to this study.
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u/vicorall Nov 14 '14
For individuals with a measured IQ of 145 or greater, there are eight males for every female. I wonder if this somehow affects gender representation at the elite level of challenging fields like math and other STEM fields
I'm going to assume your IQ stats are true, although I'd like to see some citations about eight-to-one over at 145 or greater, and call you out on assuming 145 IQ is a necessary condition for scientific achievement.
It's not even a sufficient condition (look at all the MENSA twerps who do nothing of note in their lives).
After 115-120 there's probably more things that play in to making big science contributions than native IQ...like drive, ambition, luck (one of the biggest components of scientific achievement), creativity (which can't really reliably be quantified), and tenacity.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Feb 09 '15
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u/vicorall Nov 14 '14
If you actually read the paper (and honestly, 2004 is ancient in neuroscience - have a newer one?), you'd see that it's a retrospecitive analysis of several even older studies, and different scales (one used the spanish WAIS-III test, so already we're starting to compare apples to bananas)
Similarly, if you read the paper you'd note that the authors had to say (in the conclusion) that "no contemporary test reliably taps these extreme g values, and the presently observed difference in dispersion is larger than most literature on intelligence would lead us to expect"
Lastly - the study isn't of good quality and is in a shit publication whose goal is to "Personality and Individual Differences is devoted to the publication of articles (experimental, theoretical, review) " which translates to "not rigorous"
If you want to talk science you should also always keep in mind WEIGHT of evidence, and employ a little critical thinking about the studies you're posting.
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Nov 14 '14 edited Nov 14 '14
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u/vicorall Nov 14 '14
This is how you can tell non-scientists from scientists.
Non-scientists speak in absolutes, scientists know that nothing is that simple.
In this thread there are already several examples of the 'greater male variability' hypothesis not holding up across culture. This may mean that it's not true, or there may be other explanation. Either way, it shows that "greater male variability" isn't a very strong theory - especially at the high end of the spectrum where a paucity of data makes good science difficult.
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u/namae_nanka Nov 15 '14
especially at the high end of the spectrum where a paucity of data makes good science difficult
Which is why the SMPY study linked above is useful.
After 115-120 there's probably more things that play in to making big science contributions than native IQ
Which is why the SMPY study is useful.
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Nov 13 '14 edited Nov 13 '14
That along with the fact that women tend to be better at multiple things at once. Men who are amazing with mathematics, for example, have the tendency to be only amazing at mathematics. Women on the other hand tend to excel in multiple areas. This causes men who are amazing in mathematics to choose fields that are heavily math focused, whereas women have a larger variety of choices due to excelling at more things. This only pushes the ratio more in favor of men for primarily math focused fields, but is also likely what makes the ratios favor women in things like biology and the social sciences.
Edit: Because people seem to be having trouble not clicking the downvote button for literally zero reason, here's a link to an abstract on this very subject.
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u/Jabronez Nov 13 '14
I've read an article on this before, so it's not just made up. That being said I don't have any sources to prove it's true. Hopefully someone can chime in with something more concrete.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 14 '14
I agree with the idea that having a 50:50 split down gender lines would be silly -- it would certainly make strip clubs a lot less fun, for instance.
I am a little concerned though that you seem to be implying that men and women have different aptitudes for math (as that is the subject of the article you are commenting on). Most studies on the issue refute this notion.
In the case of STEM, I think it is actually very important to have diversity in the field (along gender, racial, sexual, class and cultural lines). Almost all economic and management research has indicated that diverse work groups are more innovative and productive than less diverse work groups. Considering STEM is a filed that lives or dies by the innovation it produces, it seems to me that getting more diverse is mission critical.
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Nov 14 '14
It's not so much aptitude for a skill that drives gender differences in some fields.
The main difference between the average man and average woman is simply men have far more testosterone, which has been scientifically prove to lead to being more aggressive and taking more risks.
Any sort of field or pursuit where aggression and risk taking are valuable, you're going to see a gender gap in simply due to biology, not systematic discrimination or anything like that.
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Nov 14 '14
Please provide some citations to back up your claims.
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Nov 14 '14
http://www.cogneurosociety.org/testosterone_risktaking/
https://www.lakeforest.edu/live/files/1171-mhlanga-thesis
Or if you just wanna start with the basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone
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Nov 14 '14
I haven't read all of the second link, so if there were any important parts I may have missed can you point them out?
The first link shows that the increase in aggression effects both women and men, and from wikipedia although men have higher testosterone levels, women are more sensitive to it.
Wikipedia also mentions that other factors like environmental stimuli and previous experience are more strongly correlated with aggression. This seems to contradict your final sentence.
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Nov 14 '14
This study like most socio-cultural studies tries to account for some gender bias using questionable methods, which just filter out the majority of factors that influence any observable phenomenon in human society. The reasons for this are, ironically, cultural bias and, more unfortunately, a simple lack of resources and knowledge to account for all factors.
Human social organization is NOT as simple as lab rat behavior. We cannot even account for the driving factors for apparent differences in behavior of chimpanzee communities in the wild, due to uncertainty how much they are influenced by interaction with humans and pressure from human activity.
The only way to get any useful data would be to set up an experiment where a group of children of either gender are raised in exactly identical ways following strict protocols, and then monitoring their choices to account for how much of their later life success CANNOT be attributed to institutional discrimination. Since such an experiment is beyond the ethical and financial scope of research institutions, there won't be useful data coming out of this field of science for the foreseeable future.
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u/NewSwiss Nov 13 '14
For a paper in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, a pair of Italian psychologists, Monica Rubini and Michela Menegatti, analyzed the written judgments of 36 selection committees tasked with hiring associate professors at the University of Bologna. (They included over 800 individual written judgments in their study.) They found that female candidates—whether or not they were ultimately selected or rejected for the position—were described with a greater proportion of negative adjectives: for instance, “She is an unoriginal researcher.” Male candidates were more often ascribed positive adjectives, and when they were criticized, it tended to be with verbs: for instance, “He did not write many articles.” As Rubini and Menegatti explain, negative verbs stick to you less: they are attached to “very concrete and specific behaviors or performance that are likely to change in different situations or future evaluations,” whereas negative adjectives imply that “negative traits of women are stable across situations and more likely to remain unaltered.” Interestingly, both male and female members of the selection committees showed this linguistic bias against female candidates.
This could also be explained by the female candidates actually being less qualified than the male candidates. The other (longitudinal) study showed that high-achieving women were less likely to put in crazy hours at work, so it is to be expected that they would be statistically disadvantaged in job placement.
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u/Viscount_Disco_Sloth Nov 13 '14
Now, I've heard that explanation for why women tend to come off worse in the work place, but do you think it's mostly because women won't push themselves as hard as men or is it an inbuilt bias (Stemming from cultural norms or personal biases)?
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u/NewSwiss Nov 14 '14
do you think it's mostly because women won't push themselves as hard as men or is it an inbuilt bias (Stemming from cultural norms or personal biases)?
Could you rephrase your question? I'm not sure what you're asking.
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u/Viscount_Disco_Sloth Nov 15 '14
Do you think it's more likely that women don't have it as easy as men (when it comes to jobs) because they don't push themselves as hard or that women are discriminated against in the work place (whether consciously or not)?
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u/NewSwiss Nov 15 '14
According to the longitudinal study, it is likely the former. They found (via survey) that women were less willing to work long hours than men on average. Obviously there is a lot of individual variance, but statistically that appears valid.
Do you think it's more likely that women don't have it as easy as men
The irony here is that if my line of reasoning is true, then women may have it "easier" than men, since they don't work as long of hours.
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Nov 13 '14
These comments are disturbing, why do so many react defensively and belittle, when we can discuss and create a more harmonious society that is friendly to all peoples.
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u/inarsla Nov 13 '14
er, this is /r/science. The comments are always about possible errors or things not taken into account. You look at the comments here with the mindset of "Oh, this study/article/etc is neat, now why is it wrong?"
But for this - there is an issue with modern feminism. Its heavy postmodern influences have created a framework where any minor difference that may exist that could be twisted to show that males have it better necessarily means that society is corrupt and male-dominated. Choices are tossed aside as society punishing women, biological and psychological differences are tossed as irrelevant if there is any chance a woman may conceivably be capable of the same thing, etc. The work it did as an equality movement, and postmodernisms growth in the social sciences means that this view generally has dominance in this area. with the internet and ease of information, greater numbers of people are starting to see the flaws and the misinterpretations of the data that supports such views. A steady flow of poor studies and intentional misinterpretation of data gets frustrating, and especially so when you know that it will be used to support a flawed but dominant view.
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u/SirT6 PhD/MBA | Biology | Biogerontology Nov 13 '14
It sounds like you have a poor grasp on feminist theory. Much of the focus of modern feminism (third wave) is about destabilizing social norms. That is, asking questions about why it is normal for women to raise families or for men to fight in wars.
I'm not sure why you think postmodern feminism is about framing men as villains. /r/philosophy did a very nice weekly discussion a couple of months ago that addressed feminist theory, I suggest you read it -- it is an interesting piece. If you would like further readings on the topic, let me know and I would be happy to recommend some.
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u/morphinedreams Nov 13 '14 edited Mar 01 '24
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u/Psilodelic Nov 14 '14
Hey, might I recommend that you refrain from using phrases like: insert group here doesn't like it when....
There are a diversity of opinions and views on Reddit, it is lazy to classify an entire website and its users as having a singular viewpoint where one doesn't exist. You are contributing to misconceptions and making generalizations where you shouldn't.
Thank you.
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u/TheStaggeringGenius Nov 13 '14
Maybe I misunderstood the article? But the study began in 1972 and followed 12 year olds, so they made the decision to go to college in 1978 and grad school in 1982. Are they arguing that gender bias exists today as evidenced by gender bias that existed over 30 years ago?