Women are under-represented in the ‘math-intensive’ fields. And not just in countries where they are required to wear a burka, and thus they have difficulty viewing the blackboard at the head of the classes they aren’t allowed to attend. No. Here in America!
What the heck could be causing it? We are all ‘created equally,’ so it must have everything to do with culture, right?
Um. Quite a bit to do with culture, sure. Everything – I don’t know.
Roughly half a decade ago, the then-president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, stepped into quite a bit of controversy by suggesting that the gap between males and females in this area may not be fully about culture. Maybe there is something innate going on.
Holy flying heresy! We aren’t born equal, held back only by culture and a failure to give 110%!!?
As I used to express in my developmental psychology classes, when talking about gender differences in occupation, we must remember to consider aptitude and interest in a given subject. If you aren’t as interested in something as another person — out-performing them is is less likely.
So, are women either less able or less-interested in fields of study and occupations that require advanced math? Good question. My own current, provisional opinion is that the “playing field” has been made unequal through culture first, then personal interest, and finally by innate ability.
As the recent Eurekalert post (Women’s choices, not abilities, keep them out of math-intensive fields) points out, the fat of the bell curve of male and female abilities in mathematics overlaps with no significant differences. Yet at the “higher” end . . .
But girls’ grades in math from grade school through college are as good as or better than boys’, and women and men earn comparable average scores on standardized math tests. However, twice as many men as women score in the top 1% on tests such as the SAT-M.
Twice as many men in the top 1% . . . would that account for the entire difference in achievement? I doubt it.
Personally, I view human beings as a preeminently plastic species. I can envision a culture in which, from birth, girls are expected and encouraged to excel at math relative to boys. And they do.
But I also see it is possible that — all other things being equal — men are more driven to pursue fields requiring mathematical ability, less driven to pursue fields that don’t. Echoing that sentiment comes this line from the same science-news release:
Studies of college students find that women are more interested in organic and social fields, while men are more interested in systematizing things. And indeed, more than half of new medical doctors and biologists are women today—and in veterinary medicine, women are more than 75% of new graduates.
Maybe I’m crazy or just plain atypical, but if I were given a choice between being paid, oh, $60,000 a year working in a day-care center, or making 1/3 that in an isolated lab, I’d choose the lab so fast it would make your centrifuge spin.
What do you think?
[recycled material - first appeared here]
Is it possible that a breadth of learning could be a bad thing? It seems the answer might be “yes.” A new study comparing high school science curricula and the students’ later achievement found that the students who had spent a significant amount of time (one month+) going into a single topic in depth during high school outperformed those who did not.
Of course, a study like this is tough to control for the many other variables that might be involved. Maybe the better science teachers taught the depth courses and it was the better teachers and not necessarily the depth that helped. Some controls, however, were employed, which gives me greater confidence in the finding.
The researchers carefully controlled for differences in student backgrounds.
An important implication one can draw from this preliminary finding immediately came to mind. And, how do you like that, the article also raised it:
The study also points out that standardized testing, which seeks to measure overall knowledge in an entire discipline, may not capture a student’s high level of mastery in a few key science topics. Teachers who “teach to the test” may not be optimizing their students’ chance of success in college science courses, Tai noted.
As a science educator myself, an insight drawn from my own experience has guided me from the get-go. In college I was required to learn an incredible amount of information to pass the tests. And the vast majority of that information was forgotten within a few short years. Furthermore, many of a relevant ideas and facts are relevant no more.
If a student has no plans to go into a specific field, why get bogged down with more and more content? Why not provide students with an understanding of the essentials in a field while helping them acquire the cognitive skills that will allow them to better excel whatever the topic they later dive into? If going into depth helps builds those skills, why teach for a test alone when the test will one day be outdated?
It seems to me that a number of high-profile figures in the sciences have been hushing we boldly and baldly critical of religion Gnu Atheist upstarts. Must we be so sharp in our tone and delivery?
As examples, we have Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a Dick” talk and Neil de Grasse Tyson’s rebuke of Richard Dawkins at a “Beyond Belief” panel discussion.
This push to mellow out the promotion of critical thinking (as it pertains to religion only, funny thing is) strikes me as arrogant and unscientific on two counts:
1. The argument is too simple. It presents a one-size-fits all equation. Harshness isn’t good because you alienate people. Really? But wait, what about attempting to put a more fine-grain focus on the proposition. What type of harshness? What people? A group, a collection of individuals? Will all individuals be influenced the same way? Which individuals are most likely to be alienated? What will be the affect on the others? What is the purpose of harshness? Is it merely a matter of personality, of creative flair? Is the reason for talking the mere exchange of information, or are there other, more subtle levels of communications, such as to persuade, to motivate in x,y,z possible ways, to engage in personal in-group catharsis, to castigate others for engaging in thinking and talk that does a disservice to intellectual and cultural progress? Etc.
2. The assumption that we know what tone and delivery works best on all levels for all people: that a strongly critical tone is bad and doesn’t work.
Sure, we all know what tone we prefer. And we all have differing thresholds for rocking the social boat, so to speak — context absolutely depending. But what works best for whom in what ways?
What type of communication does work best?
This past week I encountered some new research that may be relevant to the issue. It seems a fully neutral tone and/or a withholding of a reasoned verdict may not promote thinking, but even undermine it.
Passive news reporting that doesn’t attempt to resolve factual disputes in politics may have detrimental effects on readers, new research suggests.
The study found that people are more likely to doubt their own ability to determine the truth in politics after reading an article that simply lists competing claims without offering any idea of which side is right.
“There are consequences to journalism that just reports what each side says with no fact checking,” said Raymond Pingree, author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.
“It makes readers feel like they can’t figure out what the truth is. And I would speculate that this attitude may lead people to tune out politics entirely, or to be more accepting of dishonesty by politicians.” [emphases added; Eurekalert source]
Could the same be true about discussion of religious matters? Just providing a dispassionate presentation of the two sides without bringing a gavel down in verdict — an “I don’t want to be pushy, you decide approach” — could actually undermine thinking by providing no guidance and no emotional incentive to get to the truth. Could. I’m not sure. But neither am I sure that skeptics and atheists need to make their presentations less pointed.
My own provisional belief is that atheists and skeptics need to be more vocal and passionate. In many contexts, but not all, of course. For more on why, see my past post, Freethought Musings: Refusing to Accommodate Religion (or, Why to ‘Be a Dick’).
[recycled material - first appeared here as "How to Quote Out of Context"]
I can see religious conservatives pulling this quote from a science article out of context already -
In the past nearly four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family.
Perhaps they’d even mention that the source of that sentence was a professor of sociology at YALE University.
Yep, look what happens when women leave the kitchen and go to college: their marriage and family suffers!
But wait, careful minds want to know, how do their marriages and family suffer? The answer: they don’t. Huh? How could this be? Well, you’d have to look no farther then the title of the piece to find out — “Marriage, family on the decline for highly educated black women.” Or read the entire article, but who does that?
It seems that the rates of marriage and child-bearing are going down for educated black women. The way their education is “costing” marriage and family is that less black women are getting married and having a family. So it is not actually marriages or actual children that are suffering, but potential marriages and potential children.
Does education abort a family? Should it be outlawed?
As you might guess, I applaud the news. Education is a good thing, even if it leads to fewer marriages and children. The second of those two I would actually include in the benefits of education to society. But not because I am anti-children. I am anti too many children.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Null results are noteworthy. A tested hypothesis that generates negative results is as important as one producing positive results. And yet null outcomes practically never hit the bigtime news, and very infrequently are included in rational discussions. It’s a shame. A problem.
I wish that for every 10 “we found a link between x and y” television broadcasts and print and Internet articles, there was at minimum one report of “we didn’t find a link between x and y.” In the least it would vastly improve the public understanding of science.
Consider this piece of research from the University of Illinois:
Researchers analyze student grief online after campus shootings
After the campus shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2007 and Northern Illinois University in 2008, hundreds of affected students turned to social media websites to share their grief and search for solace. A new study of these students found that their online activities neither helped nor harmed their long-term psychological health. [emphasis added]
Neither = no effect, negative results, a null finding. And what a breathe of fresh content it is for a critical thinker to encounter these once in awhile. Sadly, I encountered it in the relative backwaters of news reporting: a pure science website.
This just in: scientists spend hours, days and years seeking and seeking without finding anything. Whole careers amount to “I searched but didn’t find.” It’s what happens, a reality of the practice of doing science. Perhaps more importantly — for the sake of science education — experimenters conduct test after test, with many generating clearly negative results or results that fail to rise to the level of significance. Additionally, many initially positive result later fail to be replicated. It’s part of science. But a part that remains largely hidden. Unfortunately.
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