<p>There are (and always were and always will be) women with great mathematical minds. However, not many.</p>
<p>Nobel prize, mehh.
A destroyer is named after Grace Hopper.
<a href=“http://www.hopper.navy.mil%5B/url%5D”>http://www.hopper.navy.mil</a></p>
<p>Californiaa, yes I have heard of both of them. Marie Curie also faced quite a bit of hardship during her education and career due to the limited view of women at the time. My point was not about the presence of women who have made great contributions to math and physics, it was about how even the most accomplished women in the field did and do not receive the same recognition and respect in their fields as men who have achieved similar feats. They had to go above and beyond (for Madame Curie she won two nobel prizes) to get any level of respect for their work. So how do we know there aren’t many more women out there who have been overlooked? We hear of many less well known (but still great) men in physics, often because they have something named after them, but why don’t we hear about women in these cases? It’s very likely that women who could have made similar achievements were not even given the opportunity.</p>
<p>You still have not justified your statement.</p>
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<p>Have you ever seen a team picture? I know when my nephew was on these Olympiad teams, they were all male. The summer camp may have had one or two girls but I don’t remember ever seeing a girl’s name on the list.</p>
<p>Now, I think there are girls out there who are capable but they are steered via peer and quite possibly parental pressure away from math towards more acceptable areas, currently comp sci. People aren’t saying girls aren’t capable anymore, now it seems the thing to say is that these girls choose not to follow that path. </p>
<p>This is a much more subtle re-direction of girls away from math because now it sounds like the girls are making a conscious informed decision. But when a girl finds herself the only girl amongst dozens of guys in a competition, it’s not particularly fun; then, she has to contend with “why do you do xxx?” from friends and the inane “she must like being the only girl with so many guys?” “has she found a boyfriend?” remarks from patents (both in general and parents of teammates).</p>
<p>Teachers are often the few truly encouraging booster for these girls because a gifted student is a joy to teach and nurture no matter the gender.</p>
<p>My D’s BC calc class has 7 girls and 3 boys (Exeter). The best math student in the class is a girl (not my D). The co-head of Math Club is another girl. </p>
<p>The days of less rigorous math for girls in high schools is over. Old news. Now the boys are struggling to keep up, and being stellar at math is not related to gender.</p>
<p>But the current discussions about women in business school and graduate school are interesting. It seems to take a good ten years for these changes to slowly inch their way up and eventually through the “glass ceiling”.</p>
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<p>what the committee said in 1948, and should have said in 2009 instead of making a mockery of the Peace prize.</p>
<p>@Cali you are arguing that because girls are not equally represented in competitive math, they are not as good in math.</p>
<p>I would disagree. Competitive math takes a certain mindset (competitive, and also enjoying dealing with time constraints), and a great deal of preparation (studying prior exam questions - think spelling bee champions) in addition to math ability. </p>
<p>Recent studies have demonstrated that when the time element is removed in math competitions, girls and boys score equally. Girls prefer to be more careful and accurate, and boys prefer to work quickly.</p>
<p>One can certainly argue maybe boys are more competitive as well. Probably a social variable. My D is pretty darn competitive, but prefers not to exercise her competitiveness in math competitions.</p>
<p>No one ever pushed my girls to softer classes.<br>
There were times when I wish they had. Then again, this family is not grade driven, but education driven. And, that worked for us, in terms of the colleges they are in and how they have grown. Some crazy tales from D1’s experiences in astronomy class. Well over her head- but she learned.</p>
<p>So, what is this really about? Graduating in STEM? I think someone suggested this- that the pressure to commit to a major gets in the way. Why isn’t it enough for girls to become “STEM-savvy,” as opposed to adding up numbers of those who score this in a contest or stick with math-sci through graduation and into careers? Can we allow for gals who have the savvy, but aren’t going to be engineers or neurophysicists, but work happily and successfully in those industries?</p>
<p>I sometime think the context is too narrowed. Ie, our thinking. Why is there always some mythical ladder that has to be climbed? It allows comments like, “girls aren’t as good in math.”</p>
<p>Not directed at you, 2prepmom.</p>
<p>I don’t advocate that people should be pushed or even nudged into STEM fields. I also think that to the extent that the title of this thread suggests that “our most talented girls” are those whose talents lie in STEM fields, it’s a mistaken title. Some of our most talented girls have talents in STEM.</p>
<p>I have only an oblique response to lookingforward’s question, which is: The problem in my view is that young women who are really interested in STEM fields for careers face an uphill road that has some steeper sections than the road young men can take. I think that the relatively small numbers of women in fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science (at the moment) tends to be self-reinforcing, in the sense that some fraction of the STEM-talented young women do not want to be in a relatively small minority (by gender) for much of their professional lives, and the gender ratios do have an effect on the working environment. My niece, an engineer with a large corporation, reports that there are still some very unenlightened comments from some of the men she works with.</p>
<p>In academia, there is also the challenge that the up-or-out tenure system can make it difficult to combine career and family. I have read that the average age of an investigator receiving his/her first NIH grant is now 42. This might refer to the standard grants, as opposed to the starter grants–assuming that NIH still has those (my area is not NIH-fundable, really, but some of my colleagues have NIH money). I think that the average age of first award by NSF is a bit younger. </p>
<p>At most research-intensive universities, a grant is a prerequisite for tenure. And the list of research-intensive universities where this applies goes pretty far down on the CC prestige scale–well below the CC-top and into the merely alphabetized group. </p>
<p>Still, it means that it is quite difficult for a woman in academia to delay having a family until she has tenure. And it is really quite difficult to do the work required for tenure while caring for young children, unless one has a phenomenally supportive spouse or a lot of money. The options are basically deal-with-it, adopt when older, remain childless, have children first and then start the academic career (this can work, especially if one gets a bachelor’s degree, then has a family, then eventually later starts a Ph.D. program), or be super-lucky, or super-accelerated.</p>
<p>The issue of women becoming STEM-savvy is also very important, I think–There are some policy decisions where it is fairly important to be STEM-savvy in order for one’s voice to be heard, and on some of these, there may be some gender correlation in points of view.</p>
<p>I think that’s an important perspective. When I mentioned that some “fields are… historically structured toward male skill sets, interests…and ways of operating,” family time needs are one real aspect of that. It’s a good example of how some atmospheres work for men, are oriented to- and reward- their “availability.” And, how only when more women are in these arenas, can things (slowly) change. When in my 20’s I took a hard line. But to be fair, I was also in a start-up that needed all hands on deck.</p>
<p>The timeline of an academic career is a bit different from the career-path that lookingforward has just mentioned. </p>
<p>For someone who wants to be a professor at a research-intensive university, it is typical to complete a Ph.D. about age 27 (give or take) and then take a postdoctoral position or two. So the decade of the 20’s is pretty much full-out work. One can take a more relaxed attitude in grad school if one is not interested in an academic position, but otherwise in a STEM field one spends a lot of hours in the lab, or at a computer, or surrounded by sheets of equations (or perhaps out in the field, doing field work). It is not unusual for a person to be already in his/her early 30’s when he/she is first hired as an Assistant Professor. In fact, we have hired several people in their late 30’s. So you can see the problem with the current arrangement.</p>
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<p>How is doing work required for tenure any more difficult than doing the work required to advance in any other field - say the business world?</p>
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<p>Being on the tenure track, especially after the 1970’s means one has to be 100% concentrated on doing research in one’s field and publishing a sufficient quantity of academic research at a high enough quality while juggling teaching and university service responsibilities within 5-7 years or else one’s asked to leave and start at/near the bottom again. And that’s not even getting into the competition to even be in such a position…200-500 applicants with PhDs from mostly the most elite schools in their respective fields/subfields for the chance to even start at a tenure-track position. </p>
<p>While there are exceptions, most other fields with the exception of the creative arts, medicine, or some areas of law don’t require nearly the same degree of concentrated focus on one’s job nearly all the time for the first 5-7+ years of one’s career for the sake of rolling the dice to see if one gain’s the coveted brass ring of tenure/promotion/passing one’s boards/big break or one’s asked to leave at the end of the year and start over at another institution/leave the field altogether. </p>
<p>One cousin was on the tenure track and did get tenure right before he left it behind to start up a successful engineering startup with some partners several years ago. From his perspective, the tenure track was much much harder than being an engineer/entrepreneur even given the much higher financial risks and uncertainty. </p>
<p>One thing he cited as a major difference is when he’s off work…he can literally leave all the less pleasant aspects of his work behind once he’s out of the office to pursue leisurely hobbies such as playing in a local jazz band with friends. That meant his “off-time” was really free of the less pleasant aspects of his work…or any if he was so inclined. </p>
<p>In contrast, practically every waking moment of his first 5-7 years in academia was concentrated/concerned with research, publications, teaching evaluations/teaching, and more all for the goal of gaining tenure at the very end of that period.</p>
<p>PG, I think it’s partly the up-or-out nature of the tenure decision. A person who does not get tenure is lucky to have a second chance elsewhere. The AAUP guidelines mean that the person is not supposed to be offered a regular 5-7 year “start over” Assistant Professorship anywhere else that goes by AAUP rules. Major grants are required for a person to obtain tenure, and at NIH, a proposal has to be somewhere within the top 10%, including proposals by long-established investigators, in order to be funded; at NSF, the funding rate is more like 20% overall, but again the Assistant Professor is in competition with established investigators–including Nobel Laureates at both NIH and NSF; and NSF typically offers half the funding of NIH, on a per-year basis. Starter grants do not count.</p>
<p>So the move from Assistant to Associate Professor is something like “advancing,” but for a faculty member at a research institution, there is no option to do as much as possible while spending a significant amount of time on child care, and then power-up the career and advance later on. One could delay looking for a faculty appointment until the children are elementary-school-age or older, but in my opinion, if a person wants to do that, the best time to interrupt the education/career progression would be between undergrad and grad school. </p>
<p>Added: Another possibility would be to hold a very long-term Postdoctoral Position–so to insert a delay between Ph.D. and the start of a faculty position–and have children then. I have seen this done successfully, although post-docs don’t make much money, and have pretty strenuous time demands nonetheless.</p>
<p>I guess the other thing that I would add, PG, is that in 30+ years in my department, I have never seen anyone who successfully managed child-rearing during the Assistant Professorship. I think that in other departments in my university it has been possible. But even the men often postpone starting a family until they have been tenured. I think I mentioned elsewhere that I was advised not even to get married–because there was about a decade when the department tenured only single people. This latter bit of advice has fortunately not been given any time recently.</p>
<p>I am facing a bit of a quandary here, in that some of the realities are discouraging in themselves–it makes me more committed to restructuring the academic system to permit more sanity for both genders.</p>
<p>I am far more concerned about the efforts to emasculate normal boys. Everywhere you go, girls are being told how the sky is the limit for them, that everything is possible. Boys are told how abusive the male psyche is, how their achievements are not amazing, because they must have walked over others on the way, and how most of the great males in history have this skeleton in the closet in which they either abused the little guy, took advantage of a class of people, or took credit for the work of others. My daughters are excellent students. My sister is a chemical engineer with an MBA. I am a work-from-home mom by choice. Life is really about choices. By the way, after weeks upon weeks of observing seas of pink breast-cancer-awareness ribbons at every sports venue under the sun, I would give my right arm to see someone who gave a rat’s patooty about the hundreds of thousands of men dying of prostate cancer each year. Women are far more comfortable with the unmentionable areas of our bodies than men, and we’re watching good men die all around us, unchecked, uninformed, and with hardly an outcry from us ladies. So, yes a bit off topic - BUT - along the same subject lines of promoting/encouraging one gender over another.</p>
<p>“PG, I think it’s partly the up-or-out nature of the tenure decision.”</p>
<p>How is this different than the up-or-out of management consulting or law? Do academics really think they work harder than most professionals?</p>
<p>I think we had that discussion before, PG. I have no personal experience with management consulting or law. Maybe the women in those fields generally delay child-bearing until their late 30’s or early 40’s also.</p>
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<p>Both, especially management consulting have many more continuing/exit options where one can stay in one’s respective field for those who fail to become a partner in a management consulting or biglaw/law firm. </p>
<p>Moreover, according to several people I know who have done management consulting and did/went into tenure track positions, the intensity of concentrated focus on one’s narrow research field/topic along with other factors is far worse. </p>
<p>Incidentally, this was one key reason a cousin-in-law opted out of a top 5 STEM PhD program in favor of working in a big-name management consulting firm after undergrad at an HYP. While it was hard, she enjoyed her stint, wider variety of things to work on, travelling/meeting clients, and at the end…they paid for her elite top-5 MBA.</p>