May 11, 2005

Excellent debate on the Gender/Science issue Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke have the deepest clearest discussion I've read on the issue.
posted by derised 19 years ago
  • well rats - I can't get the streaming audio. Is anyone else getting just the Quicktime logo and no clickable buttons / links? cause you know - reading is, like, hard
  • Fantastic post! (although I haven't finished reading it yet) I wish I could get through to MeFi (seems it is down -- or there's a kink in the Pacific) - we had a bit of debate on Halpern/Summers/brain sex-dichotomy just the other day. When it's back up, I'll post the link. Cheers.
  • mmmm brain sex. Is that a paradigmatic concept or are you just happy to see me?
  • That MeFi thread is here should anyone care.
  • I've started watching it yesterday and it was very good. Look forward to watching it all.
  • Great link. Thanks, derised.
  • I think it's clear that the dearth of female mathematicians, etc. is because it's ingrained from an early age, consciously and in many subtle ways, that math isn't "girly." Witness the recent disney movie (which I fortunately missed) Ice Princess, where the female protagonist is a lowly math whiz who eventually blossoms into... a champion figure skater.
  • That's certainly a part of it, but I think it goes beyond that, Astragalus. There are a lot of women who major in science, but compared to men, fewer go on to do graduate research. A smaller proportion of those women go on to do post-doctoral research than do men. They refer to it as a 'leaky pipeline' effect. But the biggest drop-off in terms of the proportion of students who continue onwards in academia comes in the transition to faculty. My view of this has always been that there is discrimination against women researchers, but that it is not so overt that it cannot be overcome by empirical evidence. In entering college, you are judged largely on high-school grades and SAT scores - all numerics which can be directly compared between applicants. In entering graduate school, it is grades, esteem of your college, difficulty of classes/major, and GRE scores - mostly numerics. For a post-doc, it is the number of publications, the journals they are published in, and the esteem of your graduate lab (assuming no networking contact with the lab with the post-doc position, which often happens) - few numerics. For a faculty position, it is number of publications in the best journals, significance of proposed research, estimated or proven ability to get funding, teaching ability, estimated lifestyle and life plan (i.e. kids, actually taking alloted vacation time, etc.), the esteem of the labs you have been in, and lots of networking - some numerics, but no real slide-rule to translate them into faculty success, and rarely do applicants have enough of the same types of numberics that they can be directly compared. Since it is the biggest commitment of time and money to a person, and the most subjective decision, it is where the discrimination comes through the most. People are guessing where you will go in life as much as evaluating where you are now, and speculation is where stereotypes have the strongest influence.
  • My usual comment to those who say women't can't do science is: Susan Greenfield. Or: Gould, Stephen Jay. "Women's Brains." Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 305-311.
  • women't? crissakes, I've invented a new contraction.
  • Well said, yentruoc.