Yes. From a purely evolutionary perspective, smart is the ability to come up with the right answer in the shortest amount of time (the lion is chasing me!–run up the tree or jump in the river?). Of course there isn’t always a single “right” answer. In those cases you would have to think in terms of outcome. So, if I want to figure out how to get “Jane” to want to mate with me I can think for a while and come up with a unique conversational gambit–but in the mean time some other sonovabitch may have already started chatting her up. The “smartest” person is the one whose combination of quality answer and time to solution results in optimal outcomes for him/her.
When I was going to college, there were still a good number of females who came just to get “a good education and a good husband”. But many others were career oriented. I knew of none that were steered away from colege just becuase of their sex.
Astro, I admitted that my family and culture was more sexist than most. I was raised Mormon in small town Idaho and Utah. Ever heard the joke, “Entering Utah, turn your clocks back 10 years”?
Still, the 70s saw the *start * of the women’s movement, not the fruition. I was being raised and taught by men and women that grew up in the 40s and 50s (the conservative ones at that), not by the enlightened and liberal-minded folks fighting for equal rights.
You’re absolutely right that there was great progress in the 70s. By the end of the 70s, I was much more “empowered”. That doesn’t change the message I (and **JRBrown ** and **Doreen ** and most women my age) got as a child – that women were meant to be wives and mothers. Any career a women might have, well. . . that’s just unfortunate that the poor girl couldn’t find herself a husband to support her.
Please be very specific what you mean by academic “sexism”. If you’re going to claim a lack of same sex role models in the sciences, and a (relative) lack of maternity leave as “sexism” then we’re in kind of (IMO) a silly territory where not only overt hostile attitudes towards female academics count as sexism, but the omission of things that would make the choice of a scientific vocation more convenient for a woman’s lifestyle parameters is tantamount to some sort of crypto sexism.
Being a top level scientist typically requires massive personal sacrifice on multiple levels for someone who wants to advance to the top in the hard sciences. This is true for both males and females. No one is going to “have it all”. If a woman expects that she will be able to have a family, and be a top level producing hard scientist that’s not a (IMO) a realistic expectation. Top level female lawyers and business people have to make the same sacrifices of having a family vs being a top level producer. Some people manage to do both but it’s very, very rare. At the top most levels of any profession deciding to have children is going to effectively take you out of the game. This may not be fair, but it’s fact of life in competitive fields. You can’t take a year(s) long break at the time of maximum professional productivity to have a family then and expect to get back in the game. A human beings attention can only be focused so many ways even for very intelligent people.
You’re right, I wasn’t being specific when I lumped sexism and stumbling blocks together. I was not considering the omission of maternity leave or the lack of role models as sexism but rather as discouraging, but by no means insurmountable, stumbling blocks for women. However, sexism does exist, perhaps at a more subconscious level than people realize. One very well done study on this type of sexism was brought up by Kimera. She said it above, but I’ll say it again here. There was a study done in which scientists evaluated a journal article. For some the name on the article was female, for others it was male. The average rating of the article was significantly higher when the author’s name was male. The scientists doing the rating were both male and female, so this inherent bias exists in both genders. The study also demonstrates that inherent bias is not necessarily conscious bias. Subconscious bias like this can certainly affect a woman’s career in science by affecting how proposals are received, how awards are granted, and how her science is read by her peers. There are some ways around this (like a committee granting an award can have the names of applicants withheld) but subfields of science are small communities and there’s no way to make everything gender-blind.
This is not true of both males and females. A male scientist can have a family and be a top-level scientist. In fact, almost every married man I know in my field either has a family or is planning to in the future. It’s not a big deal for them, but for women it’s a different matter.
Ok…but that implies that smart can be attained through training. If I solve equations for a living and somebody else had some math classes in college and hasn’t done math since then, then I’ll probably solve the equation more quickly. Does that mean I’m smarter at math than the other person? I think it just means that I have more training. However, if we do use this definition, than maybe having children really does make women smarter, since mothers have to multitask and maintain many skills at once. (Although some of those skills may be at a lower level - you might use arithmetic for grocery shopping, but you won’t be using calculus.)
Or maybe it’s just women’s biological tendency towards multi-tasking, rather than motherhood, that makes women smarter. (No cite, but I remember reading somewhere that men can focus longer on a single task, but women multitask more efficiently.)
Despite the fact that I made a subscore of 34 (out of a possible 36, I believe) in Natural Sciences on my ACT, no one ever made a suggestion to me that perhaps I should become a scientist. Not my family, not my science teachers (overwhelmingly male), not my high school guidance couselor. No one. At the time, I thought a wanted to be a lawyer and that idea was supported, but scientist was not ever brought up. This was in 1976. Just a data point. YMMV.
There is so much bullshit in this thread. It does not belong in GQ IMHO.
Is that really all that remarkable, though? Nobody ever told me to become a scientist, either. If they knew you wanted to be a lawyer, why would they try to persuade you otherwise?
Because it is a high school guidance couselor’s job to help a student look at their strengths and weaknesses. It is their job to point out career options the student hadn’t thought of before. Though, to be fair, I’m not sure the guidance couselors at my high school did any of that for anyone, so maybe their disinterest in me wasn’t personal or gender-based.