Women vs. Men In Science

judging by the number of interacts so far it is painfully obvious that not too many people are interested in women and science ..........

........ so how about paris hilton ?

Re: # 21
Azra - precisely what I was thinking - it has less to do with gender and more to do with how gender is perceived. it`s a cumulative effect. In some schools today, they separate girls and boys for math and science classes because studies suggest that girls perform better when they dont have to pay attention to gender stereotypes. A significantly higher number of these girls go on to choose careers in science.

It is interesting that art and music are now consdered feminine when throughout the centuries men have dominated these fields because women were discouraged from participation. it`s only been a century or less (depending upon country - many still dont have it) since women have had equal opportunity after all.

Atif - according to some reports men are a dying breed. there`s something wrong with you lot genetically and nature is now trying to eliminate you all from the evolutionary pool. so your falling sperm count has a very good explanation, you see... :))
btw, feminists didnt come up with this idea. male scientists did! hehe

IF you go the Harvard website, you can read what Pres. Summers actually said. I don`t think his remarks are all that controversial; they are certainly unpalatable to quite a few people. Whatever happened to free speech, anyway?

From the NYT articel that Samina Shah posted, it seems that there are a heck of a lot more male geniuses and idiots than there are female geniuses and idiots. Exactly what Summers said.

What is really upsetting to women is the fact that Summers said that discrimination against women is NOT the reason why there aren`t thousands more women in the ranks of top scientists. Basically, what he said is what Irfan Hamid has said.

In a related context, Summers has this to say,
``To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense work?``

So there are 22 women in her section of the HBS class, of whom only 3 are now working full time. I recall reading another study that said that the best predictor of the number of women in CEO, COO and CFO positions in Fortune 500 firms now is the number of women in the HBS class 20 years ago. Hmmmm, so 3/22, or ~14% left in the running for top jobs. So if we don`t see the Fortune 500 ranks crawling with female CEOs, COOs, CFOs, its rank discrimination against women. It has nothing to do with women choosing the mommy track!

There is no glass ceiling after all, its just that women don`t want to work as hard/single-mindedly/obsessively as men do. Why not? Maybe because they want to have a life and a family. Check out this book, ``Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It`` by Warren Farrell if you want more on this.

So, give up having a life and you too will succeed. IF you want a life and family, well guess what, ladies, you can`t have it all!

Being an engineer myself, I would like nothing more than to see more women in scientific/technical fields. That said, I think the debate about whether women can become good scientists/mathematicians/engineers is a moot one (at least for me). I have seen more than my fair share of brilliant women engineers and incompetent men. Treating an individual as a person first and a man/woman later would solve a lot of problems, but unfortunately making the venus/phallus distinction is too deeply wired in our heads.

That said, I think physiology is programmed to give men an unfair advantage in most professional endeavors. In response to Sommer`s remarks there was a short article published which gave a very tangible reason why women are not more visible among top research positions; families and children. To become a respected researcher you need to publish as much as possible, this usually takes place during the late 20s and 30s, precisely the time when women have babies. Given the choice, some women choose family over career. I don`t think that`s a bad choice. If not, men`s decreasing sperm count may not be the reason why the human race shrinks. And in any case, raising a family is in no way easier or less consequential than being a frontline researcher (and I think most mothers might say more satisfying and rewarding).

To me, the whole debate is about the opression that women have had to face for centuries. It`s really not about your dwindling sperm counts, and if it is true about the sperm count then you should really see a dr. because that cannot be healthy. and trust me if there were a big conspiracy going around against men, women would not stop at poisoning water to cause low sperm counts.
Anywho, for the more serious folks on this forum, I recently learnt about the Dr. Shazia Khalid case in Pakistan. The 32-year-old doctor was gang-raped by the military men. Despite the fact that the military involvement has made it a very high profile case, the case is still about a woman who was raped. Her father-in-law is suggesting that she should be killed since she has brought dishonor to the family. The investigators are insinuating that Dr. Khalid is actually a whore since they found condoms in her bedroom.
There are two things happening here. first, the victim is being even more victimized by the society. second, and i do say this with great hesitation, a woman, especially the educated one, is considered nothing but a whore in the eyes of the patriarchal south asian society. The attitude in the East is very discouraging towards women and their role as equal members of the society.

17,16, 18 you guys are great...the irony of it all is that it just might be true...still great to see you do have a sense of humour. ;-)

Actually Atif the reason mens sperm count is going down is that the rise of women chemists has led to good water management where the Oestrogen levels are increasing (infact there are supposed to far too many female fish around and as a result some species of fish are disappearing). This is the great conspiracy of the femisnits to have a truly female world.

So forget the next generation...there will be just clones of the feminists.

Atif,

Uh...we picked about 30 years ago...which is why you and Urs are...single. :)

Urstruly # 17 - I hear you brother!

With women`s education level rising and men`s sperm count decreasing, God may once again have to intervene to keep the human race continuing. The last time He did that was when he fathered Jesus. And frankly, the last thing we need is a few million more ``God`s children`` roaming the world. Southern baptists already have their hands full deciphering the message of one such God`s child from 2005 years ago.

So women, there you have it: rising education levels or rising men. Take your pick. And frankly, with the level of stress running high amongst men, we may not get around to inventing artificial sperms for you to fulfill your genetic itch to get pregnant. So go back to barracks ...errr... houses. Take care of house affairs, chat with neigbours` wives etc. Let we men battle it out in the world.

You are warned.

atif2

yes I am worried about my dwindling sperm count as well; see, it is this kind of worries that have restricted me from achieving my Nobel.

Urstruly # 14 writes ``It saddens me to see the kind of world we will leave behind for our comming generations. Our infammy will go till eternity and our legacy will be our name ``the sissy generation`` ``

Dear Urstruly, for chrisssake, there will NOT be any coming generation if the rate of impotence amonts men (as a result of rising education level amongst women) continues unabated.

Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, ``It`s hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way.``

Well said.


``The rate of increase of cases of impotence amongst men has a direct correlation with the rise in education level of women. ``

``A man who is depressed, under stress, or worried about his ``performance`` during sex may not be able to have an erection. Qualified therapists or counselors who specialize in the treatment of sexual problems can often help diagnose and sort through these problems. Some impotence problems can be solved when a man understands the normal changes of aging and how to adapt to them. For example, as men get older they generally need more direct stimulation to achieve an erection. They may also have less firm erections, take longer to ejaculate and need more time between erections. ``

On the one hand you have equality of gender and on the hand you have men able to feel ``manly.`` There are many causes of impotence...you shouldn`t confuse the metrosexual cultural nowadays with impotence...the metrosexual culture is popular, impotence is not.

atif2

It saddens me to see the kind of world we will leave behind for our comming generations. Our infammy will go till eternity and our legacy will be our name ``the sissy generation``

more articles and studies related to Dr. Summer`s unfortunate comments and women in science can be found at:

http://www.anitaborg.org/pressroom/pressreleases_05/responsesall.htm

January 24, 2005
Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically
By NATALIE ANGIER
and KENNETH CHANG

Correction Appended

When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women`s lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point?

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?

Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain.

Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows.

``We can`t get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are,`` said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book ``Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.`` ``The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance.``

For example, neuroscientists have shown that women`s brains are about 10 percent smaller than men`s, on average, even after accounting for women`s comparatively smaller body size.

But throughout history, people have cited anatomical distinctions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time.

A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women - closer in size to gorillas`, he said - and said that explained the ``fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason`` in women.

Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain`s thinking - while men`s brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons.

To further complicate the portrait of cerebral diversity, new brain imaging studies from the University of California, Irvine, suggest that men and women with equal I.Q. scores use different proportions of their gray and white matter when solving problems like those on intelligence tests.

Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder.

What such discrepancies may or may not mean is anyone`s conjecture.

``It is cognition that counts, not the physical matter that does the cognition,`` argued Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When they do study sheer cognitive prowess, many researchers have been impressed with how similarly young boys and girls master new tasks.

``We adults may think very different things about boys and girls, and treat them accordingly, but when we measure their capacities, they`re remarkably alike,`` said Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues study basic spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities in children ranging from 5 months through 7 years.

``In that age span, you see a considerable number of the pieces of our mature capacities for spatial and numerical reasoning coming together,`` Dr. Spelke said. ``But while we always test for gender differences in our studies, we never find them.``

In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge, especially when it comes to performance on standardized tests like the SAT. While average verbal scores are very similar, boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so.

Nor is the masculine edge in math unique to the United States. In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences.

But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of ``uncertainty,`` which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States.

In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. ``We have no idea why this should be so,`` said Almar Midvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland.

Interestingly, in Iceland and everywhere else, girls participating in the survey expressed far more negative attitudes toward math.

The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.

Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.

Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT`s in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.

For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.

But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that men`s greater representation among the high-tail scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists.

For one thing, said Kimberlee A. Shauman, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, getting a high score on a math aptitude test turns out to be a poor predictor of who opts for a scientific career, but it is an especially poor gauge for girls. Catherine Weinberger, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that top-scoring girls are only about 60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering careers, for reasons that remain unclear.

Moreover, men seem perfectly capable of becoming scientists without a math board score of 790. Surveying a representative population of working scientists and engineers, Dr. Weinberger has discovered that the women were likelier than the men to have very high test scores. ``Women are more cautious about entering these professions unless they have very high scores to begin with,`` she said.

And this remains true even though a given score on standardized math tests is less significant for women than for men. Dr. Valian, of Hunter, observes that among women and men taking the same advanced math courses in college, women with somewhat lower SAT scores often do better than men with higher scores. ``The SAT`s turn out to underpredict female and overpredict male performance,`` she said. Again, the reasons remain mysterious.

Dr. Summers also proposed that perhaps women did not go into science because they found it too abstract and cold-blooded, offering as anecdotal evidence the fact that his young daughter, when given toy trucks, had treated them as dolls, naming them ``Daddy truck`` and ``baby truck.``

But critics dryly observed that men had a longstanding tradition of naming their vehicles, and babying them as though they were humans.

Yu Xie, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a co-author with Dr. Shauman of ``Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes`` (2003), said he wished there was less emphasis on biological explanations for success or failure, and more on effort and hard work.

Among Asians, he said, people rarely talk about having a gift or a knack or a gene for math or anything else. If a student comes home with a poor grade in math, he said, the parents push the child to work harder.

``There is good survey data showing that this disbelief in innate ability, and the conviction that math achievement can be improved through practice,`` Dr. Xie said, ``is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian society and among Asian-Americans.``

In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology.

Thus, many argue that it is unnecessary to invoke ``innate differences`` to explain the gap that persists in fields like physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry. Might scientists just be slower in letting go of baseless sexism?

C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale who led the American delegation to an international conference on women in physics in 2002, said there was clear evidence that societal and cultural factors still hindered women in science.

Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated mathematics papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was ``John T. McKay`` than when the author was ``Joan T. McKay.`` There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.

Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, ``It`s hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way.``

A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time.

The debate is sure to go on.

Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said biology might yet be found to play some role in women`s careers in the sciences.

``People have to have an open mind,`` Dr. Witelson said.


Correction: January 29, 2005, Saturday:

A front-page article on Monday about claims that brain differences between men and women may affect their success in math and science careers referred incorrectly to a 1983 study finding that when college students were shown identical academic papers, they tended give higher ratings to those they were told were by a man. The papers judged in the study were about politics, education and the psychology of women, not mathematics.



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At the onset, let me make a claim ala Larry Summers: The rate of increase of cases of impotence amongst men has a direct correlation with the rise in education level of women.

Now let me back up my claim.

As women made advances in education, they increasingly challenged the male psyche of machismo and started making demands. While for thousands of years, men roamed free in the jungles, deserts, plains, hunting animals, fighting other men (and capturing their women) and other testosterone boosting activities - today, sadly, they are confined to offices where they increasingly report to female managers.

As women became more assertive and demanding, men began to experience psychological traumas. As you very well know, 90% of the cases of impotence are caused by psychological issues. Whereas before, men grew up in a testosterone driven world, today they have to act soft, and caring, and ohhh soooo sweet. Whereas before, men copulated to have pleasure (and frankly to irk the relatives of captured women), today they have to worry about her ``needs`` too. All this, along with stress of running the world, and finding new sources of plunder (to provide comfort to the substandard female species) contributed to making men `softies` and lowering their sperm count in the process.

As I drive down Kennedy Ave today, I see hard men acting sissies, smelling flowers, making paintings, lining up at manicure shops and getting their eye brows nipped at barber shops. This is a sad demise of a hard-assed valiant specie which built dams, landed on moon, conquered the volcanos and seas and new territories (while capturing women), set up universities like Harvard (to which women would even do mud wrestling to get admission in).

Re: # 9

This post is reason enough for why the history of women should be included in a discussion of why it has taken women so long to enter the male dominated fields. BTW since then Summers has been trying to make up for his foolish mistake by apology after apology...here`s one of them:

Letter to the Faculty Regarding NBER Remarks
February 17, 2005

Dear Colleagues:

At the request of Professors Grosz, Hammonds, Skocpol, and others, I am making available a transcript of my remarks at the January 14 conference as well as the questions and answers that followed. Although I had intended them as informal and speculative, and was reluctant to reopen wounds, I want to be responsive to the concern expressed on Tuesday that our new task forces be in a position to move past the discussion of my remarks and move on with their important work. Links to the transcripts of my NBER remarks and my opening remarks at Tuesday`s Faculty meeting are attached at the bottom of this message.

As I said at our Tuesday meeting, if I could turn back the clock, I would have spoken differently on matters so complex. Though my NBER remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that ``I may be all wrong,`` I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields. I especially regret the backlash directed against individuals who have taken issue with aspects of what I said. In this University, people who disagree with me - or with anyone else - should and must feel free to say so. I know of no community as committed to free inquiry as this one, and no institution with a greater responsibility to uphold it.

As I now know better than I did a month ago, the matters I discussed at NBER are the subject of intense debate across a range of disciplines. Colleagues from these fields have taken time to educate me further. My January remarks substantially understated the impact of socialization and discrimination, including implicit attitudes - patterns of thought to which all of us are unconsciously subject. The issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes through in my comments, and my remarks about variability went beyond what the research has established. These are dynamic areas of inquiry, which will no doubt continue to engage scholars in the years ahead.

For now, if any good can come out of the recent controversy, I hope the intense attention on issues of gender can provide us with an opportunity to make concrete progress in the time ahead. It is vital that we aggressively implement policies that will encourage girls and women to pursue science at the highest levels, and that we welcome and support them in our faculty ranks.

Difficult as our most recent meeting was, I appreciate the honesty and recognize the intensity of the concerns expressed. This University faces a crucial set of opportunities and challenges, and I am committed to working together with this Faculty and the other Faculties to set and achieve common goals.

Sincerely,

Larry Summers