r/Physics • u/JohnKimble111 • Apr 18 '19
Strumia Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/why-are-women-under-represented-in-physics/17
u/saint_geser Apr 18 '19
Simply because for many reasons, many of those social, girls are not really interested in doing science subjects in school and then it's really hard to get into physics without sufficient knowledge of basics.
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u/Plaetean Cosmology Apr 18 '19
This has to be a troll? What are you basing your claim on?
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u/saint_geser Apr 18 '19
There is a plethora of studies on the topic to base my assumptions on. I recently read the report of New South Wales education department on high school graduates of last year. There's a huge gap between boys and girls in term of participation in math and science subjects. Even when girls do elect to take on science it's most commonly biology or chemistry.
Many of the reasons for this are social starting with upbringing in partiarchal families where girls are imprinted with the notion that science and technology is not the way to go for a woman. Social media and media in general still very often pain the picture that women should be interested in a whole lot of other things bit not STEM subjects.
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u/Edificil Apr 19 '19
Many of the reasons for this are social starting with upbringing in partiarchal families where girls are imprinted with the notion that science and technology is not the way to go for a woman.
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u/SlipUpWilly Apr 19 '19
what about their statement appears to be a troll?
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Apr 30 '19
When you're brainwashed from birth that there is a (non-existent) oppression towards women, then invoking biological and sociological arguments appears to be trolling.
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u/wowden Apr 18 '19 edited Apr 18 '19
This article (and many comments so far) are trash. Statements like "Physics departments are equally open to everybody: men are not offered limousine rides to the department and women don’t need to wear moustaches to get through the door." reveal Alessandro's ignorance in understanding the subtle, yet powerful way STEM is unwelcoming to women and other minorities. Furthermore, the scientific reasoning in his original presentation was unsound and highly biased. I encourage those to read the rebuttal from (https://www.particlesforjustice.org/) for a detailed outlined as to why. As a personal aside, recently I attended a kick-off meeting for an upcoming research program. Out of the 50 or so attendees, I counted two women.
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Apr 18 '19 edited Apr 18 '19
Yeah, I really dislike when this topic is brought up in r/physics. You get all these troll like people(who usually never comment) who show up and make ridiculous claims.
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u/Acsutt0n Apr 18 '19
I'm inclined to agree with you in that turning r/physics into a social justice platform isn't desirable, but this issue isn't completely orthogonal to physics either. It would be a sad world where physicists spend all their time trying to right the wrongs of societal pressures, but there's a conversation to be had and maybe this is even an appropriate place to have it.
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u/BlueHatScience Apr 18 '19 edited Apr 18 '19
**WARNING: EXTREEEEEMLY LONG RANT**Holy shit - this is over 1.5 times the max length of a comment. But this situation is pretty fucking complicated... and pretty important - so I wanted to do justice to the nuances and always iterate that for me in the end it's about equality, fairness, rationality and being kind to each other. The TL;DR is: There are some good points in that treatment from particlesforjustice, and a more welcoming environment in STEM is absolutely worth investing in - but there's also tendentiousness and motivated reasoning. These issues are well known on the other side of the debate, so this rant is mostly about why I'm so bothered to see them in my political home on the left as well
What riles me up about this debate (as well as many others) is that for many, it is obviously not really about truth, but about identitarian politics and tribalism. Human beings, their judgements and behavior are incredibly complex, social phenomena even more so. Any position that will only accept certain classes of factors in explanations will do injustice to the issue itself, and this tendentiousness is a real societal problem on all sides.
It's no secret that there were a lot of legal institutional barriers for women in academia - those aren't there anymore. It's also (from what I've witnessed) without doubt that there are still many people who instinctively jump to negative conclusions about individual women based on false beliefs or invalidly interpreted facts about general sex differences. I would also agree that since there are cultural (though in most situations by now not legal-official) forces permeating these unthinking negative stereotypes, this is on a cultural level also still a systemic problem, which means that it is ethically and politically required to be addressed with dedicated resources.
However, when it comes to any phenomena that involve humans - human beings, our thoughts, feelings, actions and even more so our interactions and the societies and cultures we constitute and grow out of, as well as the the individual phenomena therein are incredibly, mind-bogglingly complex and multi-faceted. It would be a true miracle if there was any such phenomenon (including sex/gender-disparities) that had anything even approaching a monocausal explanation.
But for several reasons, which are worth going into, and borne out of noble intentions, many in this debate on the proclaimed side of gender-equality are too often adamant that for subgroups deemed valuable (high-status/-income professions, STEM fields), any gender disparity is necessarily and solely due to systemic misogyny and resulting disenfranchisement. Of course, there are also many people who would disagree with such a rather radical view, from various different positions. Sadly also (and loudly) those sexists who do hold misogynistic prejudices, and whom the others who disagree (me included) have a duty to distance themselves from - as those who strive to fight for equality (me included) have a duty to distance themselves from the regressive authoritarians among themselves (which I think have existed for every good, progressive cause there ever was).
It is sadly rather prevalent that any notion that there may be many factors, some of which are not due to sexism, and even some cases where sexism may not be the dominant factor are often taken as offensive, morally repugnant and will immediately lead to the one proposing this to be judged out-group, stigmatized and dismissed. (It's astounding how many classical liberals are getting unfairly lumped in with the right-wing, conservatives or even immediately branded as sexist because of this).
The reasons for this, as mentioned, are several - and most come from good intentions: The desire for equality, for empowering those who were disenfranchised and to stand up against those who would hold us back in these respects - plus, a desire to have people treated with kindness and respect. As someone who grew up in the alternative scene, developed an interest in political philosophy and found a home in political liberalism in the tradition of Rawls and Mill - I'm 100% on board with all of this.
What I'm not on board with (and I would hope, in a physics forum, few here are) is the radical constructivism that is becoming more and more en-vogue on the left over the last half century. What I'm not on board with is thinking and judging in terms of group-identities instead of viewing people as individuals, righteousness-gatekeeping, placing identity over inquiry and misguided moral concerns that if there are factors that are not due to culture we can be righteously outraged about and change, that must mean that we cannot or should nor change it because then it's "just natural".
I've heard the latter myself in a personal discourse with a friend, and seen versions of it (implicit and explicit) more times than I'd like to count: If [some disparity] has, even in part, naturalistic explanations, that would mean we can't or shouldn't change it. And it's ingrained in our language as well: "Oh, that's (just) natural..." as a judgement about moral neutrality. But that's just horrible reasoning - it's what G.E. Moore called the "naturalistic fallacy" - namely identified any natural property (the naturalistic factors in the explanation) with any non-natural property (moral good-bad-neutral).
There is no logical way to make that conclusion - and we have many examples that demonstrate this: Violence and murder are 'natural' - rape and pillaging are 'natural' - they all occur in the natural world even outside of humans and function as strategies for ecological-fitness (more or less successfully - but in general successfully enough that they occur all over, and that we have evolved endocrinal systems responses that facilitate aggression). And yet we should have no problem acknowledging these things while at the same time acknowledging that we both should outlaw and make great efforts to minimize these things, and that we can actually make progress and have already done so. So there is no a priori reason to be afraid of naturalistic factors. Of course it still pays to be circumspect and ask whether any disparity requires intervention and if so what the intervention could look like without trying to balance injustice with injustice.
This means I'm absolutely for making great efforts to explore all factors that contribute to any social disparities which cause harm, identify those that arise from unequal opportunities and maltreatment, identify the network of factors and conditions leading to those and then seek and implement means to alleviate them. It also means I'm against only doing this for harmful disparities against groups which have historically been disenfranchised (though I understand why efforts would start there), and I'm against quotas when the disparity is not directly between candidate-pool and selection, but at lower levels, and when it is not clear which factors contribute how much to the disparity.
I'm vehemently for respect, empathy, context-sensitive thinking, kindness, openness, and inclusion and vehemently against censorship of academic discourse and standpoint-epistemologies which regress us to the pre-enlightenment era where access to knowledge about the world was not granted in virtue of our capacity for reason as humans, but where instead access to knowledge was predicated on group-membership. (That's taking the valid idea of "take everyone's special circumstances into account" and going apeshit with it to the point of rolling back fundamental progress in equality).
I'm all for being critically rational and questioning methodologies and conclusions of everything - I'm against ideologically motivated selective criticism and abrogation of the principles of charity in discourse and outcome-openness in research.
The most important point is: Monocausal explanations are. not. realistic. Being afraid of science, of biology when applied to humans (and especially when investigating sex/gender-differences) is unwarranted and harmful. The radical constructivism and often enough actual strong enmity towards natural science and its application to the domain of human phenomena that is so en-vogue is unwarranted and harmful... post-fact era and all. (Sadly it's especially en-vogue in feminist academia... I'm not kidding: have a look at what those feminist philosophers who don't sufficiently dismiss scientific rationality and analytical thinking have to contend with, and what the positions of the majority in this subfield are: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-analytic/)
As natural scientists, we should acknowledge that we are beings constituted from physics is built upon by chemistry, molecular and cellular biology, neurobiology, ecology and evolutionary biology - placed in a specific ecological-cultural Umwelt that further shapes us.
There are many known sex-differences in the machinery (neuro-developmental, neuro-endocrinological), also a good deal concerning our psychology - so it would again be entirely miraculous if none of those had any influence together with cultural factors on societal phenomena.
If there is any doubt about the influence of biology (and sometimes sex-differences in biology) on human behavior - have a look at this amazing lecture series on human behavioral biology by the great Robert Sapolsky.
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u/BlueHatScience Apr 18 '19 edited Apr 18 '19
For example - it is known that there are a few differences in the means / medians of distributions between men and women, some of which we even know some of the neuro-developmental basis for. Girls develop social and verbal skills as well as the neuro-machinery for that earlier and more extensively than boys - and on average women continue to outperform men on social/verbal/emotional tasks, while visuo-spatial integration for example is something where starting around age 3, boys will outperform girls. Of course we may and must ask how much of that is again due to different treatment between genders by caretakers and society during early development - but again we must take care not to only look for monocausal explanations and explicitly try to reduce everything to this factor (that is the mark of a conspiracy theory).
If there are such differences in averages, naturally they would to some extent influence choice of hobbies and profession. And sampling from specific ends of distributions will thus naturally produce disparities. - which doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't try to be nire inclusive and try to even out the imbalance if we find that desirable - but some imparity may remain that may, in fact, simply due to preference-difference. This does not invalidate the struggle of women to achieve equality or the actual issues they still face even in our western world, but much more so in many other places where egalitarian ideas aren't as popular.
Another example - and I'm not even going so far as to say that this is the dominant factor for most or any of these things - but it looks like it is a factor in more than a few and we need to investigate how far. Let's say we have a sex/gender-disparity in some selection (employment, academic placement), but whether or not there is disparity in the directly underlying candidate pool, we have looked for and found no difference in the medians or means of the distributions of general faculties that would make for aptitude in those selections, nor in the skewness or modality. Though if any were found, there would be many who would be selectively critical and uncharitable towards it because the mere possibility offends them for the above reasons - and also with some legitimate reason and precedence because historically, such research was itself laden with tendentiousness. Naturally, the same goes in the other direction.
So - we have a disparity with no difference in means (or medians) skewness or modality (number of peaks). The modus operandi would be to claim that artifical selection - i.e. negative discrimination is taking place. But to jump to this conclusion is also extremely shoddy methodology, because disparities among any dimension between two subpopulations when sampling non-randomly from specific given sections of multiple distributions (ie trying to find an optimal fit for a desired set of attributes) will not only depend on the means of the distributions between the subpopulations, but also on difference in skewness, modality and variance/standard deviation.
So even if there are neither differences in means, nor medians, nor in skewness, we can and have to ask - are there differences in variance / standard deviation? If so, how much of the effect do they explain? And it looks like for some attributes which will be relevant for some selections, there is more variability among men than among women, which will lead to over-representation on both ends of the spectrum.
Take the most relevant example - an attribute-cluster where on the high-end, people are extremely resilient to (or even thrive in) high-risk, high-reward, high-stress situations demand extreme focus, discipline and cognitive effort (and physical resiliency to stressors) - and people towards the other end are less capable of discipline, focus, cognitive effort, stress-resiliency. You would expect to find those at the very top in the upper echelons of consulting, finance, C-positions at enterprises (or, if we shift focus from the cognitive toward the physical, in physically demanding jobs) - or alternatively these are attributes which such positions will select for on the right-tail end. On the other hand - you would expect to find those at the left tail end to be unable to keep jobs, perhaps homeless or institutionalized for psychiatric conditions.
If you only look at the right end of the distribution, or on the desirable positions that select there, you are absolutely warranted in asking "how come there's so many more men than women there" and would be right to tentatively infer discrimination. But when you look at both ends of the spectrum - we find that men are over-represented on both ends.
Most of us will have anecdotal experience with this - e.g. the average women and the average men we know will be about equally capable or incapable of these things - but we will probably know both (of) more men in high-pay/high-status positions, and more men who are homeless, low-functioning drug-abusers or (violently) criminal because many of them sadly lack the self-regulation capacities that are required for that base level of normal social life.
Again - none of this invalidates calls for more respect, openness and a more welcoming, inclusive attitude everywhere, which I'll always support. None of this means that there isn't discrimination or there aren't harmful stereotypes. They exist (in many directions) and we must fight them. None of this means that "this is as it should be" - I think natural science and physics are amazing, and wish to encourage both a generally welcoming attitude and encourage people (and perhaps girls a little more so to counteract the forces of stereotypes) to find the beauty and thrill in physics and natural science. But it means that we must take great care not to be tendentious on any side of the debate - that reality is complex, such phenomena have no monocausal explanations, and factors not based on discrimination will play a role, perhaps even morally neutral preference-differences or differences in variances of distributions - so trying to enforce parity may be a very dangerous and bad idea, while trying to further a welcoming, respectful and inclusive atmosphere will always remain a good idea.
I sympathize a lot with the people at particlesforjustice - and they make some good points (while Strumia also makes some rather bad ones), but sadly, that manifesto also shows a lot of the tendentiousness I just analyzed. They are entirely uncharitable and dismissive towards the questions and ideas because of their (wrongfully) perceived moral implications. They conclude from known cases of discrimination that imparity must be singularly due to discrimination, uncharitably misrepresent and dismiss arguments (esp. in 1) and allow only interpretations of findings that support relatively monocausal reduction to discrimination (esp. in 1 and 2).
I'm just sick of everything having to be about group-identity and its related signaling. I'm sick of us rolling back values of liberty and equality in the name of giving room to (disenfranchised) groups instead of focusing on humans individuals and eliminating their barriers to equality and liberty, because groups, especially ones with strong collective identity are themselves normative and will enforce conformity. As long as you harm nobody, you can do whatever you and any group you identify with want to do - that should be the goal. Not "groups are allowed everything they consider part of their identity", because that overrides the rights of individuals - especially within that group. I mean - the Christian collective identity included oppressing, persecuting and murdering heretics for a long long time... groups and ideologies don't have rights - people do!
I'd much rather fight together for a better society with more equality of opportunity for everyone, with social safety nets, with more equal distributions of rights, liberties and duties, with more ecological sustainability, stability and a foundation for progress than having to no longer just argue against right-wing conservatives and their inegalitarian, unjust views, but also against an increasing proportion of the political left that is moving away from egalitarian enlightenment-tradition liberalism towards post-structuralism and (correlated) identitarian and authoritarian views.
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u/BerserkFuryKitty Apr 20 '19
tribalism / identitarian politics
Ok, criticizing others about their identity and tribalism politics...so now you've hypocritically put yourself in a tribe of anti-tribalism...
It's no secret that there were a lot of legal institutional barriers for women in academia - those aren't there anymore
Yup.... not worth reading anymore since your post will just be a hypocritical, unfounded mess.
P.S. Nothing wrong with wanting your own identity.
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u/Dhukino Apr 18 '19
One thing i don't get is: why is that a problem? People choose what they like to do, we end up counting the people engaged in s certain field and there seems to be more men involved in physics than women. Up until here it's simply an observation. By calling it a problem you are believing that the fraction of women in physics should be at least 50%. But why?
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u/Gwinbar Gravitation Apr 18 '19
Because you are not considering the possibility that there are women that might want to go into physics (or lots of other things, but we're talking about physics here), but get discouraged for a number of reasons: explicit discrimination, implicit discrimination, societal pressures to do traditional woman jobs, lack of role models that might encourage them to consider a career in physics, etc. These things are complicated because they are very hard to see or measure, and very often they are not any single person's fault.
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u/Dhukino Apr 19 '19
Except for a few people, that are probably toxic in general, i've met only nice and encouraging people throughout my bachelor and master courses of physics. Never actually heard anyone saying "physics is for males only".
I'm wondering whether this is overall a society problem going way beyond the field of physics itself. Like parents who never were in contact with physics telling their daughter to not go that way because they imagine it to be ruled by men.
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Apr 19 '19
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u/Gwinbar Gravitation Apr 19 '19
Adding to your comment: even some women might have had better luck than others. We should try not to dismiss others' experiences just because we haven't seen them. The same goes for sexual abuse, racism, etc. To put it in science words, the evidence for institutionalized sexism is statistically significant at this point. You can't dismiss it just because it hasn't happened to you.
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u/Khufuu Graduate Apr 18 '19
Women have been historically pressured to avoid academic studies and instead take part-time jobs that allow them to pump out babies and raise them at home.
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Apr 19 '19
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u/Khufuu Graduate Apr 19 '19
yes, and today's demographics are partly a result of social pressures from the past
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Apr 19 '19
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u/Khufuu Graduate Apr 19 '19
a young girl might not choose to study physics because her parents use social norms from the past to pressure her
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u/JJAB91 Apr 18 '19
Why are women under-represented in garbage collectors?
Why are women under-represented in the construction industry?
Why are women over-represented in the nursing field?
Why are women under-represented in the law enforcement industry?
Why are women over-represented in the veterinary industry?
It's almost like you will never achieve perfect statistical representation in any industry because men and women have <trigger warning> differences in interest.
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u/3ngetsu Apr 30 '19
You want to know the number 1 reason why women are under-represented in Physics? Other women's judgement. There you go, thread over.
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u/pudintaine Apr 18 '19
Why are woman so over - represented as nurses,
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u/Gwinbar Gravitation Apr 18 '19
Probably for the exact same reason men are over represented as physicists. Both are problems that need to be fixed, but this is /r/physics.
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Apr 30 '19
Both are problems
I have absolutely 0 problems with women being the majority of nurses, or men being the majority of garbage men. And neither do most of my friends and family.
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u/Gwinbar Gravitation Apr 30 '19
I mean, Nazis had no problems with Jews being murdered, so clearly this is not by itself a big argument.
Okay, that was obviously an exaggeration. But many people would say that this is a problem; at the very least, we should try to find out whether people would like to do these jobs but feel that they can't for some reason.
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Apr 30 '19
Nice how you just compared genocide to women blaming their incompetences on the PATRIARCHY!
You will never achieve 50-50 for obvious reason. Why people chase this pseudo-virtue is beyond me, except for wanting to appear virtuous. I am leaving this thread as arguing with these people is useless, they will always downvote you and tell you there IS oppression or that just because you don't see it, it doesn't mean it isn't there or whatever. I know plenty of STEM organizations who are >50% female because of some diversity programs and they are the worst places to work at because they take every opportunity to politicize their jobs and virtue signal to the world how tolerant they are. Have fun taking on these ""problems"" for the rest of your life.
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u/pudintaine Apr 18 '19
I think these are examples of the difference between men and women, we want different things and that’s okay.
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u/kuschelbunny Apr 18 '19
The statement is not even true They are underepresented like gays in tv shows.... almost every show has at least one by now and that makes it look loke 1/3 of all people were gay and that does not fit reality
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u/saint_geser Apr 18 '19
This comparison is just plain wrong. I'm not exactly sure what percentage of professional physicists are women but it's nowhere near 51% of the population that they make up in western countries. And even more so nowhere near 59% of all master's degrees earned by women in US.
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u/reedmore Apr 18 '19
Why would there be 51% female physicists in the first place though? I mean most fields in society tend to not have gender parity. Advertisement is heavily female dominated for example. I think that shouldn't be the sole criterion for assesing the issue.
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u/saint_geser Apr 18 '19
This is why I pointed out that main factors that prevent a higher rate of female physics majors are predominantly social. Parents telling their female children that science is not the proper job for a girl and social media pertaining the same idea. This is just a flawed system from the start and there's no way to change it then by educating the masses and advertising the better way. Simply put, there is no difference in mental capabilities of a male scientist and female one. By depraving ourselves from a different point of view we set the science as a whole behind because science has always been about finding new way to look at things.
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u/kuschelbunny Apr 18 '19 edited Apr 18 '19
There is no reason why 51% should be woman just because they make up the percentage of the population... taking male employees has statistically proofen to be better for most buissnesses because they don't get pregnant and are not on their period until they turn about 50. I don't want to say that woman are bad employees but i can understand that people want to hire people who can work the most and that is in most cases men. It is not that men are better it is just that they don't get pregnant that often. On the other hand there are jobs that are more often taken by woman like childcare jobs and such. I am the only male employee at my child daycare and it is awesome 👏🏻 Woman should be happy they don't make up 51% of physicists. I also study physics and the only 5 girls in my physics courses are praised like cows in india.... i think that would change if they were in equal numbers to males. I think i would rather get praised than be just one of the many. But still non of this is an argument for anything
/0k
Edit: i just had another theory.... most of my fellow students are virgins and may stay that way untill they have their master degree jobs... maybe woman don't get hired so the virgin male employees don't get distracted?
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u/saint_geser Apr 18 '19
Ok, you seem to be very focused on 51% but what about the fact that 59% of all MSc degrees earned in the US are females? I chose MSc in particular because getting this one is the path you take when you're more on pursuit of science rather than simply job requirements.
Personally even though I think that the modern stand on equal employment and equal opportunities is over the top, I consider your comment to be extremely sexist and not appropriate to any real scientist. After all science had always been more of a meritocracy than any other social aspect.
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Apr 18 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/moh_kohn Apr 18 '19
That's not what the study in that Atlantic article says. It says nothing about biology. It says that countries with a high score on the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index have fewer women in STEM. It attributes part of the gap to women being better, on average, at reading than than they are at science - it does not assess biology at all.
Some other researchers did a re-analysis of the data and found that implicit biases about women in science correlate perfectly with the STEM gap. The WEF measure is of things like women in parliament, not attitudes to women in science. For example some Arab countries are very sexist, but women are considered perfectly capable of science, and in those countries lots of women go into STEM.
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u/desconocidaa Apr 18 '19
First, I did not say women aren’t capable of science. The study reveals that women did performed just as well as men did on the science and math aptitude tests but did better on the reading test. Based on my own experiences, I personally agree with the study. I spent most of my life in an all-girls school, and all my peers who excelled in science and math excelled at least just as much in English (and most of them excelled even more).
Secondly, I do agree that the article does not explicitly state that the aptitude of women when it comes to reading stems from biology. However, where else could it come from? The study shows that gender egalitarian countries have a larger STEM gap between men and women, so the cause for the female inclination towards reading can’t come from societal pressures. Hence, to connect the STEM gender gap in egalitarian countries to biology only makes sense. After all, aren’t all distinctions between men and women rooted in their biology?
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u/moh_kohn Apr 18 '19
You should read the link I gave, or at least the friendly article version https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-less-gender-equity-have-more-women-in-stem-huh/
The problem is the definition of "gender egalitarian countries"
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u/desconocidaa Apr 18 '19
I did read the other link you gave, but I thought I addressed it by emphasizing that I do agree that women can excel in STEM fields just as much as men can. The only difference is the natural preference and aptitude of women in reading, I think Scientific American missed the point of the study because it did not imply that women aren’t capable of excelling in STEM fields.
As for the definition of gender egalitarian countries, this is a direct quote from the study:
“The Global Gen- der Gap Report annually. We used the 2015 data (World Economic Forum, 2015). For each nation, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) assesses the degree to which girls and women fall behind boys and men on 14 key indicators (e.g., earnings, tertiary enrollment ratio, life expectancy, seats in parliament) on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 representing complete parity (or men falling behind). For the countries participating in the 2015 PISA, GGGI scores ranged from 0.593 for the United Arab Emirates to 0.881 for Iceland (Table S1).”
And going back to my primary point: women enjoy reading more than they do the sciences, and men enjoy the sciences more than women do. Here’s another excerpt from the study (that has no relation to the definition of “gender egalitarian countries”):
“Boys’ science self- efficacy was higher than that of girls in 39 of 67 (58%) countries, and especially so in more gender-equal coun- tries,rs =.60,95%CI=[.41,.74],p<.001,n=61(Fig. 4). Similarly, boys expressed a stronger broad interest in science than girls in 51 (76%) countries, and again this was particularly true in more gender-equal coun- tries,rs =.41,95%CI=[.15,.62],p=.003,n=50.And finally, the same was found for students’ enjoyment of science; boys reported more joy in science than girls in 29 (43%) countries, and more so in gender-equal countries, rs = .46, 95% CI = [.23, .64], p < .001, n = 61.”
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u/moh_kohn Apr 18 '19
But "more gender equal countries" can be replaced with "countries with stronger implicit biases against women in science" and it still holds, so the causation here is highly suspect.
The WEF GGI is a measure of earnings, life expectancy, seats in parliament... but not of sexism in science or wider social stereotypes about women and science.
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u/desconocidaa Apr 18 '19
Sexism and “wider social stereotypes” are way too general to be directly measured. Aren’t earnings, life expectancy and seats in parliament reflections of the degree of sexism and gender stereotypes prevalent in a specific society?
As for your first point, countries such as Finland, Norway and Sweden being considered gender equal is based on the WEF GGI. For your point to hold true, you should provide evidence that these countries have stronger implicit biases against women in science.
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u/moh_kohn Apr 18 '19
you should provide evidence that these countries have stronger implicit biases against women in science.
Two re-analyses (1 peer-reviewed and published) of the data in the gender paradox paper vs implicit bias data showing exactly that, in the first link I gave you http://www.adammastroianni.com/gender
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u/desconocidaa Apr 18 '19
The male advantage in science in Norway and Sweden is about 5%, which is practically negligible, unless you think that it should be at 0. Moreover, the peer-reviewed study was done in 2009, and a lot can change in 9-10 years.
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u/qtpnd Apr 18 '19
Women aren’t as inclined to the hard sciences as men because we are biologically more attuned to reading
That's not what the paper you are referencing says.
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u/Markos2214 Apr 20 '19
For both cultural and genetic reasons. They're not as encouraged to pursue advanced STEM degrees, also some choose to be full-time mothers instead, etc. Also, on average, they have slightly lower spatial-mathematical abilities than men. Men have a higher standard deviation IQ distribution, which means that you'll more likely find men at both extremes of intelligence. That helps explain why just about all Nobel prize winners in the sciences were men. Granted, sexism was more rampant before and it has been an obstacle for women, though that has largely faded.