Women vs. Men In Science

Unfortunately, this was a disappointing read! Most of the women in science/engineering/technology would consider this article a challenge to their womanhood. It`s like questioning a woman if she is a woman. This is an annoying article for those who have never considered a man better than a woman in any regard. Well, they may have appreciated the underlying humor in ``The Diary of Adam - by Twain`` but that`s it. I do not know why we don`t look ahead and keep on going backwards to justify our existence.

Irfan,

Sorry. Bored already with the predictable direction of this exchange.

Re: # 38 (Amrita),

Trust me, I`d rather see two sets of sweaty women run around a field. I even applied as head coach of the Swedish Bikini Mud-Wrestling Team, but they didn`t accept me. And why didn`t anyone tell me clean socks were a prerequisite to success in the mating game?

Irfan.

Re: # 37
Right! Coz it`s sooo intelligent of you lot to regularly spend five days of your life watching two sets of sweaty men run around a field! And pay for it too! :)) The arguments are endless....

Dots and Irfan - you mean the grand theory of Bird mating isnt valid? Disillusionment stalks me everywhere.

Samina - I`ll take sissies any day - red hatted, black feathered, scrubbed behind the ears, clean socks and ferrari. :))

Women folk please don`t get offended but I can prove that men have superior rational capabilities than women. How?

---

because NOT many men like Star Plus dramas, the limit the stupidity will ever reach :)

35 - forget it mate. Is this theory writen up by a feminist scientist? If not then you have to wait till hell freezes over before it is accepted as being valid ;-) till then this is a male conspiracy ;-)

Saminasha,

Interesting that you should mention birds, since for a long time it was thought that birds, like humans, were `pair bonding` species (needless to say both those theories got booted out by the scientific community upon detailed study). Where do you think the word `cuckold` comes from? It comes from cuckoo, because that bird`s female has two tendencies; a) mating behind its partner`s back, and b) Laying its eggs in another`s nest for the target pair to raise.

Also, the red hat theory is just another facet of the big plume theory. Among plumed birds, females tend to choose the one with the largest and most colorful plume (maybe it is related to social rank, maybe not, I don`t really know).

As for the metrosexual argument, that WAS my point! Women of today value grooming and money over genetic health, whereas their subconscious tells them the opposite, so; haywired intuition :) Things should get really interesting in a million years or so when this choice mechanism descends to the level of instinct.

Irfan.

PS: These posts are just for fun, don`t take them too seriously. And yes, I know that there are millions of women out there for whom money is not an object, I know and respect more than a few of them.

Males recognise this...some women who are overly critical miss out on this fact - thats rules for alphaness have changed......

32 - Missy Sammy you seem to be forgetting one thing here.....the white bird with the red hat is the new Alpha male. The old alpha male can longer compete and is hence not the alpha male. Similarly for a particular class of women, metrosexuals are alpha males. The old ones are out.
The concept of the alpha male is precisely this. Rules change. Old alphas are put out to graze and new ones make hay while the sunshines.
You are making a fantastic assumption that the nature of alpha_male_dom is static when it is not.

Irfan, Amrita,

The theory of the Alpha Male is very nice and all, but lets be honest-as Natalie Angier pointed out in one her books on sex among the species, very specific bird life is more accurate. The study cited observed that if a white bird wore a red hat, the female bird chose him over his red hatless peers. Hence, the Alpha Male theory is being challenged by the Red Hatted White Male Bird Theory....another argument for metrosexuality (what Urs, atif, etc code as ``sissies``) or at least men who know how to dress themselves and clip their toenails.

Re: # 25 Hamidm -

Quality not quantity! It`s been pretty entertaining so far....

Irfan - I love that theory. The revenge of the geekoid forsooth! I bet a geek came up with that - he`d have to be if he was working for discovery. I`m all for modern girlie men turning traditional hardy men into gigolos - makes everyone happy. :)

............ i really shouldn`t say anything about women and science because i live rather precariously with three women ......... however, sometimes i do wonder why it is my job to change light bulbs, put gas in the cars, fix leaky faucets and operate complicated machinery like the can opener ...........

Re: # 24 (Amrita),

Spoiler: Wildly inflammatory and politically incorrect post.

The decline of the male breed can be attributed to the fact that millions of years of accumulated feminine wisdom on choosing a mate has been rendered rather useless in the past couple of hundred years or so. Allow me to explain; until very very recently (around 10,000 years ago) humanity was based on a rather simple hunter-gatherer society. He who hunted best was at the top of the social pecking order, thus, he had a high mate-value in the eyes of women, who saw him as having the best genes. Also, it was most probable that he would pass on these positive genetic traits to his offspring. All this calculation was done not conciously, but on a subliminal level, it was the `wisdom of the ages` passed on, there is a whole field called evolutionary psychology dedicated to this. Another way of stating this (much more scientifically) is that women who found the strong and rugged men attractive mated mostly with them, had children with them, who were protected and had a better chance of survival then the children of a weaker man and thus this preference was propagated generation to generation. What complicates matters here is that the percieved `alpha` male had a very undesirable trait, he was not amenable to attachment or to sticking around for the rearing of his young (he was the very first badboy). There are many many details I am skimming over, including the fact that women have an innate tendency to attach themselves to a man who is the `just right` mixture of dependable/nice guy (enter the sweet, sensitive guy who manages to finish last, and you`ll find out why soon enough) and then go behind his back and mate with a male of higher social standing while letting their partner believe all the while that it is his child that they are rearing. This way women ensured a moderate amount of support during the rather long rearing period of their young (12-15 years, longest among animals) while also making sure that their offspring had the best possible genes.

Here are some interesting facts:
- 66% of all married women who are unfaithful commit adultery while they are ovulating
- When presented with a collection of photographs of males with varying levels of testosterone content in their blood (more testosterone -> more `masculine`) women invariably chose males with testosterone levels in the range of slightly above average (the sensitive/nice guy)
- 3 men with different testosterone levels were each given a t-shirt and told to wear it continuously for 3 days. These 3 t-shirts were then given to 3 women who were ovulating, and they were asked to decide on the basis of smell alone which of the three men they would prefer to mate with. All 3 opted for the man with the highest testosterone count

Unfortunately, during the past few centuries, social dominance is decided more by material wealth and intelligence than by brawn. Today`s women value a Ferrari much more than the ability to run down a wild animal and kill it, similarly, most women would rather be seen with a fat guy in an Armani suit then with a sinewy Masai tribesman wearing an original bearskin loincloth (unless the loincloth comes from a designer outlet). So women`s legendary intuition is going haywire. To quote atif2`s post, the `hard men` are now no longer seen as having a high mate value. Thus, the sissies are reproducing like bunnies and diluting the gene pool, whereas the `real men` are either sitting idle or playing the left-handed tango with their schlongs. A sad state of affairs if there ever was one.

Irfan.

PS: This titillitating little tale of tantalizing transgressions is of makings not my own. I learned about this from a program on the Discovery Channel called The Science of Beauty, and then did some googling. By the way, compared to what men are historically capable of doing, this account reads like Mother Teresa`s biography.

Here`s what I think:

Pakistanis are incapable of understanding democracy. Ergo, there will and should never be a Pakistani American President of the United States of America, Inshallah.

Now, lets put billions and billions of dollars behind this so that we can actually ``prove`` this within the scientific community. We may begin with measure the head and brain sizes of all Pakistani-Americans, their capacity for making peace with India and Kashmir and their willingness to accept ``minority`` communities within Pakistan.

Hamid, here is your cue to begin a spiel about the donkey descending from the sky, the goat who ate our religious homework, why it is important to support Darwinism, etc, etc. etc. We in turn will lap your posts up like the Pavlovian dogs that we are, and you will once again be championed as the heir apparent ot Carlindom.

Next!

Some more facts:

1. ``Fields Medal`` is considered as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. There are no women recipients
2. ``Turing Award`` is considered the Nobel Prize`` in Computer Science. There are no women recipients.
3. Another example is that of ``Shannon Award`` by IEEE. Again there are no women recipients.

[Note: Both Turing and Shannon were epoch-making (male) mathematicians]

I personally think that in the days to come there will be more and more women in medicine, biology, chemistry, engineering, IT, business, law etc but there will be always acute shortage of women in the rarefied fields of hardcore mathematics. Excellence in abstract mathematics has little to do with the amount of time you devote. You either get it or you don`t. Newton invented the field of ``Variational Calculus`` in one evening. Einstein did a lot of his outstanding work when he was a glorified clerk at a patent department.
My point is that theoretical work can be done in minimal amount of time with minimal assistance and institutional set-up. There is only one catch: you have to have it in you. Few men have it and I guess even fewer women have it. I will be happy to be proven wrong but I strongly suspect that I am right.

Speaking of controversial remarks on college campuses, here is one that is interesting:

``Bill O`Reilly on Fox News has stated his argument that Ward Churchill should be tried for treason or sedition. He states Churchill wants the government to be overthrown and is helping with his hate speech.``

Here is what a Univ. of Colorado professor, said in a article. I wonder what is going to happen to him.....

``In the quote below, Churchill asserts that some of the victims of the attack were not innocent:

As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let`s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America`s global financial empire – the ``mighty engine of profit`` to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly.[15] (http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html)

Perhaps the most controversial passage of all was the following, in which he is accused of justifying the attacks as an appropriate ``penalty``:

If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I`d really be interested in hearing about it.

In January 2005, attention was drawn to the essay after he was invited to speak at Hamilton College as a member of a panel titled ``Limits of Dissent``. In response to what he calls ``grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning [his] analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks``, Churchill clarified his views:

I am not a ``defender`` of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people ``should`` engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, ``Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.`` http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

Apparently, Churchill has resigned (or been forced to resign) his position as chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department. He continues to hold a position as professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado.

Bill Moyer lost his popular show, ``Politically Incorrect,`` after saying that it took a lot of courage for the hijackers to hit the WTC (or something similar). No company was willing to put their ads on his show.............

Wonder what will happen to Summers....................Freedom of speech is allowed legally, but does have boundaries when it starts affecting finances of a school, TV show, etc........

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

As a matter of fact I agree with Dr. Sommers; women should be ashamed of themselves; half of the world population and all they have to show is 34 noble prizes. Compare it jews, a tiny group of people and they have 3000 Nobel prizes. there must be something wrong with women (1/2 of world pop), blacks (1/6th of world pop), chinese (1/6th), hindus (1/6th), Muslims (1/6th), South Amricans (1/6th)......where is hamidm

..... but please don`t kill the horses ........

............. in 1988 cbs fired jimmy the greek for saying that blacks are better at sports because of slave plantation breeding techniques........... ``during the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid–that`s where it all started``

......... in 1989 they killed secretariat for making as much as a million in sud fees - sometimes political correctness can go too far ..............

...... now it is poor larry summers ..........

Hi all,

AmericanFOB
Thanks for the advice. I think, you are absolutely right about the need for a bit more detail on the different roles of women in the society. I originally wrote this article for a magazine and there were obvious constraints on the size. :) But I do appreciate your recommendation.
Saminasha,
Thanks for liking the piece. It is my first attempt on this website. I think there is a huge south asian community living in north america and this article could not be more relevant to anybody else.
Warpster,
I really appreciate your account on the science behind the issue.
Sheelajaywant and HP,
I did not mean to spark a debate, neither do i think it`s suitable for anybody else to do so. All we need is mere acceptance of the history and positive and constructive efforts towards what can be done moving forward.
ZahraJ, I just read the article. I wrote this piece about a month ago. :-)

peace,
azra

``There is no question that there are huge biological differences between males and females in any species, including our own, at the genetic, hormonal, physiological, and psychological levels.``

Any basic genetics student knows that the phenotype is the sum of the environment and genotype. This seems to becoming increasingly part of mainstream thought, despite people like Larry Summers. Studies show that the number of women in many different fields once dominated by males are increasing. There`s still a long way to go. However, society is getting there. The reason why women are infiltrated male dominated fields is because their upbringing isn`t as gender restricted as it used to be. This is really a recent phenomenah in terms of the histroy of women.

I also think there were many women probably cheated out of scientific/mathematical careers. Rosalind Franklin is a great example. She did some excellent X-Ray diffraction work was but never properly recognized for it, while her colleage Wilkins and Watson and Crick were given nobel prizes. The reason today why they still don`t award her is because she`s dead.

In order to understand why women lag behind to the extent that they do today in male dominated fields one has to study the history of women. Genetics don`t account for deprivation of a proper education and motivation to chose a field of ones liking.


``The present outlook of the society, the one with male dominance, is not likely to reverse in the blink of an eye. ``

Overall, this was a great article, but I think you should have elaborated a little more on the roles of women in society for the past centuries, and why that`s an hibitor to the success of women in the male dominated feilds of today.

Azra,

Welcome and thank you for this well written piece!

Over the last decade especially there is strong evidence that Men and Women differ substantially in their neural organization. How this translates into proficiency in X, Y, or Z is a different matter. I think it is pretty much a given that most scientists in highly mathematical fields are men.. But such folks are 5 or more standard deviations away from the mean, heights that most mortals cannot hope to reach. But that still leaves lots of areas of science where one can excel without superlative proficiency in math. One very interesting puzzle is the greater variability of men on almost any trait that one cares to measure. There are many more idiots and many more genuises among men than women, no matter how you define aptitude.

Larry Summers was pointing out that in such fields (i.e. a subset of science) relative absence of women need not be a result of discrimination. He began his remarks by acknowledging that he was going to be provocative (i.e. as a scholar and not as a president).

I give some excerpts that point out the very politically inconvenient facts that are emerging from current research. The Stress response also varies quite substantially across gender.

---

Sex differences in the brain begin in the womb. About midway through pregnancy, the testicles of a developing baby boy start churning out testosterone in substantial quantities, achieving serum testosterone concentrations comparable to those seen in young adult men. These sex hormones, transformed by aromatase enzymes within the brain, bind to brain tissue and begin to transform it. Between 18 and 26 weeks gestation, the developing brain is permanently and irreversibly transformed. Israeli scientists Reuwen and Anat Achiron have found that if you do a regular ultrasound examination when a woman is 26 weeks pregnant, you can distinguish a female brain from a male brain.

Once those changes have occurred, they are permanent. Research with both humans and with laboratory animals shows that you are born with a male brain or a female brain; postnatal experiences, even experiences as extreme as castration, will not change your brain from male to female, or vice versa.

Consider also the series of papers published over the last seven years by Tracey Shors and her colleagues at Rutgers, Princeton, and the Rockefeller University. Professor Shors has demonstrated that violent stress -- such as delivering electrical shocks to an animal -- improves the learning curve of a male animal, while it impairs the learning of a female animal. ``Exposure to the stressor had diametrically opposed effects`` on learning, she reports in her 1998 paper (Wood & Shors, 1998, p. 4067). In her more recent work, Shors has conclusively demonstrated that the beneficial effect of stress on learning in males depends on masculinization of the male brain which occurs before birth. Professor Shors demonstrated this fact by injecting the pregnant mother with an anti-testosterone drug (cyproterone acetate) which crosses the placenta. Male babies born to mothers injected with the anti-testosterone drug showed no improvement, as adults, in their learning in response to stress. They had lost that male-typical characteristic as a result of their mothers` being injected with the anti-testosterone drug while they were in utero. Male babies castrated at birth (but whose mothers did not receive any injections) DID show the male-typical beneficial effect of stress on learning. Those babies retained that male-typical characteristic, despite the fact that they couldn`t make testosterone after birth.

A recent report from London, England documents consistent sex differences in brain anatomy which are visible to the naked eye (with the help of an MRI scanner). Male brains consistently show more hemispheric asymmetry: the left hemisphere looks different from the right hemisphere. In women, the two hemispheres are much more alike. In women, there is proportionately more grey matter, and less white matter; vice versa for men. Women have a higher concentration of grey matter in the neocortex (the phylogenetically `newer` part of the cerebral cortex), whereas men had proportionately more grey matter in the entorhinal cortex, one of the `older` areas of the brain.

Some brain structures that are prominent in females, such as the massa intermedia of the thalamus, are smaller or even entirely absent in males. In one study comparing the massa intermedia in women and men -- including only those men who had a massa intermedia -- the massa intermedia was, on average, 53% larger in the females, despite the fact that the male brains were on average 8% larger than the female brains.

---

For the complete text http://www.singlesexschools.org/research-brain.htm

am sure this article is going to evoke several points for and against women (not) being good/bad at science. As one who studied science long years ago in college, I did wonder how the guys seemed to get the physics/maths problems much faster/easier than we girls. Perhaps there is a difference, we`re better at biology and languages maybe. Vive la difference.

Larry summers said he wanted to initiate a debate and he did but his choice of forum also raised some ethical issues. Was it appropriate for a person of Larry summers position to bring up this issue in a forum where he was speaking as the President of Harvard? People are entitled to their idiosyncrasies but such candid observations from the President of Harvard are bound to raise some eyebrows. I agree to the point raised by several that science would not go anywhere if scientists stop investigating seemingly weird thoughts. And that’s true for any discipline. Asking questions and developing theories no matter how weird they appear is the pre-requisite for reaching some good conclusions.
Research scientists do place their bets on controversial hypotheses that would require un-relented intellectual pursuit to prove or disprove their hypotheses. However, Larry Summers was not speaking as a research scientist there. Therefore, he may have actually put his foot in his mouth and I believe it was not the first time. Was he really out of line? The issue would have required the same scrutiny no matter where he raised it. He is after all not a research scientist and his opinion would always be judged by the position he currently holds. In other words, his personal opinions are subservient to his official position.
Coming back to his point that, “innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers.” appears to have some merit! Before somebody jumps on me, I should qualify my statement with a caveat that genetic hardwired differences do exist and gender has no bearing on it. Some men can be better at math and others can be better at social sciences. So there are innate differences and in my opinion, those differences are not gender specific. With this context in mind, I think Mr. Summers just wanted to create a controversy and he was genuinely looking for some debate by equating innate differences with gender. Putting gender in the innate differences certainly has made people to discuss this issue and may be in future some right ideas may emerge that would shed some light on historical deficiencies in different races, genders, and social groups.

Azra.

Very interesting. I was just reading the latest Time Issue with a cover story ``Who says a woman can`t be Einstein?``

I have not read your article yet, but I would like to post the excerpt from my reading for further thought ...

[Who Says A Woman Can`t Be Einstein?
Yes, men`s and women`s brains are different. But new research upends the old myths about who`s good at what. A tour of the ever changing brain

by AMANDA RIPLEY
Posted Sunday, February 27, 2005

There was something self-destructive about Harvard University President Larry Summers` speech on gender disparities in January. In his first sentence, he said his goal was ``provocation`` (rarely a wise strategy at a diversity conference). He called for ``rigorous and careful`` thinking to explain the gender gap among top-tier tenured science professors. But he described his pet theory with something less than prudence. The most likely explanations, he said, are that 1) women are just not so interested as men in making the sacrifices required by high-powered jobs, 2) men may have more ``intrinsic aptitude`` for high-level science and 3) women may be victims of old-fashioned discrimination. ``In my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described,`` he announced.

Cue the hysteria. The comments about aptitude in particular lingered, like food poisoning, long after the conference ended. For weeks, pundits and professors spouted outrage and praise, all of which added up to very little. Then came the tedious analysis of faculty-lounge politics at Harvard, as if anyone outside Cambridge really cared.

The rest of us were left with a nagging question: What is the latest science on the differences between men`s and women`s aptitudes, anyway? Is it true, even a little bit, that men are better equipped for scientific genius? Or is it ridiculous—even pernicious—to ask such a question in the year 2005?

It`s always perilous to use science to resolve festering public debates. Everyone sees something different—like 100 people finding shapes in clouds. By the time they make up their minds, the clouds have drifted beyond the horizon. But scientists who have spent their lives studying sex differences in the brain (some of whom defend Summers and some of whom dismiss him as an ignoramus) generally concede that he was not entirely wrong. Thanks to new brain-imaging technology, we know there are indeed real differences between the male and the female brain, more differences than we would have imagined a decade ago. ``The brain is a sex organ,`` says Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist who became famous in the 1990s for her study of Albert Einstein`s brain. ``In the last dozen years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of studies that have found differences in the brain. It`s very exciting.``

But that`s just the beginning of the conversation. It turns out that many of those differences don`t seem to change our behavior. Others do—in ways we might not expect. Some of the most dramatic differences are not just in our brains but also in our eyes, noses and ears—which feed information to our brains. Still, almost none of those differences are static. The brain is constantly changing in response to hormones, encouragement, practice, diet and drugs. Brain patterns fluctuate within the same person, in fact, depending on age and time of day. So while Summers was also right that more men than women make up the extreme high—and low—scorers in science and math tests, it`s absurd to conclude that the difference is primarily because of biology—or environment. The two interact from the time of conception, which only makes life more interesting.

Any simplistic theory. . .]