Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? - Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the...

The American ^ | March/April 2008 | Christina Hoff Sommers

[neverdem]

Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem.’

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn...

[peggybac]

When will these people realize that males and females are different? It’s so simple.

[lepton]

I’ve seen that chart, so I knew what you were referring to.

I’m feeling a bit lazy today, but here are a couple of quick links. A bunch of the studies reqire memberships in various things to access.

Interesting chart for areas in general. See Spatial Reasoning, especially.
http://www.polymath-systems.com/intel/essayrev/sexdiff.html

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0655(198721)24%3A1%3C65%3AMDISAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Note the comments in textbook design on page 372: http://books.google.com/books?id=ktDW9UWraeQC&pg=PA372&lpg=PA372&dq=%22spatial+reasoning%22+female&source=web&ots=_WyoSJqbIf&sig=5aKxjKQISJISb_gRUZGV4ZiDZCk&hl=en

[tbw2]

As an engineering student, I found math interesting. But my interest and skill set was statistics and data analysis, and linear algebra. The calculus and vectors was hard to visualize personally, while many males seemed to get that part immediately. (Related to hunting skills?)

When I switched to industrial engineering, I’d managed Calculus 1,2 and 3 - but it was HARD.

The statistics courses and linear algebra were a breeze. And of the math classes I took (past the first algebra class), they were the only math/engineering classes with any significant proportion of women. (30%, compared to 10-15% in other engineering classes).

Physics was easy for me except for the calculus, though that stumped lots of people of both genders. Astronomy, biology, other memorize this stuff science, women had strong representation.

If there is a gap, it is from visualization ability, not math ability.

[GovernmentShrinker]

On the other hand, there’s no reason to cram huge amounts of this stuff into a single semester, or to push so far beyond the limits of even the less than half of initial enrollees who stayed in the course that the class average is 56%. Our society does NOT need tunnel-visioned humanoid robots building our nuclear power plants, space craft, and military technology, and calculating the structural soundness of our skyscrapers, and getting things right 56% of the time.

Many students who are pushing themselves like this have no lives outside their schoolwork, couldn’t care less who the next President is, and wouldn’t dream of taking a day off from studying to help out at a church or community group. Some even become dangerously unstable since they have no perspective on anything and keep themselves extremely stressed all the time.

[skeeter]

One mechanism related to that is rooted in fairly solid science. Since most genes related to neurological functioning are located on the X chromosome, a mutation in one of these genes, whether “positive” or “negative”, will thus have a higher impact in males (who have only one x, guaranteeing the associated mutated phenotype) than in females (where the second, non-mutated copy will dampen the effect of the mutated one, to put it colloquially).

Somewhat less colloquially than 'hardwired', I'd say:)

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

Thanks for the interesting references.

The second one seems perfectly consistent with the hypothesis of bigger differences at the extreme right of the curve.

The reference on test design is interesting. I already knew that the tests have long been "re-balanced" to make them more “gender balanced” and “race neutral”. It appears that leaving out questions requiring spatial reasoning is one of the ways to accomplish that.

The re-balancing of the tests makes it almost impossible to have a meaningful discussion about I.Q.

[TChad]

just as women are better with verbal skills than men.

Not this again.

It is not true.

Here is a sampling of SAT scores since 1972:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html

Males usually outscore females slightly in the verbal SAT and outscore them substantially in the math portion. Remember this the next time you hear a feminist blame the drop in male college attendance on lack of aptitude.

I could not find a table that shows the SAT results for every year.

[flowerplough]

OU had a strange class numbering system back then. Math 201 was a third year class. 0XX courses were first year. 1XX course for sophomores, 2XX

Strange numbers? Many industrial controllers label I/O points similarly. Some of our cheapest, and, therefore, most prevalent Rockwell (Allen Bradley) junk runs its software octally, 0-7, 10-17, while numbering the screw terminals on the input board 0-15. When installing or troubleshooting, parallaxic dyslexia abounds.

[varyouga]

Did not grade on the curve and any error was a 25 point deduction.

I guess he had the popular all or nothing philosophy. Most older profs I had gave you nothing if your answer was wrong.

Every time people complained he would bring up some tiny error at NASA that crashed a billion dollar spacecraft or a hotel lobby that collapsed because of bad math and say "a small mistake still gets you in big **it."

Or "if you can't add with a calculator by now, go waste your time in the business school".

[Neoliberalnot]

“I personally don’t subscribe to the genetic stuff where some races are smarter than others.”

Do you think all breeds of dogs possess this sameness of intelligence?

[Neoliberalnot]

IMHO, infoplease.com is not a refereed source of information. Just a thought.

[imintrouble]

How about the Mesocorticolimbic center of the brain?

There are wiring differences and men (whether it is comfy to know or not) happen to be more adept at math.

However that doesn’t really get to the core of the opening topic re the numbers of Ph.D.’s being awarded.

[Ditto]

Do you think all breeds of dogs possess this sameness of intelligence?

I don't think dogs posses intelligence at all. They have instincts (varying by breed) along with training and conditioning.

[TalonDJ]

Right on! Weedout courses should not exist, Certainly not in the 3rd year. Instead the entire course work should be hard enough that those not capable weed themselves out. At the Engineering/Science school I attended professors that thought there job was to flunk people got canned very very fast. That school hires people that TEACH.

[TChad]

infoplease.com is not a refereed source of information. Just a thought.

You were certainly free to provide a link to a more authoritative source for the SAT data, that showed different results. The Educational Testing Service does not appear to post historical SAT results, perhaps because the results are politically incorrect.

Here is another source (the highly unrefereed Wikipedia) that shows exactly the same thing over a 31 year period. Males slightly outscore females in the verbal portion of the SAT. Males substantially outscore females in the math portion of the SAT.

[rrrod]

What’s for dinner?

[Mamzelle]

re: Just teach the subject! Don’t try to weed out the near geniuses from the geniuses. )))

Dittoes. Math isn't just hard for many people to learn, it's hard for many mathematicians to teach--

I think it's discouraging to hear of some math classes taking pride in the number of dropouts. I'd rather hear of a math department at some university taking pride in the ability to teach the subject in such a coherent and diligent fashion that even people not extraordinarily talented could learn.

Talent in teaching math is much scarcer than math talent, per se.

I've often heard college student complain that their teachers not only were incomprehensible, but couldn't speak English well enough to be understood.

[curiosity]

I personally don't subscribe to the genetic stuff where some races are smarter than others.

Do you have any empirical reason to reject the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between races and ethnicities?

[curiosity]

Just teach the subject! Don’t try to weed out the near geniuses from the geniuses.

Highly abstract math is not for everyone, both in terms of ability to grasp it, as well the need to know it.

The vast majority of people in quantitative disciplines do not need the stuff. Engineers don't need it. Even most physicists don't need it; only the really abstract theory guys need it. Some abstract economic and financial theorists might find it useful, but most don't.

This is a course that you only really need to pass if you want to be a mathematician who spends his life proving theorems. If you're an undergraduate, it's a very good idea to figure out whether this sort of thing is for you or not very early in your college career. Most who attempt it find it's not for them, and so they drop. That's how it should by.

My undergraduate institution also had a class like this, and I dropped by the middle of the first semester. If I stuck it out, I probably could have gotten a B-, but after talking with my advisors, I realized that the class wasn't necessary unless I wanted to be a mathematician, something I definitely did not want to be. I went and took the standard advanced calculus sequence that science and engineering majors take, and that proved to be an excellent move. It in no way hindered my ability to go get into a top Ph.D. program in Finance.

[curiosity]

I think it's discouraging to hear of some math classes taking pride in the number of dropouts. I'd rather hear of a math department at some university taking pride in the ability to teach the subject in such a coherent and diligent fashion that even people not extraordinarily talented could learn.

The number of dropouts from one particular course isn't because of poor teaching, but because of the nature of the subject matter.

We're talking about a highly abstract course that's all about proving arcane theorems and no applications. I didn't go to Harvard, but my college had a class just like that, and I tried it. Believe me, it's not for everyone. Most people, even many geniuses, will not want to take a course like that. This is a class that's only useful to you if you want to spend your life proving very abstract theorems that only a handful of poeple in the world could come close to grasping.

It's completely unnecessary even for most physics majors. Completely irrelevant to engineering. It's necessary, and appeals to, only a very small percentage of people. That's why the dropout rate is so high.

Most people who need to be good at Math should take the Calculus sequence for science and engineering majors. That's more than enough for 99.9% of quantiative career paths.

A lot of kids who are good at Math take this class to see whether the super abstract stuff is for them. They find it's not, and they drop, and it's good that they find out early in their undergraduate experience. Most will go on to very successful careers that involve application of math.