gender
purepedantry | May 20, 2008Daniel Drezner links to two articles with alternative interpretations to the gender gap in science. Both are looking at a female exodus from hard sciences, but explain it in different ways. First, Lisa Belkin in the NYTimes takes the angle of institutionalized discrimination and a macho male culture:
Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually…
greengabbro | April 16, 2008My beautifully kludgy little script that does much of the work of putting together linky-posts for me - pulling everything with a special "to SB" tag off my del.icio.us account and formatting it - has stopped working. I cry tears of sadness. I also have a backlog of links.
Like, f'rinstance, April's Scientiae carnival. And the announcement for next month's Scientiae carnival - I'm excited about the theme!
And a couple of things on the social status of women in relation to geology: A Broadsheet summary of this article (pdf) about how oil and mineral-resource economies are bad for women. The…
purepedantry | April 2, 2008What an astonishingly useful graphic (click to enlarge, source):
Richard Florida (author of one of the most interesting books I have ever read) comments on the gender disparity in singles:
By far, the best places for single men are the large cities and metro areas of the East Coast and Midwest. The extreme is greater New York, where single women outnumber single men by more than 210,000. In the Philadelphia area and greater Washington, D.C., single women outnumber single men by 50,000. I met my wife outside Detroit, where the odds were greatly stacked in my favor - single women outnumber…
purepedantry | March 31, 2008Go read this post at Language Log. It is about race as a confound in interpreting psychological differences between the sexes:
On the other hand, the samples used in sex-differences research are often quite small, and are not in general demographically balanced. We wouldn't trust pollsters who claimed to characterize gender differences in the American electorate based on a sample of, say, 20 UCLA medical students.
More on this at Mind Hacks.
jane | March 30, 2008This weekend, I went to 2 different retailers to return a couple of items. (Grandma Jane bought Baby Jane an Easter outfit that consisted of a frilly frilly dress and a delicate WHITE sweater. Now, Easter is not exactly a dress-wearing holiday in our household, and if Baby Jane wore either item to daycare, or even around the house for more than 30 seconds, the outfit would be toast.) Since I was there anyway, and since shopping trips ALONE are so rare these days, I decided to check out the baby departments and see if I could spend the store credit then and there.
My experience at each…
jane | March 7, 2008Say you are a woman in computing. Maybe you're struggling to get through school. Maybe you're trying to start up a mentoring program, or have a great project idea, or are facing a career transition. And maybe you need some funds to get your project/schooling/transition off the ground, or at least help it along.
There's a program that might be of assistance....
The Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and the Systers Online Community, sponsor a program called Pass-It-On Grants. The idea behind the grants is to develop a network of women, who provide financial assistance to their…
purepedantry | March 3, 2008Conventional wisdom + bigger microphone = excellent journalism!
High fives all-around for Charlotte Allen who repackages conventional wisdom about sex differences to a degree rarely attained by print journalists.
My favorite part:
Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men…
greengabbro | February 20, 2008
The buzz in the geoblogosphere this week has been about an article in Nature Geoscience on the status of women in the academic earth sciences. I meant to review it here, but haven't had the oomph. Instead, you should join the discussion at All My Faults are Stress-Related, Ten Million Years of Solitude, and The Dynamic Earth. One point that hasn't been discussed much yet is that graduate school in the earth sciences is actually freakishly egalitarian - unlike other fields, we do not see large-scale gender fractionation between the master's and Ph.D. As a Ph.D. noncompleter I was tremendously…
dmunger | August 30, 2007When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's more emotional?
Dave: She is. [Oops!]
The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…
purepedantry | August 13, 2007I read this article in the Economist that summarizes a paper showing that men wanting to attract women spend conspicuously and women wanting to attract men volunteer conspicuously. All I could think about when I read it was, "Well, I guess Veblen was right about something." (I will get to the article at the bottom, but this is an interesting history lesson for those of you who haven't heard of Veblen.)
Thorstein Veblen was a turn of the century economist and social critic noted for coining term conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when you buy something really expensive so…
purepedantry | January 30, 2007We have had an ongoing discussion on this blog about whether the disparity between women and men in the sciences is the result of a innate difference in cognitive ability or the result of some social phenomena such as selective participation or discrimination. Unfortunately, one of the complexities of this debate is that there is really no good objective standard for how good a scientist is. You can look at publication rates and journal impact, but comparing these numbers across fields is difficult. We lack objective measures.
It would be interesting to look at an analogous system to…
purepedantry | November 16, 2006I have tried to show that the gender gap in the sciences is not the result of cognitive differences, but that begs the question about what else to which it can be attributed. It could be that it is the result of conscious or unconscious discriminatory behavior. However, it could also be the result of the personal and economic decisions of the women involved -- particularly with respect to having babies. If some women decide to leave their careers early or for long periods to have children, then this will affect their average representation among tenured faculty.
A recent NBER paper by…
purepedantry | November 14, 2006We're mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore:
In recent years, women's health has been a national priority. Pink ribbons warn of breast cancer. Pins shaped like red dresses raise awareness about heart disease. Offices of women's health have sprung up at every level of government to offer information and free screenings, and one of the largest government studies on hormones and diet in aging focused entirely on older women.
Yet statistics show that men are more likely than women to suffer an early death.
Now some advocates and medical scientists are beginning to ask a question…
purepedantry | November 2, 2006In my previous post arguing for the relatively large psychological similarity between men and women -- in great contrast to the public conception -- I drew heavily on the work of Janet Hyde, a professor of Psychology at Berkeley.
Now Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn have published an editorial and review in Science summarizing their work. Money quote:
A review of meta-analyses of research on psychological gender differences identified 46 reports, addressing a variety of psychological characteristics, including mathematical, verbal, and spatial abilities; aggression; leadership effectiveness; self-…
purepedantry | October 27, 2006I have argued repeatedly that I don't think biological differences between men and women are sufficient to explain their different in representation in math and science (here, here, and here). Mixing Memory has a very thorough post arguing for the other side of the coin -- how stereotypes can affect negatively affect performance. Definitely read the whole thing, but here is the money quote:
The point of all of this is that several studies have shown that stereotype threat influences women's performance on math tests, and thus is likely responsible for at least part of the observed gender…
purepedantry | October 2, 2006No more excuses, men:
"Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal," said Dr. Irv Binik, psychology professor and founder and director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of Royal Victoria Hospital, which is part of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).
Thermal imaging, or thermography, is infrared imaging using thermographic cameras that detect radiation emitted by objects based on their temperature. Because of its usefulness in detecting warm objects in the dark,…
purepedantry | September 19, 2006I have talked repeatedly here about how I don't think that genetics provide an adequate explanation of the gender disparity in science. I haven't mentioned that this gender disparity does not overly disturb me, primarily because I think that some time in the next 10 years this is going to get fixed in profound way. Here is some demographic evidence why women will soon surpass men in science and more generally in academia:
Girls have long gotten better grades than boys in all levels of school. But while at one time few women used those academic skills to get degrees, new research suggests…
purepedantry | September 11, 2006Differing from the typical strategy of threatening potential suitors with castration, scientists speculate that phermones from fathers delay their daughters sexual development:
Chemical cues from fathers may be delaying the onset of sexual maturity in daughters, as part of an evolutionary strategy to prevent inbreeding, according to researchers at Penn State.
...
"Recently, experts elsewhere discovered a little-known pheromone receptor gene in the human olfactory system, linking the role of pheromones on menarche, or the first occurrence of menstruation," said Matchock, whose findings are…
purepedantry | August 10, 2006Keeping to my week long theme of gender differences in cognition (here and here), here is an article by Diane Halpern in eSkeptic. It not only summarizes a lot of what is known about gender differences (even though it is reprinted from 1993) but also goes into confounding factors like prenatal hormones, sexual preference and most importantly handedness -- all of which affect verbal and mathematical ability. I found this passage about the confounds of handedness and homosexuality particularly interesting:
The idea that the brain is a sex-typed organ has generated a great deal of interest.…
purepedantry | August 9, 2006Earlier this week I argued that the gender differences in cognition, while real, are not substantial enough to explain gender disparities in science. We talked about the work of Janet Hyde; it shows that -- contrary to the popular conception of women and men as psychologically disparate -- men and women are actually quite psychologically similar in most respects.
Some of the commenters brought up the issue of the upper tail, and I want to talk about that specifically. It has been suggested that even if the size of the effect -- the differences in averages between a trait like mathematical…