Funny. I was just having this argument today. I live in China, which is more along the lines of 1950s when it comes to gender. Additionally, it’s a culture where people’s lives are shaped by other people’s expectations a lot more than we are used to. I was hearing all about how women love being teachers, nurses, etc. It was pointed out that these all also just happen to be low paying jobs.
Kind of like how women “love” to cook because of their “innate nature to want to take care of people” or whatever. And yet nearly all of the top celebrity chefs are male. Apparently women are “innately good” at stuff right up to the point where it starts to pay well.
The problem with the “it’s innate” argument is that we’ve heard that argument before in so many situations where it has simply turned out not to be true. For centuries (and in plenty of cultures today) we heard that women “innately” were not interested in school. Turns out girls do just fine in school. We also heard women were “innately” unsuited for management positions, etc. Not true, either.
And somehow it always just “happens” to be that women are “innately” good at things that pay poorly and have low prestige. Mmmhmm. I’m not buying it. We begin gender training at birth when we choose pink or blue clothes. Right after I was born, my own dad’s first question when I was born was “is it a baseball player or a ballerina?”
Any visit to a toy store will show how rigid gender roles get by the time you are five. A three year old is just beginning to grasp the concept of gender, but by then we’ve already given our girls their toy vacuum cleaners and boys toy ass-kicking robots. We reward children when they make gender distinctions like saying “boys are gross” or “I don’t like girl stuff.” It’s actually amazing how much time and effort we put into getting kids gendered up as young as possible.
Anyway, I’ve never been a huge nature over nurture person. If nature was that much stronger than nurture we’d have a lot more public sex, fighting, and bad table manners. Society has been pretty good at transforming even our strongest and most basic drives. Why do we have so much trouble believing that although society can control and transform, say, our sex drive, it somehow doesn’t play much of a role in what job we choose?
Yeah, and I don’t buy half of what people are saying.
In Cameroon, teaching was a highly paid position. Teachers were probably in the top ten percent of wage earners in any given town. Sure enough, 90% of teachers were men. I got a lot of amusing explanations for why women are naturally bad at teaching, biologically ills suited to the work, not interested in teaching, etc.
I’m in the sciences, and have been for decades. At almost every place I worked, there were more women than men in the labs, and, as a contractor, I’ve worked in a lot of places. People don’t end up in the sciences if they don’t like math, so girls and women must like math.
Do women enjoy math as much as men? Give me a metric and test population free of cultural influences, and we can find out.
I ended up in chemistry because I found math-based college courses so much easier than the humanities. I desperately wanted an advance degree in one of the humanities; then I read the want-ads, looked at salaries, and sucked it up and signed up for p-chem. I like math, but I picked my career for practical reasons.
(Now I both write and play with numbers for a living, and don’t have to remember if I add water to acid or the other way around. I really have a great job.)
Do you actually have any evidence supporting your position? The fact that similar arguments were used in other circumstances implies nothing about the argument in this circumstance. Multiple studies have been conducted showing women fair worse, on the whole, than men at precisely the sort of reasoning necessary for mathematics.
It’s not as if there’s a glut of women in mathematics that you can point to and say “Aha! These studies don’t seem to match what we are seeing in the real world, they must be wrong!”. All throughout the mathematical sciences there’s a shortage of women.
Now, nobody is implying that individual women are bad mathematicians. I’m sat down the corridor from a very eminent female mathematician. But, when looking at populations, the evidence seems to be clear. On what grounds are you disputing it?
> All throughout the mathematical sciences there’s a shortage of women.
It may be true that there are less women in mathematical-related subjects in general, but it’s true to a greater or lesser degree. I would think that the clearest divide for mathematical ability would be the percentage of Ph.D.'s in math that are given to women. As I wrote earlier in this thread, about 30% of Ph.D.'s in math are now given given to women (in the U.S.). Forty years ago, it was less than 5%. People are claiming that because there are some fields, like computer science or certain engineering specialities, where the percentage of women is about 10%, that that proves that women aren’t as good in math. But why would the percentage of women among Ph.D.'s in math is as high as 30%, while the percentage of women among computer programmers and certain kinds of engineers be as low as 10%, if the reason for this difference was that women on average were less talented in math? Certainly getting a Ph.D. in math requires more mathematical ability than becoming a computer programmer or an engineer. Isn’t it more likely that certain jobs (like computer programming or engineering) have a public perception of being a male job, while other jobs (like teaching math in college or working as a mathematician) have a public perception of being open to either men or women?
There are several posters earlier in the thread that give the percentage of women in computer science or in certain engineering fields as if it were some proof of the average lesser ability of women in math. Furthermore, in your post, you say:
> It’s not as if there’s a glut of women in mathematics that you can point to and
> say “Aha! These studies don’t seem to match what we are seeing in the real
> world, they must be wrong!”. All throughout the mathematical sciences there’s
> a shortage of women.
>
> Now, nobody is implying that individual women are bad mathematicians. I’m sat
> down the corridor from a very eminent female mathematician. But, when looking
> at populations, the evidence seems to be clear. On what grounds are you
> disputing it?
Now, either you’re pointing out a fact that’s completely irrelevant to the argument here, or you’re claiming that the low percentage of women working in certain mathematics-related field is relevant to this argument. Which is it?
You cite a 30% rate of female graduation as some sort of achievement. That’s still a 70% bias towards males, and male domination of that field by any objective manner. This in a context where science departments have been specifically trying to attract female candidates with female only scholarships and preferential entry (when was the last time you saw a scholarship program closed to females?)
And how about you stop being disingenuous and quote my post in context, hmm? Namely within the context of answering erislover’s question and replying to ultrafilter’s post? I wasn’t citing the lack of women in computer science as evidence of anything, rather responding to a side question.
I wasn’t talking about the posts of erislover, ultrafilter, or j666, so I wasn’t replying to them at all.
Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party writes:
> You cite a 30% rate of female graduation as some sort of achievement.
Of course it’s some sort of achievement compared with forty years ago when only 5% of math Ph.D’s were awarded to women. I remember forty years ago. There were people then who claimed that the fact that only 5% of the Ph.D.'s in math were awarded to women meant that that was the natural proportion and that there could never be a higher proportion of women getting math Ph.D.'s. They said that there were no legal restrictions of women entering math grad programs and no official discouragement of it, so it couldn’t possibly be cultural reasons that more women didn’t get Ph.D.'s in math. Therefore it had to be genetic reasons that only 5% of math Ph.D.'s were awarded to women. And it was true that forty years ago that there were no legal restrictions on women entering math grad programs. There was even some encouragement for women to do math from some quarters. Cultural restrictions on career choice were much subtler than that.
As the level of women taking math Ph.D.'s rose from 5% to 30% over the last forty years, each year there were people who insisted that the rate of women getting math Ph.D.'s in that year was the natural rate. They insisted that there were no longer any cultural reasons that women didn’t try for math Ph.D.'s. They insisted that that year’s proportion of women getting math Ph.D.'s must be influenced only by biological differences between the math abilities of men and women, not by the culture. Any yet the proportion of women getting math Ph.D.'s continually slowly rises.
This is true of any claim that this year, and not any previous year, there are no longer any forces in our culture which are holding back women from entering mathematical fields. That claim has always been made, not just over the forty years that I remember, but over the past century. A hundred years ago, when no women could get math Ph.D.'s, it was claimed that it was obvious that no women was good enough to get one and that was clearly a matter of biology and not culture. That’s why I am saying that anyone’s claim that at the present the proportion of women in any field must be strictly determined by biology and not by culture is naive. You don’t know how much culture affects everyone’s career decisions. People always claim that at present culture no longer affects their choices. They are willing to admit that in the past culture affected choice, but they insist that they (and other people) aren’t presently affected by it.
If you make a chart with the year along one axis and the proportion of Ph.D.'s awarded to women along the other axis, you see a continual rise over at least the past forty years. Why would you insist that this trend can’t possibly continue into the future? Your insistence that you are absolutely sure that there are no subtle cultural restrictions on women entering mathematical fields is naive.
Wendell, like I said, a number of departments have been providing preferential treatment to women in order to artificially even the gender demographics in their department. Here’s a cite straight from the horses mouth: Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The University of Nebraska and Rice University are two examples of departments like this, and CMU changed its admission criteria in computer science to better suit female applicants. It’s perfectly possible to skew the results when there’s relatively few mathematics PhD’s being granted each year.
Further, as I mentioned, half the battle in obtaining a PhD admission is actually securing the requisite funding. There’s whole sources of funding closed to male applicants. You cannot possibly be serious in claiming that these two factors have quite a large part in the increase in female mathematics students over the past few decades.
But this is besides the point, as I have never claimed that the cause is 100% biological (and the disparity between relative levels of females in CS and maths is more than likely cultural). Rather, it’s you that posits the existence of “subtle cultural restrictions” as the sole cause, whilst offering no evidence that such “subtle cultural restrictions” exist.
I have never claimed that it’s impossible that there is some biological difference in intellectual abilities caused by a person’s gender. I only claim that it’s very difficult to prove that there is such a difference. Culture and biology are always very difficult to disentangle.
It is not true that it’s hard to find the funding for graduate study in math. There are lots of math grad programs in the U.S., and anyone who graduates with bachelor’s degree in math and fairly good grades can get into one of them and get a teaching assistantship. What’s true is that it’s hard to get into a top grad school and it’s hard to get a fellowship. Most people who get math Ph.D.'s, though, didn’t get them from one of the top grad schools and worked their way through with teaching assistantships, not fellowships. Indeed, most math departments with a graduate program would like to have more grad students working as teaching assistants. Teaching assistants reduce the cost of courses for the university. Most of the non-top departments would like to have more math grad students. Indeed, most universities would like to have more grad students of all kinds. Teaching assistants reduce their costs.
What proportion of the fellowships in math given to grad students in the U.S. go to women? The fact that there are a few fellowships directed at women is irrelevant if the vast majority of them are available for everyone. Everyone I work with is (more or less) a mathematician, and I’ve never heard one of them complain that it was difficult for a man to get funding for graduate study in math. I’ve never heard one of them complain that departments made it harder for men to get math Ph.D.'s. These people were graduate students anywhere from the 1960’s to the 2000’s, so they cover pretty much the entire last forty years. Give me some actual statistics showing that women are generally preferred for graduate study in math, not just some anecdotes.
I should clarify my position. There are surely some innate difference between the average man’s and women’s brain.
But these differences pale in comparison to the force of culture. Culture is a better explanation for why we see the patterns we see today. I’m not willing to believe that at this moment and this moment only (as opposed to, say a few decades ago when few women even got higher education) we have somehow found the perfect expression of human nature in academia.