Sheril and other science bloggers are talking about the fact that the top 3 in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are female. I suppose that means we'll stop talking about gender disparities in science & engineering? Yeah, I doubt it....
At the same time, this just popped into my RSS, The freedom to say 'no': Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren't interested:
They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her controversial new book, "The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap," Pinker gathers data from the journal Science and a variety of sources that show that in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced.The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.
"It's the opposite of what we'd expect," says Pinker. "You'd think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it's the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom."
A few years back I was browsing through some European data; to my surprise the countries with the highest proportion of math professors were Turkey & the Iberian nations. The lowest? Scandinavia.
Do you find it implausible that people could actually have an aversion to the sciences despite aptitude or ability? I don't. High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers:
Japan is running out of engineers.
After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.
Universities call it "rikei banare," or "flight from science." The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.
It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of shooting the shit with a bunch of quants; really smart guys, refreshingly little dick-waving (all 25 were male). Most had math or physics doctorates. Instead of doing pure research, there were manipulating financial instruments, and pulling in orders of magnitude more in income per year than they would have ever made as scientists.1 But it isn't like a career in science has the tradeoff of security and likelihood to compensate for its modest remuneration; The Real Science Crisis: Bleak Prospects for Young Researchers:
The job market in science is now shifting faster than graduate programs can keep up, leading often unhappy Ph.D.'s to hunt for careers far from the academic homes where they hoped their degrees would lead.
Academic and government leaders acknowledge some of these problems and are attempting to correct them. Major sponsors of science -- the National Science Foundation, the NIH, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute -- have started programs to help young scientists weather the rough climate. And a five-year study led by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has assessed reform programs to try to improve doctoral education across all of academe.
The scientific life is a grind. The system ingests far more than it will "fully process" and convert into full professors. Most will drift off into industry or other domains of life, their dreams crushed, the flower of their youth consumed in a passion which never blooms into a stable relationship. Even among those who become minted PIs (primary investigator) few will be remembered in generations to come. At the end of the day the neverending fame of science is a winner-take-all proposition. Many shall strive, but only an Elect shall be destined for communion with the Great Discovery.
If not quantity, what about quality? My experiment with smart drugs:
The next morning I woke up and felt immediately alert. Normally it takes a coffee and an hour to kick-start my brain; today I'm ready to go from the second I rise. And so it continues like this, for five days: I inhale books and exhale articles effortlessly. My friends all say I seem more contemplative, less rushed - which is odd, because I'm doing more than normal. One sixty-something journalist friend says she remembers taking Benzadrine in the sixties to get through marathon articles, but she'd collapse after four or five says and need a long, long sleep. I don't feel like that. I keep waiting for an exhausted crash, and it doesn't seem to come.
When the American journalist David Plotz took Provigil, he said it should be given a slogan. Just as valium was marketed as "the housewife's little helper," he said this should be sold as "the boss' little helper." It makes you work better and harder than before.
Related: Jake has more.
1 - This is not the best year for quants. But no one is asking that they return the money they made earlier.
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http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2008/04/are_men_any_bet.html
Griffin Hansbury, who started life as a woman, but began taking massive testosterone injections in the 1990s, and became a man...
Are there other ways that testosterone has altered the way you feel or perceive?
Something that happened after I started taking testosterone, I became interested in science. I was never interested in science before.
...watch what you say, watch who you link....
The two big meta-analyses of sex differences in personality find that they are most pronounced in more liberal, individualist countries, and more attenuated in more traditional, collectivist countries.
It could be that liberal policies unmask differences in preferences that are unapparent when people can't choose. But it could also be that the more collectivist cultures have produced people whose underlying preferences really aren't that different from one another to begin with.
East Asians born and raised in the US would be a good example. The females have complete freedom to pursue more careers that are very different from what their male counterparts tend to choose, but they're still very interested in nerd careers.
Germany has a reputation in Europe for being a bit backward in this respect, not a frontrunner in scientific careers for women. At least in the life sciences, the steepest dropoff in participation is after graduate studies. You could put this down to ability or opportunity, but not so much lack of interest in the subject matter itself (although perhaps a lack of interest in competition), unless women are slow to catch on and only notice after graduate studies that they aren't interested...
right, west germany had low labor force participation....
I don't know about Russia, but for Third World countries, a possibility is that there are more women in "elite" professions because the extreme income inequality provides rich women with cheap labor - servants, nannies, etc which makes it possible to raise kids, keep house etc while also having a "real" job.
One issue one has to engage is why they have a preference against the math and sciences. While it's been a while since I studied this I seem to recall a series of experiments and studies done in the 80's that strongly suggested it was subtle communication during the K-6 classes. That is the way teachers (even female teachers) taught science subtly suggested it wasn't of interest to women.
I don't know if those studies held up. I know the college I was at (BYU) was doing a lot to encourage more women into the departments. I think the math department did much better than the physics department. Anyway, in the math department they made us read those studies (presumably to have an effect in the future).
Anyway, long story short, merely talking about preferences independent of possible structures leading to those preferences avoids the central issue.
That said I'm not sure why having gender 'equality' in the sciences is as important as some make out. Equality of opportunity I'm all for (and I'm not sure we have that yet) but equality of hiring or interest always struck me as odd for some reason. (Ditto with minorities)
BTW - I agree that pursuing a career in science can be questionable. That's a lot of years of living poor and working your tail off with an iffy chance of becoming a researcher or professor. Want a family before you get too old and then the problem becomes even greater. (I honestly don't know how those grad students with 2 - 3 kids do it - let alone slaving away on your second low paying post-doc)
think the math department did much better than the physics department.
yes. there seem to be two independent dimensions here; the math one, and the visual-spatial one. i did a survey of international representation re: sex, and the rank order always had mech. engineering to be the least female. physics right behind. math always had more women than these two fields.