<p>Thought I'd share this with all of you guys, in case you find it as amusing as I do: </p>
<p>I'm writing a paper for 21A.100 (Intro to Anthropology) on a book by an MIT Anthropology professor about the culture of a weapons laboratory at the end of the cold war (book here</a>). This book is kind of annoying me (by which I mean I want to throw it at a wall) due to its repeated assertation that science is a "male" field and that women in science are somehow divorced from their "inherent" "emotional" "tendencies".</p>
<p>So one of the topics of my paper is how science isn't really as unbalanced as the author insinuates, and I got to include this gem of a paragraph:
[quote=molliebatmit]
Much of the characterization of science as a discipline with a masculine worldview has relied upon statistical portraits of the scientific workforce which are rapidly becoming archaic. Gusterson notes that females, most of whom were secretaries, made up only 26% of the Livermore staff (Gusterson 1996: 94); even ten years later, this figure sounds astoundingly antiquated, given the remarkable gains in female interest and participation in science which have occured in the past decade. In my field, molecular biology, many PhD programs now admit almost two women for every man (Entering 2004); even science-focused schools like MIT admit men and women in even proportions into their undergraduate programs (Common 2005). Furthermore, undergraduate women at MIT perform in a superior fashion in their studies compared to undergraduate men; MIT women on average have higher grades, more leadership positions, and a higher graduation rate than MIT men (Jones 2005).
<a href="I'm%20paraphrasing%20from%20post%20#12%20of%20%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=112700%5Dthis%20thread%5B/url%5D%20--%20although%20unfortunately,%20as%20you%20can%20see,%20I%20was%20not%20able%20to%20work%20in%20the%20use%20of%20the%20word%20%22pwn%22.">/quote</a></p>
<p>Ben Jones, admissions god and demolisher of anthropology! Muahahaha! :D</p>
<p>I also quoted Ben in a paper I turned in for a hass the other day :) It was for a cool 21W class on how the college admissions process is changing as a result of the computer and the Internet...</p>
<p>mollie -- unless I have become illiterate (which is possible) I see no assertion in Ben's post about women having higher grades, which is part of your "paraphrase". I was actually going to ask about the grades issue earlier, at the time of that discussion... sure, women graduate at a higher rate, but that's a very coarse, "minimal" indicator. In fact, it's much more related to persistence than academic ability. Grades -- especialy at the top end -- would be much more on point. I see nothing in Ben's post about the average GPA, especially in the sciences. Even more interestingly, how about the fraction of women with GPAs in the top 10%, compared to men? By field?</p>
<p>My very strong guess (I'd go so far as to bet cash money if someone wants) is that the higher a bar you set, especially in the hard sciences (math, physics, to some extent chemistry) the smaller the proportion of women in science that exceed it. At the extreme end, we have the AMC/AIME/USAMO/IMO and the corresponding physics competitions, which still have very few women, and even fewer women medalists. Moreover, the proportion of women falls off as one gets into the higher levels... so this is where I get my intuition from. (More anectodal jabber: a well-placed MIT source ;-) says that her section of 18.100b went from about half girls to two girls during the first couple of weeks.)</p>
<p>Nothing would thrill me more than to find out I am wrong... but I'm pretty sure that if you take some given field -- other than the humanities and social sciences -- and then slide the GPA minimum upward, the percentage of women who exceed it will fall. I don't think this has anything to do with intrinsic ability, but that's a story for another day.</p>
<p>I am quite glad to see Ben J. quoted as an authority, but you might want to double check that you haven't ascribed to him a statement he didn't make.</p>
<p>(If he did say it and I really did miss it after rereading three times, then I shall eat dirt most assiduously.)</p>
<p>--
P.S. Pretty please let's not make me a Larry Summers pi</p>
<p>Ben - You're completly right (and are totally literate). I see NO mention of higher grades in Ben's post. It looks like Mollie made that up.</p>
<p>I also agree with everything you said, and would like you hear your explanation of why "Nothing would thrill me more than to find out I am wrong... but I'm pretty sure that if you fix a field -- other than the humanities and social sciences -- and then slide the GPA minimum upward, the percentage of women who exceed it will fall. I don't think this has anything to do with intrinsic ability, but that's a story for another day," cause i'd like to use your explation with my friends sometime.</p>
<p>No, Mollie didn't make that up. As a long time reader of the blogs, I immediately recognized that that statement was in fact written by Matt McGann. I'll check Matt's blog archive and come back with a link.</p>
<p>Ah, okay. Well mollie should cite that comment, too, then. Good memory, indeed.</p>
<p>I do stand by my view that to get any useful data on how well women are actually doing in the sciences you have to zoom in closer than overall graduation rates and GPA averages. For instance, the data cited to date in this thread say nothing against the following hypothesis: "women specialize disproportionately in fields with more grade inflation and higher graduation rates (for everyone) and this explains the above figures."</p>
<p>I have no idea whether this is true, but it's as consistent with the data as the alternative hypothesis "women are academically stronger in general". An intellectually honest assessment of this question requires looking closely and making sure that you aren't ascribing things to the data which they don't say. </p>
<p>(I have always admired mollie for her insistence that statistics are not to be swallowed uncontemplatively but analyzed for what they actually say and don't say.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
My very strong guess (I'd go so far as to bet cash money if someone wants) is that the higher a bar you set, especially in the hard sciences (math, physics, to some extent chemistry) the smaller the proportion of women in science that exceed it.
[/quote]
[quote]
I just don't think the way to get us there is by shutting our eyes tightly and pretending the day is here already when it's pretty obviously not even close.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>From a math girl: THANK YOU! I get so frustrated when people argue that girls are "just as good at math" in all possible regards. What they mean, of course, is that there is no reason to discourage or discriminate against a particular woman on the basis of gender, or to discourage girls from going into math. But oftentimes the "equality" message comes at the price of honesty. Even disregarding the possible overall differences (in mean ability or reasoning style) between men and women in mathematics, the greater male variance makes for a rapidly increasing gap as you look further and further out on the distribution function.</p>
<p>Finally, someone who doesn't think that that notion is just horribly outdated and misogynistic :)</p>
<p>(I would add, without the offer of a real bet, that the lower you set the bar below the mean, the smaller the proportion of women who exceed it, too. But I'm not sure of how that would be measured, and it couldn't be so math/science specific.)</p>
<p>(First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I may have been a little bit goofy on writing HASS papers -- I hate writing them and they make me somewhat silly after several pages -- and I fully thought there was something in the post about GPA, which there clearly is not. But, um, I'm glad Matt is backing me up. ;) )</p>
<p>I would be interested to see any data on GPA by major, by year, by whatever... but other than anecdotal evidence, I don't think there's anywhere to find it. </p>
<p>As for women in the hard sciences and engineering, though, I just don't see as many female students failing/getting C's in classes as I do male students. Part of surviving MIT classes is a marathon of work, and the women seem more willing to sacrifice and put in the hours of work than the men do.</p>
<p>So I think perhaps women at MIT don't get as many A's as men do. But I don't think they get as many C's either.</p>
<p>Mollie -- yes; that sounds exactly on the mark to me. This is the standard higher-male-variation situation -- men are more likely to be at the extreme high end and the extreme low end. I'm prettty sure you understand (much better than I do) the evolutionary biology which posits an explanation for that : )</p>
<p>
[quote]
From a math girl: THANK YOU! I get so frustrated when people argue that girls are "just as good at math" in all possible regards. What they mean, of course, is that there is no reason to discourage or discriminate against a particular woman on the basis of gender, or to discourage girls from going into math. But oftentimes the "equality" message comes at the price of honesty.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, trust that it makes me equally glad to see that someone appreciates honesty on this issue. It makes up for a lot of nonsense. There are few things more infuriating than being called some kind of bigot or misogynist for pointing out certain properties of statistical distributions -- properties without which life would be easier (but wishing don't make it so). </p>
<p>When someone like JerseyMom trots along and accuses me of being prejudiced against women for such statements, I want to ask: am I also prejudiced against Jewish people because I know that they are much shorter, on average, than Kenyan people? Or that they run much more slowly? (That would make me an odd example of self-hatred, since I am a Jewish person.) We should solve problems of underrepresentation by looking at the facts squarely and discussing them honestly, not by trying to ignore the inconvenient ones so that we can avoid revising certain cherished beliefs about equality.</p>
<p>Plus, it's more respectful of women to have this discussion honestly. The vast majority of women in science that I've talked to about this are way too smart to buy the uncontemplative (and almost completely undocumented) happy talk that there are just as many truly outstanding young women at the top end of science as there are men, etc. We're not going to achieve any noble goal by patronizing them.</p>
<p>I definitely agree that people need to think about these sorts of issues, and must be willing to consider points of view other than either the "men are inherently way more amazing than women at math and science" and the "men and women are exactly equally amazing at math and science, down to the 9th decimal place". Either of those viewpoints, I think, reflects a certain lack of thought and rigor.</p>
<p>Personally (and of course my Anthro prof would claim I'm WAY biased), I think the more we learn about biology and the brain, the more likely we are to understand what sorts of things about people are relatively immutable and which ones are amenable to change via social channels. Both sorts of factors are probably at play here.</p>
<p>The initial intent of the paper (although, I suppose, not that of the particular paragraph I posted) was to question the author's viewpoint, which was that antinuclear activists in the 80s challenged weapons research because women are naturally more concerned about life than are men (scientists). A quote from the book:
[quote]
This traditional construction of womens identity is then used as a point from which to criticize the uncaring masculine world of war and weaponry... a typical woman is very much in touch with her feelings mothers or not, most women care deeply about the preservation of life.
[/quote]
Frankly, I find that sort of setup (women = feelings = good, men = science = mean) nauseating. And more than a little offensive. The critique from statistics is at least an attempt to be honest to reality.</p>
<p>Hehehe... Mollie, you may rest assured that I find few things more ridiculous than the po-mo anthro burble of which that quoted snippet is a paradigmatic instance.</p>