<p>Ah, dear Ben G., did you believe no one would notice that your vehemence on this thread has little basis in "certain properties of statistical distributions," or that you cavalierly employ data when it's to your liking, anecdotes, exaggerations and "guesses" when it's not? </p>
<p>Well, if the equal-ability camp accuses me of being cavalier with data and the like to support wishful conclusions, there is this saying about a pot and kettle ... ;-)</p>
<p>This is ridiculous. No one can stand to my face and honestly tell me that right now, in the mathematics/physics field, that women are on equal standings as men.</p>
<p>Now - we're not here to attribute that to any reason. Would it be too much to say women work harder in school, which would explain the lack of lower grades? Would it also be to much to say, generally, men naturally excel in the sciences at a far higher rate, which explains why so many men are getting higher grades?</p>
<p>More research needs to be done before we can decide if this disparity it caused by actual biological differences (maybe women memorize better while men rationalize better) or if it's simply a product of our society and their expectations.</p>
<p>Like many studies of, for instance, SAT-M scores, this supports the notion that males are increasingly overrepresented at higher and higher levels of ability/achievement. The plateau is kind of cool, too; I wonder if that's just the 2005 test or whether it's a general trend.</p>
<p>Note that I didn't include the fact that far fewer females qualified, even by comparing percentages who qualified; certainly looking at AMC data would be interesting as well, but the higher male participation rate adds more bias (I assume) to that data than to the AIME. Of course, the "0" for the score of 15 is pretty much meaningless since there was only one guy anyway; we'd need considerably more data (all of which is readily available!) for the upper end of that chart to be significant. I'll probably go fetch that soon, but for now I have homework to do :)</p>
<p>I'm mostly reading the boards re my senior S and his college application adventures (including MIT), but had to join this discussion with an anectodal story to temper all these numbers. My mother graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard in the 40's, then went back to school in the 60's at MichStUniv and earned a doctorate in statistics while raising two kids. She then taught in the Engineering dept for several years - if I remember correctly, there was only one ladies room in the whole department - for the secretaries - it was one building and two floors away from her office. She got me one of my first jobs punching Fortran cards. I always say my son got his math brain from his grandmother!</p>
