You've deleted the other two, then?
Yeah, the site was acting weird for me.
Yeah, there were some problems. It was down for a few minutes.
One of the ways in which I see sexism as a major factor is the degree to which women that do get on the Op-Ed page are seen as inherently more provisonal than equivilent men.
I think that for all of the people that hate David Brooks people usually take for granted that he has some basic plausibility as a columnist. I see the criticism as being closer to, "He's an idiot, I wish someone would get rid of him." Whereas I see criticism of women as being more like, "she's an idiot, she never belonged here at all."
Though, I would note that Maureen Dawd seems to have enough credibility to attract the former criticism rather than the latter.
This seems related to Pollit's comment "I've seen men allowed to fail again and again while the editors tried to figure out what to do with them. With women, it's 'We assigned her a piece and it didn't work out.'"
So it wasn't enough that you were invited to blog at Unfogged? Now the Times has to call you?
I'm of two minds about this sort of thing. On the one hand, it strikes me as a pretty accurate description of how things work, and it is sad and wrong that what we wish was a meritocracy is not one. It drives me nuts, as does the very concern about which you brood.
On the other hand, we're talking about an unbelievably small number of people here, and...I don't know, there's something...I really don't know what the word is: troubling?...about an access problem that is assumes a whole series of other access problems (primarily education and social networks) away.
What is that, Tim, the "other people have it worse" deflection? Bah.
7: Right. But what about the guy who sits right next to LB, but is short or fat or bald, or all three? An equal complaint? It's really hard to disentangle this stuff when you're looking at a extraordinarily limited number of people. And so it makes the argument about this really difficult as well.
(This strikes me as the reverse of Krugman's argument for taxing the very rich.)
Are short / fat / bald men underrepresented on the op-ed pages? Not if the byline photos constitute evidence, I don't think.
That's completely aside from the deserved tirade about having to make sure that every single man is treated absolutely fairly before we worry about the girls. Lucky for you, my throat feels like someone sandpapered it today and I'm not up to yelling.
I understand SCMT to say that people that occupy elite positions of authority get there by benefiting from so many overlapping spheres of privilege that it's a bad representation of any specific manifestation of privilege.
Or, I would think, that looking at the NYT op-ed page may be a measure of how our society apportions authority, but it will be difficult to fix problems with that apportionment by trying to fix the NYT op-ed page.
I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I don't think that boils down to #9
The question isn't about the Times, though we've done a nice job of narrowing the issue down so as to make it seem petty and arbitrary. The question is about whether women's voices and opinions get heard in public, especially on issues other than fashion or mommying or whatever. It does make a great deal of difference if, say, the vast majority of the opinion pieces on abortion are written by men, as some study found a couple of months back.
That said, I need to put together a proposal for the Nation my own damn self.
9: Something like #10. I didn't really say it very well. The problem is that, in the case of LB's friend, it is (as I understand it) a one-off. I have no idea what goes into that, and my suspicion is that neither does the person who asked her friend to write the piece. I guess I'm saying that the problem isn't the .01% of possible opinion writers that get to the NYT, but the 1% that get to write at smaller magazines and the like.
Actually, I'm not sure what I mean. I'm suspicious of fine-grained claims of meritocracy, and so I'm suspicious of fine-grained claims that the meritocracy has been corrupted. Or something like that.
I'm still not sure what I mean.
11 -- agree completely. In fact part of why I specified the Times in my comment was to make clear that I thought SCMT was talking specifically about the highest profile positions.
That said, let me ask a question that might bridge what you're saying and what I understand SCMT to be saying. How much of a difference would it make if there was an editor at a moderate sized daily that was committed to developing as many female columnists as possible. For the sake of argument, say that the San Jose daily started printing lots of great op-eds by female columnists. Would that, by itself, help build the talent pool and visibility of female columnists and create more women out there looking for columnist positions and trickle into the rest of the media or would the women who wrote at the San Jose daily find that they was no career ladder to climb from there and that they couldn't consistently get columnist positions anywhere else.
Something else is that when women actually are hired, they're often chosen to provide "a woman's touch", with more sensibility and intuition and less argument. Maureen Dowd is an example, but Ellen Goodman seems that way too. Molly Ivins isn't, but she's never been on the A-list.
Let me say as a feminist that I personally do not think that women are necessarily nicer or more sensitive than men. Many women are perfectly OK people, and many sensitive, intuitive women would have been properly hardass except for social conditioning.
I mentioned on a different thread that this seems American and not British. In academia and public life there seem to be a lot of hardass, sharp-tongued women over there, who seemingly have lost nothing by being that way.
People don't seem to be interested in my Lally Weymouth obsession, but she seems to have gotten into the reporting/editing biz partly just by being part of the old-boy network via her family connections (i.e. through her mother, who inherited the business from her own father). From this point of view the exclusive-social-set problem is foremost.
I'd like to see some kind of a study of the family and school connections of the major pundits. It definitely seems to be a clique, but I don't really know how many people are born into it. The one guy I know personally in that game, who was moving up the ladder at the Post, definitely was not born into the elite. He was a straight WASP male, though.
13: I think it would help a bunch of women get clips, which would probably be seen as less valuable resume fodder over time because the publication prints so many women.
I think either a whole bunch of publications would need to devote themselves to cultivating women, or a bunch of high-prestige publications would need to cultivate a few women, but not so "many" that their prestige takes a hit (perhaps 1/4 of their space at most), or the boys would need to lose interest in op-ed journalism and move on to something else.
Yeah, I'm cynical on this one.
14 -- "feminist" s/b "misanthrope"
Suppose you think of the phrase "our kind of people". Not very many women are OCOP. And not very many minorities. People who went to an Ivy League school are more likely to be OCOP. Family and classmates of OCOP are more likely to be be OCOP. On general principles we need to let some new people in, but they need to people we can be comfortable with.
Somerby and others talk a lot about the media as a HS clique of Kool Kidz, and they do seem to have a rather haughty air.
I've always thought of Ellen Goodman as the gold standard for mainstream female op-ed writers and I would never have thought of here as lacking arguments. Of course, I haven't read her column in years, and my impression is formed largely by reading collections of her columns from the late 80s/early 90s which were great.
In a similar vein, how does one get short stories--specifically, mildly absurdist short stories written by loveable blog-troll personalities--published in fancy periodicals? Or even, not very fancy periodicals that will pay you?
Off-topic but found this at saiselgy:
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/11/internet_incivility/
Holy shit! There's some more stuff at sadly no as well.
13: Well, the linked Pollitt article talks about that specifically, and she mentions specific smaller pubs that do have a lot of women writing for them. Magpie's right--that sort of thing leads to clips. It also leads to having a presence as a writer, which then addresses the main point Pollitt is making: it's not like there aren't a lot of well-known women who write about politics. At that point, it's not too hard for a NYT editor to pick up the phone and call one of them, or it shouldn't be.
And one of the reasons why this matters is that people like Text and me are looking for venues and trying to figure out how to get in them. And if you see women published, and you've made contacts at those venues, that goes a long way towards overcoming the anxiety/modesty problem women supposedly have: you're more willing to put yourself forward if you see other people doing it successfully, and if you have reason to believe that you might actually be successful.
20's interesting. I saw a little story about that in the local paper this morning and thought huh, Woodland Hills? Not too surprising....
text, a writer friend says that you just have to submit stuff. Find a magazine or journal that seems to publish stuff that's similar to what you write, and submit your stories to them. I think it's just that simple (and difficult, obviously).
Lally Weymouth
I followed one of your links, and she's now dating an incredibly useless politician from my old neighborhood -- Andrew Stein. Family legend has it that he was so dimwitted that he was entirely flummoxed by a question my big sister asked him when he was shaking hands on a streetcorner when she was four.
What I find so incredibly depressing about this is the invitational nature of these sorts of jobs; you can put yourself in the position where you're a reasonable person to approach, say, to write an Op-Ed, but at that point the decision as to whether you're worthy has to happen inside the head of someone with power. And then, what is there to do about it? If they don't tap you, you've been found wanting -- that was the objective standard. So if it turns out that female columnists just don't make the cut, it's very hard to argue about it on a case-by-case basis.
thanks ogged. I will give my friend the troll personality your friend's advice.
Meanwhile, I will hunt the golden piggie who, in turn, sniffs out the garnet truffle which, when suspended in vinegar, yields forth the rusty key that unlocks the dilapidated barn of Harpers' fiction department.
Yeah. The thing is, I think you need to know the the guy who buys fiction for Harpers, or at least he needs to know you.
Family legend has it that he was so dimwitted that he was entirely flummoxed by a question my big sister asked him when he was shaking hands on a streetcorner when she was four.
I have a similar story.
I think that aggressive self-promotion has a lot to with success in many areas, this one probably more than most since writing opeds (compared to cinematography, surgery, or statistical analysis, for example) is not a rare skill and not really one in which the preeminence of the best is transparently obvious. And self-promotion involves this mix of bragging, confrontation, ingratiation, and backbiting which few non-psychotics are capable of. There's that fine line.
Based on my stereotypes of women, the bragging and confrontation parts are what's usually missing, though again the rules are different for women.
Also, very competitive people have to be pretty lacking in self-doubt and self-awareness beyond the level of "I guess I should be more careful who I interrupt" or "I should have known enough to butter up that secretary".
"I think you need to know the the guy who buys fiction for Harpers, or at least he needs to know you."
This can be accomplished. In a matter of weeks, the fiction buyer for Harpers shall know me as the fellow in the lobby who needs a wash.
at that point the decision as to whether you're worthy has to happen inside the head of someone with power.
I've probably said this here before, but I remember being very struck watching TV director Paris Barclay accept an Emmy. He said something about how Steven Bochco cared about not just being "open" to hiring minority directors but actively looking harder for them.
It's on my mind right now because my organization is hiring, and I'm trying to do just that. I vacillate between thinking irritably that it's difficult, and thinking with some surprise that it's not nearly as difficult for me because of two key projects from early on in my career, through which I met several hundred "minority" (gender, race, religion, disability, however you want to quantify it) leaders.
Lynda Obst's autobiography has a number of telling stories about the challenges of getting noticed as a woman in a hyper competative male dominated field.
She comes across as a staggeringly competative person herlself, in a good way. The writing isn't great, but the stories are good.
My job field has the same invitational nature as op-ed columnists, albeit without the discourse-shaping significance. Out of the first eight technical people (of which I was one), all were male, all had worked together at a previous large company, and none really "applied". It makes sense from the company's perspective - why sift through 1000 resumes off of Craigslist to find three people who will interview well, and one you hire will turn out to suck in some substantial and previously undetected manner and end up useless at best or having to be fired at worst, when you can say "OK, who do we know who's a proven quantity." No woman had a chance to get hired in this group, but then again neither did 99% of the engineering population of the valley.
But it seems like the critical point for all of us was working together at the previous company, which had a couple hundred engineers, and so had no choice but to interview people off the street, and indeed had a reasonably high percentage of female engineers (I think in excess of 10%, maybe more), and given some of the goofballs that got hired or promoted, it's hard for me to imagine that any sort of social engineering would have made it much worse.
Of course, possibly a bigger problem, and I can't believe I'm saying this in public, is that a lot of the engineers I work with are arrogant and abrasive and sexist, and most women wouldn't want to work with them even if we did recruit them. But if firing the sexist asshole engineer kills the company, what can you do?
Where that story gets really depressing is that none of the (better than 10%?) women from the earlier workplace made the informal cut for your current job. Not that that's necessarily malice, or intentional exclusion, but still depressing.
It is depressing. I wish I worked with more women. I've pushed to get two of the women out of there, and been successful with one (the other is on an H-1B). But when you're picking ten and getting six out of two hundred, not hitting a 10% subpopulation isn't incredibly shocking, especially when it's a field whose population (of bastards) makes it less appealing to women, so those who are truly gifted choose other careers. I also wonder if there are gender differences in the willingness to accept an offer of the form "come work for us for minimal pay and a chance to strike it big, although really we have no idea if it will work."
especially when it's a field whose population (of bastards) makes it less appealing to women, so those who are truly gifted choose other careers.
I dunno, wouldn't you think that that might mean that the women who do end up in engineering are probably better than the average engineer, in that they chose the profession despite discouragement?
Tell your daughters to be software engineers! If you're good and have a tolerance for risk, it's the best job this side of federal judge. Flexible hours, the chance at high pay, prima-donna treatment from your managers, and for all that your sexist co-workers will talk smack about you, they will secretly do whatever you ask on the off chance that you'll smile at them.
36: Could be. Better than the average, sure. But all of the really good software engineers (a group into that I know could be very successful in a number of other fields - e.g. lawyering - but find find the intangibles of engineering compel them. For instance, if I was still working at a giant tech company, I'd probably have gotten out of engineering because there was no personal freedom and the hierarchy was full of petty tyrants. Luckily I found the long-shot startup promised land. I can only imagine that if I had to deal with a workforce that was 90% the opposite gender and that wasn't taking me seriously, I'd have re-evaluated my options and could have ended up somewhere else, no matter how much I liked engineering.
38 - Really? The thing I like when I hang out with engineers is that they respect my knowledge really fast. There's no faking things, like you can in all those touchy-feely fields that are really about your feelings or something. So if you walk in and find something wrong with their simulation equations, you get cred really fast. I think of engineering as a haven where you can be judged on your skills (as compared to the op-ed page, where you might be mysteriously wrong somehow that they'll say wasn't because you're a chick.).
Megan, my memory of my physics conferencing days is that this applies more at the top and increasingly less as you go down, making a massive pipeline effect--and that it's somewhat American. The problem is supposed to be inverse in Europe---lots of girls take physics in high school and want to do physics or engineering or college, and are encouraged, but accomplished, educated women have a hard time getting taken seriously because adult sexism been socialized out less, and the programs of the state are less relevant. This is all based on memories of the 1999 Centennial conference, so it might be slightly out of date information. But basically, most women did not have the best lead-in experiences as young girls. Also this:
So if you walk in and find something wrong with their simulation equations
Requires the obliatory noting that some brillliant women are not always socialized to loudly point out the "something wrong" as aggressively as men used to shouting at each other.
But I was going to reiterate that this applies as much to minorities as to women. I think a lot of Asian and South-Asian Americans feel this way about art, entertainment & fiction, for instance--they're not really welcome to participate nor likely to get calls back unless they're willng to play the role of focusing on their Otherness. Not to mention politics, these days--Macacagate wouldn't have happened if Allen didn't have some sense that something close to half of his audience would resonate with the idea that brown people don't belong in politics. How often do minorities get called by their local machine to run for office? And in the realm of music I think it very much applies to fat and balding people of either gender--when looks should nothing to do with music, music diretors from elementary school onward may bias their selections and tutelage with a desire to get the most adorable child on stage.
I am finding it impossible to avoid reading this post title as "Where Are All The Female Pundits, Redfox?" I don't know! Stop asking me!
The thing I like when I hang out with engineers is that they respect my knowledge really fast.
I noticed that back in the early 60's. The "Heavy" IBM sent out to tweak the OS was Linda, and people thought she walked on water 'cause she could make it do what it was supposed to do.
The same with any of the others in the CS department. The stuff they produced, whatever it was, either worked well or it didn't; the gender of the creator wasn't relevant.
39: Sure. When you know your stuff, you get respect, gender aside. But in the early stages of your career, when you don't know your stuff just because you haven't been exposed to it, things may be different.
Something else is that when women actually are hired, they're often chosen to provide "a woman's touch", with more sensibility and intuition and less argument.
This, definitely. I would also not be surprised to discover a reasonable amount of token-think. Why would we need another woman? We already have one to prove we're fair.
I also wonder whether class affects women more than men. I don't mean in raw terms of poverty, but that a young woman, who would have to sacrifice greatly in order to pursue a journalism career, might be less likely to do so than a young man in a comparable economic situation.
43 - True. I was very lucky to be formidably trained. I also think I get in the door based on my professor's reputation. But after that, they can't dismiss my understanding of regulating reservoirs as a woman's intuition.
I thought 6 made a good point, and then drowned itself out (especially by agreeing with 7's characterization of it). So, the life choices of women are constrained to some degree or other and in some way or other at a very large number of junctures in their lives (there's a "the patriarchy hurts men too" point to be made here, but blah). Is there something discontinuous about the way women's choices are being constrained at this stage such that people concerned with the overall level of injustice to American women should be particularly concerned about it? If people want to say yes, what's the discontinuit /emergent property at this level?
who would have to sacrifice greatly in order to pursue a journalism career
I bet some of this has to do with the other long running discussion of how women are still fundamentally less safe in society then men. You can be physically brave and adventure seeking, but at some level you always have to be one level more careful than a guy in the same situation with the same risk-aversion, and that's just going to filter the stories you have access to by that much more.
I have to say my previous point wasn't to diminish the uphill battle felt by women in a lot of fields--I'm quite aware of it--but just to note the obvious emergent property of "Our Kind of People"--of inertia in social sensibility. I was raised and schooled with the notion that the only cure for this somewhat natural tendency is to actively and earnestly seek out different sensibilities at every scale and in every context. Besides propagating this countervalue--that part of the pursuit of excellence includes constantly trying to humbly question one's own cliquishiness and seek out new input at every social scale--I'm not sure of any cure-all.
Funny -- just talking about this topic this morning. It is interesting that when symphony orchestras started auditioning people behind a screen the number of women in first and second chairs increased.
Oddly, women seem to do well as international and war correspondents. Georgie Anne Geyer is one example but there are others.
Oh sure, John. When I was at Columbia all the people at the Kurt Schork memorial thing were women. But it's like science--the ones who make it are all frequently really good. But is that parity of opportunity?
I think this is clear on its face, but just want to reemphasize that the point of 46 isn't to say, "This isn't the most important problem and therefore isn't a problem." Rather, it's "what's interestingly distinctive about this problem?"
You can be physically brave and adventure seeking, but at some level you always have to be one level more careful than a guy in the same situation with the same risk-aversion, and that's just going to filter the stories you have access to by that much more.
I don't know that this is at all true. Men who are willing to go on dangerous assignments are a rare breed; women who are willing to go on dangerous assignments are a rare breed. Women are probably more likely to be raped; men may well be more likely to be killed. And I'm sure there are stories that women will have access to that men won't, precisely because a lot of people think that women are less dangerous, more empathetic, yadda yadda.
Is there something discontinuous about the way women's choices are being constrained at this stage such that people concerned with the overall level of injustice to American women should be particularly concerned about it? If people want to say yes, what's the discontinuit /emergent property at this level?
One possible answer to this is that having more representation of women at elite, highly-regarded Op-Ed pages would have effects all the way down the ladder in encouraging women to pursue careers in journalism/punditry because of the role-model effect, which would probably be larger in this field than in most because being famous is an integral part of the job. Therefore, the lack of women in these positions can be seen as a (not necessarily the, but a) contributing factor to the dearth of women in punditry generally.
I'm not sure I understand the question, but it seems obvious to me that more women on the op-ed pages would likely mean more coverage of "women's" issues from a position of actual understanding, which would presumably affect public discourse, no?
Premise: "the life choices of women are constrained to some degree or other and in some way or other at a very large number of junctures in their lives" (quoting myself above) and I forgot to add constrained in different, more subordinating ways than the life-choices of men.
One result of this is that in a plethora of institutions and settings where [whatever actual biological differences exist] don't look like they should have an effect on the representation of women, such an effect exists. What's particularly interesting about such an effect existing at the top level of news-punditry? Is this any more or less interesting than, e.g. the question of why the Senate hasn't ever been majority female, or even close? I've spent actually a while wondering, not really at that second question, but at the fact that people don't note it as something strange.
What's particularly interesting about such an effect existing at the top level of news-punditry?
In addition to the role-model thing I mentioned before, another interesting thing about this is the fact that punditry is both easy and influential, so it's not the sort of thing where educational opportunities are going to be an initial cut and there are therefore fewer alternate explanations for the dearth of women than in some other fields, and it's also an area where the lack of women conceivably makes a difference in the kinds of topics that get discussed in our national discourse (this is b's point in 54). Really, I see all sorts of ways in which this is a special case.
45: in addition to your formidable training and possibly your professor's reputation, you clearly have an understanding of reservoirs and hydrologic engineering that is both profound and deeply important to you; Exhibit A being Ogged's picture of the Iranian weir. People would dismiss your understanding as a women's intuition at great peril, and on pain of being made to look like an idiot. Of the software engineers at my previous company, none of the ones that fit the analogous description were female.
Of course, this may be path-dependent in that by the time the previous company grew to the size at which things other than referrals became the dominating factor, all the really good engineers were getting snapped up by Google, so the people at my current company never met them.
This has fuck-all to do with punditry, but I feel that to some extent the same thing can be said about the real world. After all, look at how many people make a million bucks as a pundit, or even how many affect millions of people's lives as a pundit, vs. as an engineer. I think that women are screwed more by being shut out of the latter than out of the former, but I'm not prepared to categorically state that that's just an artifact of thinking about that which I know.
46: I'm not sure where the discontinuity happens, but it seems that there must be one. I'd guess it's before college.
37: "Tell your daughters to be software engineers!"
My sister is one, though at a Large Corporation, so there are different deformities in the company culture than the ones mentioned here.
Also, at the very top of the market for op-eds and such, there's a huge difference between the one-offs and the regulars. For the one-offs, getting called means being one of the three people per subject an assigning editor thinks of immediately when the decision is taken to have pieces on Foo and Bar in tomorrow's paper. Getting into that headspace is the trick.
If Foo is genocide, it's very likely that Samantha Power will get called. Not because genocide is a "women's issue" or because a tip-top paper is necessarily committed to having women on its op-ed page (though that obvsly wouldn't hurt), but because Power wrote the contemporary book on genocide.
In this case, the first discontinuity (57, 46) is almost certainly having gone to Yale for college. Power was born in Ireland and went to a public high school in Atlanta. A normal, suburban upbringing would be my guess. But this break is a direct result of the choices Yale (and, to be fair, other elite universities) made a generation earlier to admit and recruit women, minorities and people from all regions of the US. The second discontinuity is her post-college choice to go to Bosnia as a freelance reporter. Kudos to the publications for being open to freelancers and not just people they already knew, without which her excellent work would not have mattered.
So that's the path to getting called: consistent terrific work, gateway institutions that consciously reach beyond what they know, and canny choices and alliances along the way. Plus to do a one-off, you have to have some other institutional perch. There's no way to live from these things.
Columnist is a whole different ball of wax, and it's probably good to remember that we are talking about the dozen most desired slots in all of US newspapering. Absolutely everything has to break someone's way to land one of those jobs.
Two tidbits on columnizing. First, Molly Ivins' story about her stint working for the NY Times (reporter, I think, though it's been years since I read the book). In short, her writing style was too lively for the Times' printed culture. Paper of record was not a good fit with Texas wit. (The DFW Startlegram was much better, as the title of her first book demonstrates.)
Second, two or three of the Washington Post's women columnists died in a relatively short span of time a couple of years ago. Mary McGrory and at least one other whose name escapes me. Given that there are only a handful of columnists at the paper anyway, this was a significant change.
55, 56: Yes. Something that I found both peculiar and frustrating about the Larry Summers flap was the focus on a possible math-specific biological inferiority of women. (and if anyone is going to be irritating about my terminology here, yes, yes, average, variance and all that. A possible biologically determined lesser number of women capable of performing at the topmost level of mathematical achievement.)
Given that we get pretty much exactly the same underrepresentation of women in the very elite levels of political commentary, where it seems unlikely that their mathematical deficiencies are the problem, the seriousness with which Summers' speculation gets treated seems peculiar to me.
60: My recollection is that Summers mentioned at least three factors, including discrimination and (for lack of a better phrase) outside interests. IIRC (and I do, b/c I looked it up- a first!), he listed "outside interests" as the most important factor. That would be relevant across diverse fields where time put in was one of the driving factors.
Sure, but he made the biological argument as not the least important of his three factors (outranking discrimination) and it was treated by his defenders as a reasonable explanation for a significant part of the effect. Given that we get the same effect in fields where the biological explanation doesn't appear to apply, it seems a stretch to find it necessary.
1. Given that it appears he was making off the cuff comments, and that there are real experts that actually study this stuff and he's not one of them, his remarks probably shouldn't have been treated seriously at all, or only as evidence about the views he held.
2. As I recall, there seemed to be fairly widespread agreement in the left blogosphere that the "outside interests" factor was a good place to look for a significant part of the explanation. If it's convincing about the sciences, my suspicion is that it's convincing about the op-eds (and other areas) as well. I doubt it explains everything, or even a majority, but I'm personally willing to buy it as the plurality explanation. I don't think it has much justification, on the other hand: op-ed pages really, really don't seem like the sort of thing which requires time in to increase op-ed ability.
3. The NYT is going to get another shot to do right: Tierney is leaving. Gawd willing, they'll fill it with a useful woman.
60: LizardBreath:
"Given that we get pretty much exactly the same underrepresentation of women in the very elite levels of political commentary, where it seems unlikely that their mathematical deficiencies are the problem, the seriousness with which Summers' speculation gets treated seems peculiar to me."
But mathematical ability or at least a significant component (problem solving ability) is much more objectively measurable than pundit ability. And for whatever reason 90% or more of the best are male even at college level (Putman exam) or high school level (Mathematics Olympiad).
The point is that we get the same effect in spheres where innate mathematical ability can't possibly be the cause. If you note that both lawyers and investment bankers have a tendency to live off takeout eaten at their desks, it seems unlikely to me that a significant portion of the explanation for why lawyers eat take-out is a peculiarity of the legal mind that doesn't affect bankers.
But mathematical ability or at least a significant component (problem solving ability) is much more objectively measurable than pundit ability. And for whatever reason 90% or more of the best are male even at college level (Putman exam) or high school level (Mathematics Olympiad).
Unless you're following these kids through their careers, color me unconvinced.
If I were going to speculate, I would guess that the idea is that high-school and college students are young enough that they couldn't possibly yet have been exposed to sexism, so differences in their performance are much more likely to be innate. But I don't actually know what Shearer meant.
RE 63.3
>Tierney's previous column had rapped the popular "Borat" movie for slandering Kazakhs.
61, 63: There is a much better term than "outside interests." It's "care of children still falls primarily on women," paraphrased here as "the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks." "Outside interests" make it sound like women aren't advancing in academia because they're out playing golf or something.
In any case, I question how much of a factor that is in punditry, because writing op-eds just isn't all that time-consuming. It's possible that it is a factor in building up the level of credibility needed, but I'm skeptical.
66, what are you unconvinced of? That there is such a thing as problem solving ability? That the Putman exam measures it? That it is stable over time? That it has anything to do with professional success as a mathematician?
That differential success in male and female participants is biologically, rather than socially, determined?
72: That relative ranking on the Putnam exam predicts relative reputation down the line. Maybe it does. I don't know. (Does it?)
This is basically the Moneyball (or NBA draft) problem, isn't it? We're not very good at modeling success in specific careers.
68, no my point is the pool for whatever reason is already low in females in high school. So sexist Harvard academic hiring procedures is not the explanation (at least directly).
75: But the hiring pool isn't Putnam winners, it's mathematics grad students. (Not that that pool isn't also limited, I would argue most plausibly for reasons other than biological determination).
73, I think it is partially biological but the reason doesn't matter the effect is the same, a relative lack of women with top level mathematical problem solving ability trying to pursue a career in mathematics or heavily mathematical sciences.
We're really straying from the question of what Redfox did with all the female pundits, but: mathematics strikes me as the field where the Summers/Pinker facile appeal to neuroscience is most likely to have some truth, but it hardly applies to all the physical sciences. In fact, one of the participants in the seminar where Larry made an ass of himself noted that Rutgers is making a concerted effort to hire female chemistry faculty who feel mistreated in their current home departments. Larry's response? "My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature..." Color me unconvinced that a deep and intuitive feel for mathematics is required to be a top-notch chemist; I have no trouble, conversely, believing that there are a number of women who feel their careers in chemistry are constrained by sexism, and apparently Rutgers agrees with me.
78: I think I'm roughly where you are. Except more naked.
76, in 2004-2005 the pool of new mathematics phds was 70% male. Over 1000 mathematics phds are awarded each year and perhaps 2 mathematicians get tenure at Harvard. So Harvard is looking at the top end of the pool and that is skewed even more male.
That means, accepting your stats at face value, that 30% of new math PhDs were women. Are 30% of the math faculty at Harvard women? Do those women get tenure at the same rates as their men colleagues? No? Well then Harvard isn't free from prejudice, is it?
Right Bitch, but Mr. Shearer already pointed out that the women with math Ph.D.'s are not as smart as the men with math Ph.D.'s. So Harvard's in the clear.
Oh, I must have missed that. I'm always forgetting how it's the stupid ones that manage to succeed despite discrimination--must be because my shitty problem-solving skills keep me from realizing what an obvious conclusion that is.
To be fair, B., that's a poor comparison, because Harvard isn't hiring freshly minted Ph.D.s for their math department. Also, please allow James to gloss over the fact that the percentage of women faculty awarded tenure dropped durings Summers' stint as president, and that he was bloviating in front of a room full of people who knew more about the subject than he did.
Harvard is famous for giving tenure to the people they hire after they win a Putnam rather than the people they hire fresh out of grad school. "Tenure track" at Harvard traditionally means "six years from now, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."
86 the Putnam exam is for undergraduate college students so anyone out of grad school has already taken it (or not). Perhaps you are thinking of Fields Medals which are for mathematicians under 40. The 38 Fields medal winners like the 23 senior Harvard mathematics faculty members are all male. I count 4 in both groups (Hironaka, Mumford, Yau and McMullen). Mumford is also a two time Putnam prizewinner.
Right. There's no argument about an overwhelmingly greater presence of men at the highest echelons of mathematical achievement. The only question here is whether it's necessary to assume a biological explanation, in the presence of similar gaps in areas where innate mathematical ability isn't an issue.
(Note that I am not claiming that there has been proven not to be a biological explanation, just that no biological explanation has been demonstrated, and that the facts do not appear to me to require one.)
81, you don't get tenure at Harvard as a new Phd. In 1983-1984 new Phds were 80% male. Also all math Phds are not equal. In 2004-2005 of 1116 total Phds 592 were granted by group I or II unversities. Of these 470 went to males, 122 to females or 79% male.
Some people seem to have the idea that applicants can be divided into two groups qualified and unqualified and that there are no finer distinctions. This is certainly not the case with mathematical ability. The number 1 math Phd in a given year will generally be distinctly better than the number 10 who in turn will be distinctly better than number 100 who in turn will be distinctly better than number 1000. And this is not all that subjective, there might be arguments about 10 vrs 11 but not 10 vrs 100.
But what does any of that have to do with whether differences between candidates are biologically innate, or environmentally determined?
This really isn't feeling like much of a dialogue.
The number 1 math Phd in a given year will generally be distinctly better than the number 10 who in turn will be distinctly better than number 100 who in turn will be distinctly better than number 1000. And this is not all that subjective, there might be arguments about 10 vrs 11 but not 10 vrs 100.
Fair enough. This is part of what I was asking about. Do you have any sense of how good people are at picking out future stars?
74, Putnam success predicts statistically (as does being a first round NBA draft pick for that matter). This doesn't mean you are guaranteed a successful career as a mathematican if you win the Putnam. It does mean you are off to a good start.
Enh... I sort of hate bringing this up, because there is clearly a lot of social influence on the gender makeup of various fields, but I think that different fields have wildly different distributions of ability, to the point where 95% of tenured math professors being male might be less indicative of sexism than 80% of elite law firm partners being male.
At my job, I think that I do a fair bit of work and people are happy with my performance, yet I also think that one of my coworkers did at least 5 times as much work as I did, if not ten. When you have that sort of ability distribution (which my feeling is that law firms do not, but I have no factual basis for that statement), small changes in variance between genders actually do make a difference, unlike most of the time when they're just trying to deflect attention.
Isn't there an element of self-fulfilling prophecy there? Membership on law review predicts success as a lawyer, because it's much easier to get a good job with law review on your resume. That doesn't mean that the ability to get good grades that gets you on law review (or the skills that win the Putnam) is unconnected with the abilities necessary for a successful career, but it does mean that it's a better predictor of success than it would be on the basis of a simple measurement of a candidate's abilities.
94 to 92:
To 93: The thing is, we see huge differences in outcomes, in fields where innate differences in ability seem really unlikely to be an issue. I find the argument that "But these really really huge differences in outcomes must be the result of innate differences in ability," not terribly convincing in the absence of direct evidence of innateness.
Or, sometimes it's valid to generalize from the extremes to society at large, other times it's not. But maybe this is wrong, and everyone thinks that it's ok to generalize from the extremes in all cases except the ones in which they are personally familiar. I could easily be convinced of this.
92: Well, since LB sort of brought it up, I'll ask my marginally off-topic question: do you think is math ability something like pure athleticism (sprinting) or like basketball, where good training can cover a lot of lacks? (I'm inclined, with Jake, not to blame naive sexism at the highest levels for math in particular. But I don't have any fixed sense of this.)
I feel dumb for muddling Putnams and Fieldses. No tenure at Harvard for me.
97: Don't be decieved good training can cover a lot of lacks in sprinting, too. But it seems like at least part of math might be related to brain topology.
97: Even for sprinting, isn't training absolutely necessary? That is, as between two groups who are trained significantly differently, wouldn't you expect most of the fastest runners to come from the better-trained group, even if people were initially distributed absolutely randomly between the two groups?
I should say that I don't think the underrepresentation of women in the highest levels of academic math is all that similar to their underrepresentation on the NYT Op-Ed page; where the latter can largely be described, I think, by simple (although possibly unconscious and unintentional) sexism on the part of people making editorial decisions, the former probably has a lot more to do with socialization and discouragement throughout the educational process, although I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that there were elements of sexism at the highest levels as well. And of course an innate biological difference remains a possibility that has not been ruled out.
94: The influence of sexism via cartelization? The supply of elite law firm jobs is kept arbitrarily low so that existing partners can make a lot of money, below the threshold at which easily-applied standards can distinguish between candidates, leading to the imposition of largely arbitrary standards by those doing the deciding? I've heard that college faculty hiring is the same way, as is becoming an astronaut.
Winning the Putnam isn't quite like getting on law review. It's much more like winning the Heisman Trophy.
No one's proven to me that mathematical brilliance must be correlated with gender (BS handwaving about "higher standard deviation males" doesn't count), but I really can't see how the social networking/stereotyping/etc. filter is supposed to work here. There are plenty of obvious reasons why being a female partner at law firm should be more unlikely than being a female hotshot mathematician, if it was just a matter of fair social access, and yet that's not even close to being true.
97: depends. I'd say that there are people who, solely through their natural gifts, could compete successfully at a Division III college level - say the best 1000 in the country - with zero training. Even in sprints. By the same token, the number of people who have a non-zero chance at making the Olympic team (top 2 in the country), is probably less than 100.
Also - to the extent that OpEd writing is only superficially about insightful commentary and actually about increasing readership through bomb-throwing and other insincerity (just like the customers of broadcast news aren't viewers, but advertisers), there's probably a lot of socialization from middle school through college that works against females. Who's a better writer, Garance or Saiselgy? Who's more widely read?
If I were going to speculate (oh look, I am) I'd guess that creative thought at the very limits of human capacity, as is necessary to be a pure mathematician, is only compatible with a certain fairly fragile emotional state of absolute self-confidence, and that elite male mathematicians are drawn from the pool of highly intelligent people who have never doubted their own capacities. Women, who are much more likely to have their abilities in this regard aggressively questioned by others, are therefore much less likely to be able to express their full potential. I would surmise that encouragement and ego-stroking, while certainly not sufficient for achievement, may be necessary.
That's off the cuff, and I certainly don't know that it's true, but it's perfectly possible.
104 to 102, and I should really say that I'm not suggesting that that necessarily is the mechanism, just that I can come up with a fairly plausible mechanism pretty easily.
And I'm not saying that mathematical ability must be biologically based, while being a top partner at a law firm must not be. But there are clearly aspects to being a top partner that are slanted against females for no biological reason - having to work more than all of your fellow associates who get domestic support from their spouses and having to win a popularity contest judged by the current partners for two - that may not be there in other fields.
You know, I'd be inclined to listen to the people who actually know what they're talking about--the women mathemeticians at Harvard, and the women (mostly) who study what happens to women in math and science. And the evidence from those people is squarely on the side of discrimination.
The folks, on the other hand, who say "we observe these small differences" are also scientists; however, extrapolating from observed difference to innate/genetic cause is distinctly unscientific.
And even I know that, despite having a vagina.
104: Sounds plausible. But Feynman seems to have been sociopathic to the point of not caring what other people told him because he knew he was smarter than them, and Einstein worked in the Austrian patent office because no one thought he could do math.
We are having a mandatory all-hands meeting now, which angers me greatly because I would rather talk about sexism in the workplace (mine especially!), but I must attend. I shall return.
Sure, maybe. I don't know enough about academic mathematics to know to what degree subjective judgments of your peers and superiors of the quality of your work affects your career arc -- I'd be fairly surprised if the answer were 'not at all', but it could be pretty low. My point is just that when we live in a society where the gaps in achievement that are plainly due to social forces have gone away, if differences in mathematical achievement still remain, that may then be a piece of evidence that weighs pretty heavily toward the possibility of an innate difference between the sexes. While those gaps still exist, and are comparable in magnitude to the gap in elite mathematical achievement, I am not persuaded that social forces don't have a significant effect on that gap as well.
If this world is so sexist, why am I not wealthy? Why are there women more successful than me? Ergo, there is no sexism.
No racism either.
Plus, you forgot Brock, there is objective proof that women die later and are less likely to be in prison or in the military. So obviously men are the victims here.
I don't know what's going on in this thread, as people seem to be talking at cross-purposes. James B. Shearer's arguments, as far as I can tell, are for the following claim: Somewhere between all to a large part of whatever it is that causes a massive over-representation of men (relative to their population percentages, both in the U.S. population as a whole and even in the very limited subset of that population which pursues an advanced mathematics degree) in the highest levels of math professing occurs before (some year of) high school.
Is that a fair reconstruction? Do people disagree about its truth? About what policy consequences follow from its truth? Both? Neither?
There are a couple of other conversations going on, one of which appears to be the "Summers debate", but I'm not sure who's having it against whom.
Of course a lot of it happens way before high school. But Shearer seems to be arguing that because this is the case, and because there's "objective" evidence that men are innately better at math, that Harvard is off the hook. Which is manifest bullshit.
112: I agree with you about the cross-purposes, and also, sort of, about your characterization of Shearer's argument, except that making that argument in response to an invocation of Summers conveys to me that he intends to claim that a large part of the overrepresentation of men in math professing is probably due to innate biological factors. I don't know for certain that he intends to make that claim, and if he said something along the lines of: "Certainly, whatever it is could be biological or environmental. My point was that it can't be completely fixed by a lack of sexism at the faculty-hiring stage," I'd say "Sure," and leave it at that.
90 in 60 you said:
"Given that we get pretty much exactly the same underrepresentation of women in the very elite levels of political commentary, where it seems unlikely that their mathematical deficiencies are the problem, the seriousness with which Summers' speculation gets treated seems peculiar to me."
I don't understand your point. The shortage of females with top level mathematical problem solving ability is real and it is a real handicap to a greater or lesser extent in many scientific fields. As I understand it you do not believe the pool of female potential pundits has any important real deficiencies relative to the pool of male potential pundits and hence the shortage of female pundits is due to faults in the selection process. In contrast Summers has pointed to a real and important deficiency in the pool of female potential mathematicians and scientists. This holds true whatever you believe of Summers' speculation about the cause of the deficiency.
So are we looking for policy prescriptions for increasing women's confidence in their mathematical abilties beginning at a very early age? Something else? Shooting people who say "grade schools are failing boys"?
"Summers has pointed to a real and important deficiency in the pool of female potential mathematicians and scientists"
Which deficiency is that? The fact that there are more women than men in math and science? Summers isn't the one who pointed to that: we've all known about that for ages. And a lot of schools have made real efforts to address the problem. Summers, on the other hand, didn't, and his speculation actually does more harm than good.
Moreover, what you're quoting says, specifically, "the seriousness with which Summers' speculation gets treated." LB did not say "the seriousness of the underrepresentation problem." You're either not understanding her point because you're not properly reading what she read, or else you're being deliberately obtuse in order to perpetuate the persona of the objective, reasonable scientist presenting facts, as opposed to the emotional and irrational arguments of the feminist Summers-objectors. Which is it?
Of course a lot of it happens way before high school. But Shearer seems to be arguing that because this is the case, and because there's "objective" evidence that men are innately better at math, that Harvard is off the hook. Which is manifest bullshit.
I think you're making a much stronger argument than Shearer is. I take him to be saying that Harvard could use objectively neutral standards (e.g., speed at performing a proof, or whatever) and end up with all men. ("no my point is the pool for whatever reason is already low in females in high school.") (My emphasis.)
Part of what's important here is the strong belief (whether wrong or not), much like similar beliefs about athleticism, that there's something fair and obvious about measuring talent in math. I've heard enough stories of very smart people, primarily men (e.g., Gates), who are in a math class and suddenly realize there is simply no way they can be top class. That is, as if it is simply an objective truth about which they can do nothing. It may not be true; the interest in Moneyball was that it was a story about how badly we understand a sport. But I find credible (if not certain) claims that simple, straightforward sexism doesn't explain the lack of women in math (and I really do mean to restrict it to math) at Harvard (just Harvard (-ish)).
I still have this feeling of missing gears in this conversation (that is, wouldn't a normal response to this, from my last:
if he said something along the lines of: "Certainly, whatever it is could be biological or environmental. My point was that it can't be completely fixed by a lack of sexism at the faculty-hiring stage," I'd say "Sure," and leave it at that.
be to either agree or disagree?) But nevertheless, I'll go on.
Summers made a claim that a significant cause of the underrepresentation of women in the sciences (which he did not limit to pure mathematics, of course) was an innate biological difference in the percentage of men and women with the requisite abilities. My point was that, given that social factors can explain underrepresentations of similar size in other fields, Summers' claim of a biological cause seems unnecessary to explain the facts. I did not intend to assert that precisely the same social mechanism could explain the underrepresentation of women among NYT columnists and among mathematics professors (as you would have seen, had you read my 100, among others).
Shooting people who say "grade schools are failing boys"?
Not giving those people Op-Ed page tenure might be nice.
Let me try that again, in a less stiffly hostile tone:
Hey, Jim. Is this statement: "Certainly, whatever it is [that causes the overrepresentation of men in math professing] could be biological or environmental. My point was that it can't be completely fixed by a lack of sexism at the faculty-hiring stage." a fair representation of what you're trying to say? And if not, how so?
116: I'm willing to say that the people who are worrying about boys performance in grade school are not insane; although the evidence does *not* show that middle- and upper-middle class white boys are falling behind girls, my anecdotal observations are that the test-focused curriculum requires a lot of sit-down-and-do-these-worksheets type drilling, and that (broadly speaking) girls at that age are better at being "good" in that way. Which doesn't mean that I think it's especially good for girls to take advantage of their social skills to impose fairly dull work on them in the classroom.
But yes, we need to start really teaching teachers how to run an anti-bias classroom: god knows the teachers I've met at PK's school reinforce boy/girl stereotypes all the damn time. And we need to get parents and coaches and everyone else to stop doing it too. And we need to work on getting low enough class sizes, and skilled enough teachers, and supportive enough administrators so that the teachers have resources, abilities, and support to individualize instruction--so that the active girl gets to do some kinetic learning, and the artsy boy doesn't get marked wrong for coloring in the cute picture of mice even though he knows the right answer is supposed to be "moose," and the talkative girls get to do some mathetmatical theory as well as just memorizing formulas, and the naughty impatient boys get to read and write stories about bad kids who break things as well as "I have a fall flower. It is pretty."
I take him to be saying that Harvard could use objectively neutral standards (e.g., speed at performing a proof, or whatever) and end up with all men.
Maybe. But they don't, in fact, use "objectively neutral standards," and I don't see how one could come up with "objectively neutral" hiring standards, really. And I'm fairly sure that if one could, one could come up with different sets of "objectively neutral" standards, some of which would privilege men, and some of which would privilege women. "Objectively neutral," in discussions about social policy, is a rhetorical red flag, and should be recognized as such.
I certainly agree that there are a lot of historical periods where you would have been really foolish in extrapolating innate abilities from then current gender relations. It is also true that people like David Brooks like to piggyback onto the current disparities in Mathematics unsupported speculations about the importance for women to stay at home and the like.
It seems odd to me that in an era where college admissions are 60/40, and law and medical school admissions are close to 50/50 that mathematics is so strongly male dominated. I think that there is some sort of innate component. Which isn't to say there isn't sexism in Math departments.
I do patent law and it is a pretty good field for women (and men) with a technical background to go into. There isn't such a great demand to put in unproductive time late nights and on the weekends, because you can't bill the clients for it anyway. Women don't go into the field as much as men but the ones who do go into the field do as well as men on average (as far as I can tell).
115 - And this explains the underrepresentation of women among the faculty of the chemistry and biology departments at Harvard? The engineering school? Because... what, women can't do the level of calculus and statistical analysis required to understand these things?
I've actually speculated that the 'Boys do worse in grade school/Men do better in elite achievement' can be explained by the same mechanism. If we assume that girls are socialized to sit-still-and-be-obedient, while boys are socialized to run wild and follow their impulses, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that you'd get precisely the 'same average, greater male variance' pattern people claim -- that the slower girls would outperform the slower boys, because they were better behaved and more attentive, but that the brighter boys would end up outperforming the brighter girls when self-confidence and intellectual creativity became important.
123: Where would you like your pony?
And 126: Yep, isn't that the question.
123- have I ever told of the time in kindergarden when we had to color in these pictures as assignment, and I colored the rain pink, and was harshly scolded with "Rain is supposed to be blue, not pink"? I protested that I understood that the rain in the picture was supposed to be colored blue, but I thought it looked nicer in pink, and what the fuck did it matter anyway since I got all the coloring in between the lines and isn't this supposed to be a creative exercise? But I was told this was wrong-wrong-wrong. Let us set aside the point that rain is not, in fact, blue, and instead lament the fact that my career as a famous modern artist died in the classroom that day.
I am however, good at mathematics. So there's that.
125: 60/40 college admissions doesn't mean that there's not still plenty of sexism re. careers (e.g., who is responsible for children?) and disciplines (math and science vs. the humanities) that affects decisions women and men make. We're still in one of those historical periods.
128: To answer that, we need to first know which gender is being failed to a greater degree by its lack of ponies.
130: Heh. I've given PK permission to be messy while doing his homework, which makes it "fun" for him. "Let's color the pink ORANGE!" he says, scribbling in orange crayon. Dude, whatever it takes to get him to stay focused on the fucking assignment, I do not care.
Of course, when it comes to the actual standardized test, this kind of thing isn't going to serve him well. Nor is his ability to think of seventeen different ways to continue the pattern, or his desire to demonstrate *both* ways of cutting the sandwich in half on the *same* picture of a sandwich--"No, that's not quarters, it's two different ways to cut a sandwich in half." "Yes, I know, but your teacher won't." GAH!
128: Well, there *is* a good anti-bias curriculum handbook already available. Whether it's required reading in teachers' colleges, I do not know. But it damn well ought to be.
"Objectively neutral," in discussions about social policy, is a rhetorical red flag, and should be recognized as such.
Part of what I take him to be denying is that it is a social policy issue. Actually, I don't want to put words into his mouth, so let me assume a "JS" who says that Harvard's math department wants the best mathematicians it can find, and that it uses a test that isn't facially discriminatory and uses it without discriminatory intent. It deeply doesn't care about gender, for good or ill. Whether they should be pushed to do something about it is another question, and closer to whatever I was wondering about in my first comment: we're talking about a super-small group here, and I'm not sure that the appropriate level of action is Harvard's math hiring committee.
So let's tell me tell you a story about how senior hiring works at some of the Ivies (including, I believe, Harvard), and we'll all have fun picking out the places where structural sexism could attach. I'll put little stars next to them.
So, as rf-tail-s noted, being tenure-track at Harvard rarely leads to tenure. Why is this? Harvard, in a laudable attempt to avoid insularity, requires that all senior positions be formally opened to competitors.
The details of how this affects tenure varies, but here's one thing that happens with senior hires. The university wants oversight, so they ask the department to provide a shortlist of (say) the top ten scholars in the field the department wants to fill. The department gets the top ten list by polling respected scholars at other universities.* There is some fudging, of course, because the department can craft the job description.** But basically, the department will present ten people who are supremely qualified to the university.
Of course, they probably can't interview ten people. And if the ten are really the best of the best of the best, they probably have good jobs already. So, first, the prudent department will eliminate from consideration those who are considered unmovable*** from their present jobs. Sometimes, this will also eliminate married academics, because the department won't have enough senior-level equivalents to hire both the desired candidate and his or her spouse.**** A lesser consideration is that it's a pain in the ass to authorize a job search in the first place, so it's good to make offers to people who you know are likely to accept the position.
What you get for a shortlist is not the top of the top of the top, but the top of the top who are movable and likely to come. Then they interview candidates*****, and make an offer.
I believe that overt sexism is probably comparatively rare. But there's a deep structural problem in that, as I understand it, women academics are perceived to be less likely to want to move, and that they're also more likely to be married to another academic. The shortlist might be all male as those are the scholars Harvard thinks it has a shot at.
To conclude from this that Harvard has some sort of pipeline to the best minds seems to me to be wrong. It may well be true that aptitude by discipline varies by gender. But to conclude that this so-called fact explains the gender disparity seems to ignore that not only are there many structural reasons that explain the data, but that these structural reasons are something that Harvard has some measure of control over.
What about the rest of Harvard's hiring committees, in fields where it is perhaps less possible to make 'objectively neutral' decisions, like chemistry? And, you know, if I've got a choice between non-sexist grade schools and non-sexist faculty hiring by Harvard, I'll take the grade schools without hesitation. But it's not clear to me either that such a choice is on offer, or that not worrying about Harvard's hiring increases the possibility of non-sexist grade schools at all.
134: I was referring less to the anti-bias part and more to the other stuff, which, while it would definitely be good to do, would require boatloads of money and a serious revamping of our educational system.
94 certainly there are positive feedback loops both internal and external operating. If you do well on the Putnam you are more likely to choose a career which rewards mathematical ability and when you demonstrate mathematical ability such as by doing well on the Putnam you will be granted more opportunities to further a mathematical career. Nevertheless I believe the Putnam exam is measuring a real innate ability which is not at all evenly distributed and which is helpful in many fields.
Btw lots of traits have similar feedback loops. If you are a good basketball player at 12 you are encouraged to keep practicing and developing your ability. You are more likely to get into a good high school program and this will give you a better chance to get into a good college program which means you are more likely to be a high draft pick which means you are more likely to succeed in the NBA. So it is common for the environment to amplify innate differences.
137: Cool, actual knowledge about the process.
140: Yo, Jimbo: any thoughts about the question I asked you in 121? To wit, if you don't feel like scrolling upward: "Is this statement: 'Certainly, whatever it is [that causes the overrepresentation of men in math professing] could be biological or environmental. My point was that it can't be completely fixed by a lack of sexism at the faculty-hiring stage.' a fair representation of what you're trying to say? And if not, how so?"
As the product of an undergraduate Ivy League mathematics department, I'd say my personal observation -- only marginally less credible than Larry Summers' -- supports the idea that math (and its bastard cousin physics) skews male at the top level of performance. I'm making up numbers here, but of about fifteen graduating majors, I'd say about four of us were pretty good and two beyond that were likely to have productive careers as mathematicians if they went that route; there was one woman at that B+ level (where I'd put myself), and the soopa-doopa mathies were both guys. I have no idea what they're up to now, but I believe all the pretty decent folks ended up working in computer-related fields one way or another. Women in mathematics seem to my incredibly limited knowledge to cluster in commutative algebra (quite possibly I'm wrong on this, or perhaps it has to do with women-friendly departments being strong in this area).
Even if the Summers/Pinker hypothesis is true for math, it doesn't change the fact that Harvard's hiring record for women in the sciences was bad and got worse under Summers, that his blithe suggestion that sexism was less important than gender dimorphism wasn't stiupid, or that this tells us anything about other natural sciences. Also, I frequently like to imagine Emmy Noether coming back from the dead and feeding Summers his stupid Mommy Truck.
138: Not a believer in the "Lump of Outrage" theory?
The 121/142 statement seems painfully, obviously, correct; whether Jim acknowledges it or not.
Look, it wouldn't surprise me if math geekdom, whether by talent or extreme nurture starting in 8th grade, skewed male. That doesn't do a damned thing to explain the rest of the sciences. You don't need to be a Fields medallist to do hard sciences.
real innate ability which is not at all evenly distributed ≠ sex linked.
Fair enough.
Is it a bigger problem that my co-workers have discussions about who the five hottest women in our company - body only, not personality, I shit you not - or that women are not socialized to be engineers, or are they actually the same problem?
Ding to 147, and I again point out Summers' complete non-answer when he was questioned about the Rutgers chemistry department's specific efforts to recruit women who were unhappy in their home departments.
I think the second is the bigger problem. There's nothing innately horrible about engineers, what you're describing is a kind of behavior that's common in men who are or feel isolated from women. With more women peers, that kind of behavior should resolve. But I don't know quite how extravagantly bad your co-workers are, I suppose they could be driving possible women away.
A lesser consideration is that it's a pain in the ass to authorize a job search in the first place, so it's good to make offers to people who you know are likely to accept the position.
Cala, sorry, I'm really not following here. You "authorize a job search" for a position, not a candidate, right? So from that perspective it should be immaterial whether you then interview 3 candidates who are you are sure would take the position if offered, or 5 candidates (2 of whom might not accept it).
I can imagine a situation in which it's considered embarassing to make an offer that isn't accepted, and so people avoid interviewing candidates that they think might not automatically say Yes if given an offer. But that's a different problem.
Witt, at some places, if you make an offer, and it doesn't pan out, the search is considered officially closed, and must be re-authorized from the beginning.
if I've got a choice between non-sexist grade schools and non-sexist faculty hiring by Harvard, I'll take the grade schools without hesitation.
So this isn't actually the choice I was thinking about. I was thinking more Generation Awesome-ish: I'd like a significant push for chycks at not-Harvard in the math departments. (I don't know what program would accomplish that.) I believe that most people teach in the way that they're taught, and I'm willing to believe that we are leaving a lot of female talent on the table by not behaving in some different way towards them. But we can't see what we need to do; only a class of female mathematicians will, through trial and error, sort through the appropriate way to fix things to get to the next step. (I'm suspicious of studies of pedagogy.) So we should be pushing for that class. And what matters most, now, is not the name of the institution, but the number of women in the field.
Similarly, I care less about female Op-Ed folk at the NYT, but was getting increasingly irritated that GFR wasn't running a mag, and am getting increasingly irritated that Beyerstein hasn't been snapped up somewhere as, at a minimum, whatever Plumer's job is now or was at his prior place of work.
Also, I left out a step. The department agrees on a candidate, and then recommends it to the university to make an offer, then the university works out the finances and the paperwork and the negotiation. This takes a few months. If you're under pressure to hire quickly, you don't want to take chances on maybes.
It's not just embarrassing to offer a position that isn't accepted, it can be a long, drawn-out, expensive and painful disappointment. My department spent over TWO YEARS trying to woo this one dude, who was the top pick for his particular field. I knew a grad student who left my program to study with him; he dicked her over by taking that year off, prior to considering my university's offer. She just ended up wasting a year and then coming back. He dawdled, demanded more money, demanded a gig for his wife, dawdled, dawdled some more, and THEN ACCEPTED A GIG AT ANOTHER UNIVERSITY. By that time everyone was relieved he didn't take our offer, we all hated him so much.
At some places, if you make an offer, and it doesn't pan out, the search is considered officially closed, and must be re-authorized from the beginning.
Thanks.
From that outside, that sounds colossally stupid. I am sure there are internal reasons. Still, sounds like the college-admissions discussion we had here a while back -- funny how the way a process is structured (early admissions, whatever) can influence so much else.
Hmmm. That's reasonable, but I think I disagree with it. Oh, not that not-Harvard isn't important too, but when you leave the very elite positions off the table (We're going to worry about the representation of women, just not at Harvard or the NYT), I think you reinforce the assumption that women really can't cut it at the very top levels. And with that assumption still in play, it's easy for gains at lower levels to get rolled back.
But I actually don't know. My instinct is to worry about Harvard and the NYT, but you could be right.
Yeah, senior hires, particularly these kinds of hires by invitation, are a monumentally more elaborate pain in the ass for the hiring institution than an ordinary search.
Maybe we should worry about MIT and CalTech and Berkeley (say) instead, who for all I know already have better math programs than Harvard does, and let Harvard specifically go rot.
Oh, they usually aren't extravagantly bad in public. And (of course?) the ones who are the crudest in semi-private are the most likely to give into the "oh, won't you please help me by doing this feature that I need done" followed by batting of eyelashes.
But I think the second is the bigger problem, too.
139: Indeed.
135: Here you go. It's really good; it's made a big difference in how I talk to PK about stuff.
149: I think they're part of the same problem.
137, I think, has answered 136, but I want to tackle it anyway:
Part of what I take him to be denying is that it is a social policy issue. Actually, I don't want to put words into his mouth, so let me assume a "JS" who says that Harvard's math department wants the best mathematicians it can find, and that it uses a test that isn't facially discriminatory and uses it without discriminatory intent.
That doesn't mean that it isn't, in fact, discriminatory; moreover, it's been shown that hiring practices, faculty support, and tenure practices *do* discriminate. So if someone were to say this, they would be wrong.
we're talking about a super-small group here, and I'm not sure that the appropriate level of action is Harvard's math hiring committee.
Is there only one appropriate level of action? Why is this not a problem that should be addressed everywhere and anywhere it crops up? And given that one of the major problems for women entering fields where they've been historically absent is a lack of mentoring and a lack of role models, I'd argue that it absolutely should be addressed at these high levels that affect only small groups. Kids look for heroes, and seeing people at the very top who have done things that look interesting is a good way to encourage interest in a field, and a good way to help people perservere when the going gets rough.
This is quite apart from the question of whether or not, if one cares first and foremost about getting the best possible mathemeticians, it might not be a smart thing to look for talented people under rocks, as well as picking those that are just lying around on the well-trodden path.
119, 114 I am having trouble keeping up so my responses may be out of synch with the latest comments. Regarding 114 I agree with it as far as it goes but I am making somewhat stronger claims. For example I believe if Harvard was hiring tenured mathematicians solely on the basis of demonstrated mathematical research ability this would produce a department that was at least 90% male.
God, waiting for that fucker to make up his mind screwed so many people over. We couldn't hire anybody while we waited to see whether the department would have to take on him and his wife. A junior faculty dude in a similar field put off his tenure review; grad students switched disciplines in frustration. SUCH a pain.
160: I'm all in favor of letting Harvard go rot, but you still haven't explained what you've done with all the female pundits.
It's sort of stupid, but chances are, by the time the department's agreed on making an offer, the university's dicked around agreeing on the department's recommendation, and the offer's been announced, a year or so has passed. Chances are your second and third choices, if they were desirable and mobile, aren't waiting for your call, but have moved on somewhere else anyway.
discussions about who the five hottest women in our company
Wait, is there something wrong with this? I've never been anywhere that such behavior didn't occur. And women have these conversations too, although admittedly for some reason women seem less inclined to put things in ranked lists -- probably too much math for them.
One of my coworkers at my last job created NCAA-tournament style brackets of the women in the office, complete with little cut-out pictures and seedings for the matchups. He then had the guys fill them out to determine who was hottest. He got in trouble for that.
I guess part of why I'm willing to believe that mathematics is tied to gender is that mental illness often is, and a lot of top-notch mathematicians are batshit crazy. (This is also one of the reasons I don't think it's a particularly relevant test case.) Nash was schizophrenic, and Godel may well have been as well. Erdös was, umm, Erdös. Fields Medal winner Richard Borcherds has been diagnosed as having Asperger's. Grothendieck is probably the greatest living mathematician, and he's spent fifteen years herding goats in self-imposed exile in Spain or something.
My instinct is to worry about Harvard and the NYT, but you could be right.
My instinct is exactly the opposite. I feel like most of the innovation and real change happens at the second-tier level ("We Try Harder"), and that the second-tier level is fed by people who rise up out of the tiers below that. If UVA decides that it's time to firmly establish themselves as better than Michigan, they're more likely to make a concerted push to poach dissatisfied women than an MIT trying to retain their top position.
The thing is, though, that places like Harvard are leaders in higher education. When Harvard gets rid of early admissions, a bunch of other places follow suit. The same thing happens when a top school takes the problem of recruiting and retaining women (and minorities, and gays, and so on) seriously.
152: It doesn't work that way, not only b/c you might lose the line, but b/c really courting a candidate costs a lot of money up front, what with campus visits (often plural, sometimes with family). Also, you're competing with other schools, so if you take a while to work down to candidate four or five, someone else has probably grabbed them. I don't know from Harvard, but most of the schools I do know about limit themselves to two or three top candidates, who they invite out and wine and dine in quick succession; then they make an offer to one. If it's turned down quickly, fine; they have time to make a second offer. But it can take a month or more to negotiate with your first choice, and if you lose them, choices 2 and 3 might be gone, and then you're looking at digging into the backup list. And people's egos get involved ("well, but wouldn't we really rather wait another year, rather than *settling*?"), and you're stuck with a decision of throwing more money at that year's search or starting anew next year, plus the Dean may or may not have committed resources to another desired hire which means she might be wanting you to get someone on the cheap now, and so on.
It's a really weird system.
163: If you agree with that, then we have no particular disagreement over Summers. I've that his claim that biology determined a significant portion of the underrepresentation of women in science faculty was poorly supported, and you don't seem to be arguing that it was well supported. No one's arguing with you that there are not, under current conditions, many more men than women in the elite mathematical hiring pool.
158: So, partly I think of this as the Harold Ford issue. Harold Ford (dad) was a black politician. Harold Ford Jr. is a politician who's black. (As near as I can make out, there are lots of political Dems who don't like Jr., but they all recognize his pure political talent. Obama's a little bit the same way, but without the dislike (and without quite the same talent).) And Jr. can be a politician who's black because dad (and much of his cohort) was a black politician. And, to be explicit, I don't think the only important thing is the difference in attitudes about race today vs. 1970. Something relating to social capital is going on, and you can't know it before you know it, if that makes sense.
is there something wrong with this? I've never been anywhere that such behavior didn't occur.
Bingo.
(And yes, women do it too; but given that women as a class don't have the sort of power that, say, makes men fear sexual harassment, it's less of a problem.)
167: I feel like there are meaningful differences among hotness-ranking behaviors. This one bothered me; not to the extent of a spreadsheet, but still.
171: "I've that his claim" should be "I've been arguing that his claim". Editing error.
I've been stacking them up out back, like cordwood. This way we'll have plenty come winter.
There were other aggravating factors, one of which may have been my shitty mood at the time.
And people can do borderline things in a goofy or an assholish way. If it came off creepy to you, it probably was.
176: Smart thinking. Harvard should snap you right up. (Otherwise we'll be back to letting them rot.)
168: Hee. So if Harvard really wants the best mathemeticians, they should really be developing more programs to hire crazy people.
The cordwood-stacking R. notes that if you lack a wife (in the Judy Syfers sense) and are batshit crazy it is less likely to produce an outcome that charms and delights and stars Russell Crowe. Paul Erdös managed it somehow, but I doubt that a community is capable of dealing with more than one of him at a time.
147: Cala, math is less skewed that some technical areas though. Particularly physics, and some engg areas.
Women in mathematics seem to my incredibly limited knowledge to cluster in commutative algebra
Huh. What the fuck? That's weird. There were only two young, tenured professors in my math department, (one of which was my role model/mentor-type), and they were both in this field. What gives?
And it may be true that at the very very highest levels of math insanity and geekery, it skews male. So what? There's hundreds of mathematics departments all over the country, and women are underrepresented in all of them.
126, again this seems to assume there is some cutoff after which increased mathematical ability doesn't matter. I don't think this is true for chemistry, engineering or even biology although how much it matters will vary. It matters whether it takes you one hour or two days to do a calculation or debug a computer program you need. It matters if you have to redo all the statistical calculations for a paper because a referee points out you botched something the first time. It matters if you have an intuitive feel that something is wrong if a calculation is way off.
"young, tenured professors" s/b "young, tenured women professors"
I'm starting to suspect Shearer is Yamamoto, or at least they both suffer the same affliction.
87: Otoh, Mumford told Harvard to piss up a rope and went to Brown after they annoyed him.
183: Most of the female mathematicians I know are not in commutative algebra. Does that help?
147, mathematical ability is an important asset in many scientific fields. It is very important in physics. Richard Feynman and Kenneth Wilson are Putnam winners who later won the Nobel prize in Physics.
By the way, I have a problem with the idea that discouraging females in primary and secondary math leads to them having trouble later on. Mostly because performance at arithmetic, algebra, trig, calculus at high school and introductory college level really aren't good predictors for mathematical ability. I'd more lean to this sort of history leading college-age girls to not ever trying a `real' math course.
189: With the exception of mathematical physics, that isn't particularly true. Meaning that you can be at the top of most scientific fields without a deep understanding of much mathematics (depending on the field, the amount varies).
I'm not saying it isn't an asset, but most scientists don't know or need much math. Same goes for engineers.
189: You can not infer that insane mathematical ability is needed to succeed in physics because Nobel-prize winning physicists had insane mathematical ability. You're saying A shows trait X, so trait X is required to be like A.
False.
171, are you going to make me look up what Summers actually said? As I recall it was something like an innate difference in mathematical ability is a plausible explanation (at least in part) for the shortage of females at the top level in mathematics and related fields. With which I agree.
190: it may not directly make them worse, but it makes them less likely to get better by discouraging them from taking the classes required to do so. I think the effect is fairly similar.
again [asking about the underrepresentation of women among the faculty of the chemistry and biology departments at Harvard and the engineering school] seems to assume there is some cutoff after which increased mathematical ability doesn't matter
It assumes no such thing. In order for it to assume that, it would have to be true, among other things, that there is no skill sex-linked to being female, especially at the tails of a bell curve, which is of increasing or constant marginal utility as one moves towards the most prestigious positions in chemistry, physics, or other professions in which we're suggesting the relevance of the innate math problem solving ability. Is there some reason to make such an assumption other than the current observed performance of women in reaching prestigious posts in those fields? Is that an adequate reason to make such an assumption, given what we know about socialization?
192: Awesomely correct, though added points if you had said, "Hitler was a vegeterian."
192: It happens to be true about some areas of physics (that you need some mathematical chops); but you're right, it has nothing to do with Putnams or Nobels.
I think it is fair to say that the highest results on Putnam are a fair predictor of the sort of problem solving that is useful in both maths and mathematical physics, but that's about it.
I don't know that the problem is discouragement anymore, but lack of encouragement/mentoring, because people just assume that girls don't want to go into math. Thinking back to high school, I was a pretty high profile theatre/music kinda kid, and I think my teachers just assumed I would want to do that in college. I was a great student in my math courses, but no teacher ever encouraged me to pursue math. In college, I ended up changing my major from theatre to math, and I didn't feel that I was treated badly, but that no one cared whether I went on in Mathematics. None of my profs tried to get me to go to PhD programs or do research with them, even though I kept winning awards and getting As in everything. I read a recommendation from a professor in which he said that I was the top student in both of the upper-level courses I'd taken from him. You'd think that would make me the kind of student he'd want to encourage to get a PhD. Nope.
183, the skew is most pronounced at the very highest levels but it exists thoughout the top portion of the distribution of mathematical ability. So you would expect male skew in all mathematics departments and that it would be greatest in the top departments.
198: So you are saying that mathematical ability is male-skewed for everyone who's better than average at math? That's a pretty broad claim to make. I'd like to see some support.
I'm hung up on the idea that a young woman who has made it through a decent Ph.D. program is somehow likely to be forty times slower at checking the math in her chemistry journal submission. Alternately, I'm hung up on the idea that the skills that translate to doing well on the Putnam make one forty times faster at throwing together a quick C++ program.
Anyway, that it would be greatest in the top department isn't even true. I'll find a crappy math department with a low ratio, hold on.
that it would be greatest in the top department
I wouldn't even waste your time looking to refute this - there are clearly many many more ways to have a non-top department than there are to have a top department.
James, the problem with your idea is this:
It is a plausible explainition, but there is no reason to assume it is the most probable.
You claim this skew exists, but all of the methods by which we might measure the skew as an inherent quality are compromised. We can certainly talk about the empirical distribution of research mathematicians, but any logical path back from that to inherent abilities of, say, college freshmen, is simply flawed.
You may believe it's true, but you have no direct evidence that it is true, and the indirect evidence is the very sort you have to be careful with --- lots of confounding factors.
I know a lot of mathematicians of both genders and there certainly is a notable skew in positions, etc. With what I know about how the discipline works, I'm also not ready to accept that inherent ability is the key to this though, and I've never heard anyone give a solid argument as to why I should.
I'm wondering why everyone thinks they can refute 147 by saying that other fields require math when I said, charitably interpreted, that you don't need to be the tops of the mathematical profession (i.e. Fields medallist) to do hard sciences.
I certainly wasn't saying that you didn't need to be reasonably talented at mathematics, but there's a lot of room between 'Fields medalist' and 'adept with calculus and statistics.' I have a number of friends who are competent, educated engineers who could not win a top-level mathematics competition, but seem to have no problem remembering to carry the one in their day to day work.
Cala, I think everyone on commenting (with one notable exception) agrees with you on that point.
I'm going to celebrate thinking about Grothendieck and the Fields Medal for the first time in ages by going and reading some French comic books.
191 said:
"I'm not saying it isn't an asset, but most scientists don't know or need much math. Same goes for engineers."
We appear to be talking about two different things. I am talking about the ability to solve problems quickly that the Putnam exam rewards. This is different from the amount of the large body of existing mathematical knowledge that you are familiar with. Scientists and engineers may be unfamiliar with large areas of modern mathematics (as are most mathematicians as specialization is the rule) but they do need to be comfortable with the mathematics used in their field.
206 makes no sense. Comfortable with the mathematics used in their field != winning the Putnam prize. Plenty of people are quick problem solvers who would do poorly on the Putnam.
204: Cala, I don't know if you meant me or not --- because we agree, but I wasn't very clear. I was (later) pointing out that mathematical ability isn't that big a factor for most sciences, too.
I was also, somewhat inarticulately trying to say that I'm not sure the skew in math and the skew in hard sciences is really that related. People tend to lump math in with sciences, but it really isn't that similar in the way it's taught, learned, or practiced. I'm not at all sure that discovering the reason for, say, different enrollment ratios in mechanical engineering and chemical engineering would tell you much of anything about the enrollment ratios in math. This is speculative, of course.
Wouldn't waste your time because JSs statement is clearly false.
And yes. There is a lack of female scientists and engineers. There is also a lack of female mathematics professors in top departments. These lacks may not (indeed, I'd say probably don't) have the same causes. If someone doesn't want to address the former because effective solutions will include things like "going out of your way to encourage women to enter into these fields, even at the possible theoretical expense of some men somewhere", it makes sense for them to focus the discussion on the latter, where that might not be an effective course of action.
206: Actually we aren't; while you have the right idea that the Putnam doesn't test mathematical knowledge per se, you are wrong about applying it to even hard scientists. I did word that rather sloppily though, sorry (doing too many things at once).
For the most part, when scientists and engineers use mathematics they are doing something fundamentally different from what mathematicians do, and from that subset of what mathematicians do that the Putnam is trying to test. By the way, the Putnam doesn't test the ability to solve problems quickly so much as ti tests the ability to solve certain types of problems quickly. There is an important difference.
For that reason, while a scientist does need to get a comfortable day-to-day knowledge of the mathematics that is being used in their field. This is always pretty narrow, and depending on the field it may be quite shallow as well (from a mathematicians point of view). Assuming they have mastered whatever is needed, there are far, far more important factors at work in determining whether or not they reach the top of their field.
Cala, JM, B -- wow, I have had a sheltered life. I know about delayed hiring procedures in the public sector, but I honestly had no idea that the design of the academic hiring process and not just the occasional outlying instance was so...um...hm. Let me not be disparaging.
I had no idea that was the design, anyway.
On another note, JBS arguments aside: This type of discussion comes up over and over. I always want to get to the practical question of what do we DO? So, let me ask: What do you all do, in your respective fields, to counteract whatever institutional biases exist? (Not limited to gender. And for this discussion, let's stipulate that you as intelligent people have good empirical evidence that such bias exists.)
Assuming a certain number of women at level X, where X in a man would match people like him with a job at University A, are we capturing all of the women? Given leblanc's story, I strongly suspect not. Yet this is, far and away, the most obvious and least objected to form of affirmative-action--extra effort in finding suitable candidates.
To the battlements!
What is the Putnam? People seem to be nodding along as though it's some standard that all young people are tested on that proves problem solving ability? Did I miss a test I was supposed to take? Because if it's like other tests, it will be my bitch, ovaries or no ovaries.
I was also, somewhat inarticulately trying to say that I'm not sure the skew in math and the skew in hard sciences is really that related. People tend to lump math in with sciences, but it really isn't that similar in the way it's taught, learned, or practiced. I'm not at all sure that discovering the reason for, say, different enrollment ratios in mechanical engineering and chemical engineering would tell you much of anything about the enrollment ratios in math. This is speculative, of course.
Anecdotally, I suspect this is correct. Pure mathematics is a different subject matter than the sort of calculus taught to even high-level engineers. (Having taken both, and having done better in 'mathy' math than engineering math.) Also, the other selection pressures that hit some of the hard sciences - lab, 80 hours on your feet, hazardous chemicals, etc - don't apply to math or theoretical physics, so even if they did use the same brain-parts, I would expect to see different results.
212: Hope I didn't sound snippy. Not many people know about the ridiculousness of a senior hiring process, and it seems to me the sort of thing that if people knew about it, would affect their intuitions on whether Harvard or anywhere else can say 'Oh yes, we only hire the best of the best, which we attain by meditating on the Form of Academe, so sry, no ovaries in our hallowed halls.'
It's a good hiring process to the extent that it keeps an unscrupulous department from hiring friends or promoting from within to the point where no fresh ideas come in. But it is slow as molasses in January, and pretty much a dance of politics the entire time.
Cala: yeah, selection pressures are very different. Also, even though for example in some sense the usual real analysis series and a calculus series cover a lot of the same ground, they really are in different worlds. Kind of like the different ways that a chemical engineer and an architect might learn about concrete. An engineering or physics student who had done very well in a complete calculus series would be almost completely unprepared for an advanced analysis course.
There are lots and lots of differences. In some ways an undergraduate course in pure math is more like humanities or arts courses than science courses, I think.
It's an annual competition open to undergraduates, Cala. Play along at home!
I would back up 217, and I'm interested in whether m. leblanc feels the same way.
SCMT, I at one point in this thread almost wrote a really long comment about Major League Baseball expanding throughout its history where and how it was looking for the players with the highest level of baseball playing talent, such that the league has grown increasingly diverse on every metric (except gender, and I would be not totally surprised if the league, on a reasonable time horizon features a woman or two who, through an odd (submariner-type) delivery can strike out men) and wondering if math departments have expanded where they are looking in the same way.
Which is a long way, though not nearly as long as long as the original comment which would have summarized the actual history, discussed the difference between observed and true talent, and considered what it meant to make it into the MLB (some # of plate appearances/innings pitched per year, varying for history) of saying I agree with the battlement call.
Huh. How does that not involve mathematics?
"That" being the Putnam? It is mathematics -- who said it wasn't?
and furthermore, crap, i think this thread may have shot my anonymity before i had a chance to figure out if I cared.
It's math, but it's designed to require a very low level of specific mathematical knowledge and be more a problem-solving/proof-finding test. Set theory, calc, trig, and linear algebra, rather than (say) Galois theory or real analysis.
It seemed that the discussion had turned to how it was more about problem-solving ability. I'm still good at puzzles, but I think I can only solve two of those Putnam problems, because (sob) my mathematical ability is nowhere near where it was nine years ago (when I might have been able to get three right.)
Cala: Of course it involves math. But it is designed to try to avoid relying on a mathematical education. The idea is that if you are good at this sort of thing, you are good at some of what makes mathematics hard --- and you can be taught a bunch of details.
James has been presenting it as a predictor of success, but it is a better predictor the other way.
Oh, I bet 221 is refering to "while you have the right idea that the Putnam doesn't test mathematical knowledge per se...." That bit?
223: The various posters are pretty good about yanking that sort of stuff if you'll only point it out.
Do all of these Putnam problems rely on seeing a trick or a move?
228: ah, it would take work to dig up the various bits. oh well.
199, for the male skew in the upper level of the mathematical ability distribution see for example Sex Differences in Mathematical Ability: Fact Or Artifact by Benbow and Stanley (Science 1980). Benbow is not universally admired, for example see here which argues among other things that the skew is decreasing.
230: lot's of them have nice non-obvious solutions, yes.
Hope I didn't sound snippy.
Not at all. (And I was trying not to sound as judgmental and dismissive -- of academia, not you -- as I was feeling.)
Not many people know about the ridiculousness of a senior hiring process, and it seems to me the sort of thing that if people knew about it, would affect their intuitions on whether Harvard or anywhere else can say 'Oh yes, we only hire the best of the best, which we attain by meditating on the Form of Academe, so sry, no ovaries in our hallowed halls.'
Yes, exactly. There has to be a name for this process -- irrational attribution of rationality? Something more euphonious. But all the time, people observe something from the outside and attribute more logic, fairness and predictability than actually exist. That becomes an "intuition."
No big deal if you're standing at the water coolor talking about who's winning on American Idol. A potentially big deal if you're talking over the back fence about why every person chosen for the (union, pensioned) building trades apprenticeship this year was a white guy.
And a potentially huge deal if you are on the hiring committee.
(The Lancet study brouhaha is another example. Sometimes an inherent belief drives so-called intuition, not the other way around: I feel that I haven't been reading about 1,000 deaths/day in Iraq, therefore it can't be happening. Underlying thought: Because the world is predictable and deaths are always in the newspaper; if they're not in the paper, they're not happening.)
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence? Or something related.
As to what does one do, I dunno, encourage the hiring of women into roles in which they are traditionally underrepresented and in which you have influence over hiring decisions? Contribute $1000 to a scholarship for female computer science majors? Volunteer to talk to an 8th grade math class? Hell if I know.
God this argument. I'm from a generation before m leblanc. In my high school, the math/science culture was so hostile to girls that I never went beyond geometry, because I didn't want to sit in the same room with those creeps. Yet I scored 700 on the math SAT. (pre-inflation, bitches!). Maybe I could have done math, certainly I could have done science at some level, but I made the decision not to try in 10th grade (and my parents and counselors were fine with that, since they assumed I would grow up to be a housewife). I'm sure there were plenty of other girls like me at the time, and still are now. (Except for the housewifery assumption, of course.)
Summers' hypothesis is meaningless and pointless because the discrimination and cultural biases that affect girl students from their earliest years make it impossible to test. There's no way to know what's being lost.
217, 219even though for example in some sense the usual real analysis series and a calculus series cover a lot of the same ground, they really are in different worlds
I agree with this absolutely. I knew several people in college thought they were great at math until they got to, say, real analysis, and didn't get it at all, and either struggled through the pure math courses, or changed majors. Usually the people who excel in real analysis are a subset of the people who excel in a regular calc series, but not the same set. In calculus I was just a regular good student, but when I started taking analysis and advanced algebra courses I was suddenly a star. So, it's really different kinds of thinking.
201, this would be on average. I would expect the bottom half of mathematics departments to have a greater fraction of women faculty than the top half. Of course there will be individual exceptions.
232: I've seen that science paper before. As noted in a previous comment this is demonstration of an empirical distribution, not for actual ability. There are a number of problems with using SAT scores etc. as proxy for actual abilities, of course, but these aren't nearly as bad as the problems between drawing a dotted line from entry level testing like SAT to an imbalance in, say full tenure positions. At the years of this study, even moreso.
Far too many confounding factors for comfort there, so you can't conclude anything. Any mathematician or statistician will understand that, of course, as do these psychologists: the paper correctly points out that while they favour this hypothesis the data they present supports numerous other hypothesis.
236: Interesting to hear your story, mcmc. I think one problem is that girls who are talented in several areas tend to be funneled into the non-mathy-sciency ones. And most people who are really good at math? Tend to be good at other stuff, too (not just saying this out of self-interest). So the girls end up doing other stuff.
I've been thinking about this encouragement problem. One of the big problems with not having women in faculty positions is that there's no one to encourage the young women, often. I think faculty tend to see particular promise in people who remind them of their young selves, and start a mentoring relationship. When you don't remind anyone of their young self, because you're a girl and they never were, there's no one there to take special interest in you.
237: Exactly. At my undergrad university, calculus grades weren't even accepted for consideration in the honours math program, because the department didn't consider the courses mathematical enough. Top marks in the difficult 2nd year modern algebra course would get you in regardless of any other math marks.
I would expect the bottom half of mathematics departments to have a greater fraction of women faculty than the top half
Why on earth would you think that to be the case? I'd like to see a single mathematics department with more women faculty than men.
203, college freshmen can take the Putnam exam and the results show a large male skew.
Usually the people who excel in real analysis are a subset of the people who excel in a regular calc series, but not the same set. In calculus I was just a regular good student, but when I started taking analysis and advanced algebra courses I was suddenly a star. So, it's really different kinds of thinking.
I was nearly the opposite, or at least not a subset. I'm not great at calculus, but I was leaps and bounds ahead when I took 'proof math.' I thought it was an aberration, based on the size of the engineering calc course, until I had to take an advanced logic class in graduate school. Apparently I have the sort of brain that can't remember how to complete the square but is perfectly happy with assuming that n = k+1.
I have become progessively dumber the longer I've stayed in graduate school.
243: What does that show absent any controls on who has taken math classes in high school? (Next, we'll prove that public school kids just aren't as talented at math by Putnam results.)
242, .2 is a greater fraction than .1.
246: Oh, ok, I misunderstood what you said. You're still wrong though, in general.
243: The fact that you seem to think this in any way reputes what I said in 203 demonstrates it is highly unlikely that you, at least, are a mathematician.
I'll slow it down for you: There are several problems with using Putnam results as a proxy for mathematical ability, but we don't even need to go into them. The simple fact that the exam is both voluntary and recruited opens up so many sociological factors that it simply cannot be considered solid evidence for anything inherent, period.
Recruited is right, for the Putnam. I didn't even know what the Putnam was until I was about to graduate. I wish I'd taken it.
244: That isn't so unusual. The thing about calculus is that it is a required course for so many majors that there are a lot of people taking it anyway, even if they wouldn't really choose to. Many good discrete mathematicians don't do that well at continuous variable stuff (some because they hate it, some because they can't visualize it). Even good analysis students included a fair number of students that didn't do very well at calculus, via finding it boring or disliking the superficial treatment or rote exercises, etc.
To say that the Putnam is a test of innate mathematical ability is just flat out wrong. From the Putnam website:
It is expected that the contestant will be familiar with the formal theories embodied in undergraduate mathematics. It is assumed that such training, designed for mathematics and physical science majors, will include somewhat more sophisticated mathematical concepts than is the case in minimal courses. Thus the differential equations course is presumed to include some references to qualitative existence theorems and subtleties beyond the routine solution devices. Questions will be included that cut across the bounds of various disciplines, and self-contained questions that do not fit into any of the usual categories may be included. It will be assumed that the contestant has acquired a familiarity with the body of mathematical lore commonly discussed in mathematics clubs or in courses with such titles as “survey of the foundations of mathematics.” It is also expected that the self-contained questions involving elementary concepts from group theory, set theory, graph theory, lattice theory, number theory, and cardinal arithmetic will not be entirely foreign to the contestant’s experience.
Does that sound like a test of innate ability to you?
Come on, m. leblanc. By 'innate ability' we always mean 'member of the Princeton mathematics club.'
204 said:
"I certainly wasn't saying that you didn't need to be reasonably talented at mathematics, but there's a lot of room between 'Fields medalist' and 'adept with calculus and statistics.' I have a number of friends who are competent, educated engineers who could not win a top-level mathematics competition, but seem to have no problem remembering to carry the one in their day to day work."
Mathematical problem solving ability lies on a continuous scale. Just because your friends don't have enough of it to win a Putnam prize doesn't mean they don't have a lot more of it than the average person.
I am claiming there is no cutoff after which more of this ability stops helping you in fields that use mathematics but how much it helps will vary by field.
249: I shared an office in grad school for a while with a guy who made a stir by being on both the winning ACM team and a top 5 finisher (3rd, if I recall correctly) individually in the Putnam, the same year.
On the other hand, I happen to know that this guy was identified as a promising math student in a major metro area during junior high school. As a result, a mathematician from one of the best schools in the country voluntarily met with him an 3 or so other students once a week while they were in high school. Would the same opportunity have been given to him if he were female? In 1980? In 1970? Hard to say.
Of course, when he showed up (at that same school, no fools they) for undergrad studies the Putnam team coach was anticipating him.
Mr. Shearer has a high stake in the importance of the Putnam competition, seeing as that he scored quite highly in it four times himself.
So, just to clarify, JBS, we are not saying that doing great on the Putnam isn't awesome. The fact that one person did well in the competition means that person definitely has mathematical ability and promise. However, in the aggregate, the fact that male college students do better than female college students indicates nothing about their respective "innate" mathematical ability.
Did I just do bad blog etiquette?
254 makes me sad. I am just remembering now that in college, there were a couple high school students in some of my advanced classes, I think Analysis I and II, and Modern Algebra. These students had been picked out and tracked into taking college classes. And they were all boys.
255: Oh, it's a shame he isn't more generally able to think carefully, or doesn't choose to. Then he would realize some of what he has said here is quite illogical.
I think I mentioned earlier that the strength of something like Putnam results really isn't a very good predictor the way JBS is trying to use it. It's quite a bit better the other way round.
To wit:
Doing very well on a Putnam doesn't mean you will be a particularly good mathematician.
Being a particularly good mathematician doesn't mean you would have/did do well on the Putnam exam.
However, doing terribly on the Putnam exam is a pretty good indicator that you are unlikely to be a particularly good mathematician.
254: Perhaps this will cheer you up then: When I was there the same school had a `women in mathematics' group who had a number of outreach efforts to undergraduates and high school students. I'm not sure if this has borne much fruit (how can you tell?) yet but it is an effort.
Jesus, this focus on the Putnam. Look, if we accept that the Putnam is the best and only measure of one's promise as a research mathematician, that still doesn't explain why it is that women are so systemically underrepresented in the hard sciences. Vague handwaving that chemistry or astronomy requires the exact set of skills that the Putnam measures and that there's nothing, nothing else going on except that women aren't capable of doing math at a professional non-mathematician's level strikes me as about as accurate as claiming that Sam Bowie is in the Hall of Fame and Andre Ware won three Super Bowls.
Mathematical problem solving ability lies on a continuous scale. Just because your friends don't have enough of it to win a Putnam prize doesn't mean they don't have a lot more of it than the average person.
You're either missing my point or I'm not explaining it. More mathematical problem solving ability will always help, no doubt. But for that to be enough of a factor to explain the alleged lack of discrimination on the part of hard science departments, it isn't enough to say that mathematics is on a continuum. You need the further claim that the level of mathematics required to excel in chemistry or biology is such that we would expect to see a marked difference in male-female performance. (Visually, we'd have to be on the 'tail' of the bell curve, not in the middle.) I am challenging not that mathematical ability lies on a continuum, but that the level of mathematical skill you'd need to succeed, say, in electrical engineering, is beyond the reach of most bright women.
My friends are indeed brighter than the average person, but they aren't geniuses. I can run mathematical circles around them, and I ended up in the humanities. I don't think I'm that rare a bird, and so when someone says 'women aren't succeeding in chemistry because they're not as good at math according to a disputed bell curve theory', I'm unlikely to take that seriously.
Also of note: recently the Putnam prize has been won by women. Either they're complete outliers, freaks of nature, or that as schools have become more egalitarian, more women are discovered as mathematical talents. Or we're evolving *really* fast.
But Steve, you're ignoring the indisputable causal link between performance on the Putnam and induction into the upper eschelons of punditry/my stockpile of fuel for the winter.
259: The focus on the Putnam is a bit of a side-track, but it is useful, because it is concrete and it is flawed as a proxy for mathematical ability. Generalizing that one may realize how all the others are flawed also, and how all these measurements aren't telling people like JBS what they would like them to be telling them.
Oh and Steve, the idea that mathematical ability is the deciding factor in most areas of science is just a bad idea. It's so inane that it really isn't worth worrying about.
Anectdotal contribution: I more than one bright young woman who changed there field (if not discipline) in or after grad school because they found it unwelcoming and misogynist. One of them went to a workshop where she was the only woman with about 40 or so mostly middle-aged or older men. Who all promptly ignored her or were creepy. People are sometimes dismissive of grad students at these things, but she said the other (male) students were much better received. After that she thought about changing fields.
Now I'm not sure how often this sort of thing happens, but you can't tell me that at least *some* careers haven't been changed because of it, because I know some people it's happened to. Come to think of it, she did pretty well on the Putnam too, if I recall correctly.
255, and 248
It appears that I have to eat my words then, and that JBS is, in fact trained as a mathematician. Well, strange things happen.
James, instead I am a bit shocked & dissappointed. You are exhibiting quite wooly thinking here. You may not have trained in statistics, but it is fairly easy to see the problems with such studies as the one you linked even if you haven't. Of course, that is not a disproof of the hypothesis that mathematical ability is innately gendered. On the other hand there are alternative plausible hypothesis, and we have no reliable data to differentiate them.
This is quite an elementary error to make.
Oh and Steve, the idea that mathematical ability is the deciding factor in most areas of science is just a bad idea. It's so inane that it really isn't worth worrying about.
I don't understand why you hate Andre Ware.
It matters if you have an intuitive feel that something is wrong if a calculation is way off.
But *women* are better at intuition than men. Everyone knows that.
Other than that 248 pretty much sums it up. And obviously winning the fucking Putnam whateveritis doesn't prove that one is logical or good at critical thinking, both of which are also really important for careers in higher mathematics.
Anyway. On to the question of what does one do to counter hiring bias in academe. Committees do all sorts of things, although ime a *lot* of coded bias still creeps in, and junior faculty (like, say, me) are not in a safe position to point out when senior, tenured male faculty who are also the chairs of departments are being sexist.
That said, there has been some good work done on this. The U of Minnesota has a v. good program for recruiting and retaining women and minority faculty. They've identified seven key things universities need to do (all of 'em) to make it work, though I'm not sure I remember them all off the top of my head. The ones I do remember are: write the published job announcement so that it doesn't just have the usual eeop wording, but specifically invites candidates with interests in women/minority studies or issues in X field; in addition to a published job announcement, make a point of contacting folks at other universities and asking them to encourage talented women or minorities to apply (i.e., make a conscious effort to broaden the old boys club into the old boys and girls and brown people's club); put your money where your mouth is by funding focused research topics, e.g., internal competitions to award money to folks who are doing research in women's studies or minority or area studies (all of which topics can overlap more traditionally defined fields, but such targeted money is much more likely to attract applicants and therefore support junior faculty who are women and minorities); hire women and minorities in bulk, so there's mutual support; create cross-disciplinary support/mentoring groups that include women and/or minorities from several different departments. The other thing I remember being emphasized is that it's absolutely crucial that *every* layer of the university be committed to the goal: departments, chairs, colleges, deans, the university president. Otherwise you end up with lip service but no movement.
Other stuff is learning to consider folks who've taken longer than "usual" to finish their degrees (because of kids, or needing to work their way through); candidates who may have slightly untraditional qualifications (industry experience, public graduate programs); making sure that the university has decent maternity policies and onsite daycare, etc; telling *all* candidates about support for families, whether or not they ask; that sort of thing.
255, well if people post under their real name you are allowed to google them. Sure I have a motive to overvalue the trait that the Putnam test measures since I have a lot of it. However I am trying to be objective.
As long as we are questioning motives I will point out that women have a personal stake in these issues as well.
I was perhaps a bit harsh in 263, and feel badly about it.
Of course even research mathematicians, let alone people with some mathematical training, are sometimes prone to careless thinking in other aspects of their lives even though in some vague way this seems like it ought to be contradictory.
In order to be successful doing mathematics one must develop habits of careful and logical thought, clearly that doesn't mean you have to approach everything the same way you approach your mathematics. It would be inhuman to expect it all the time of everyone, of course!
Wouldn't it be nice though, if when called out on something muddle-headed, we were always capable of stepping back and taking a new (and careful) look at it, rather than bolstering defenses.
266 was posted after I started 277.
James, you are not trying to be objective at all. Several deep flaws in your argument have been pointed out and you either ignored them or misunderstood their significance. Instead you've posted in an authoratative tone --- but quite mistakenly. Please stop pretending, as it reflects badly.
erm, that should be 267, not 277 of course. With that, I'm off to bed. The horse is well dead by now I suspect.
263, my personal opinion is that there is an innate sex difference in mathematical problem solving ability. However I gave the link to the Benbow paper to support a different contention, that there is a male skew in the upper part of the distribution of mathematical problem solving ability and that it increases as you approach the very top. This contention is not dependent on the source of the skew being innate. There are several possible causes and an innate difference is one of them.
Note I am not claiming innate differences explain all sex differences in career choices and success.
270: Given the nature of this media, you probably should have been more clear when you presented that link that you realized the paper didn't establish a dependence on gender.
It's actual claims are a bit more narrow than what you represent, and it is clearly open to a fair amount of methodological question. At best, it is weak support the idea that the skew you describe exists and widens at the `top'. Even weaker in the contention that what was mesureable by SAT is `mathematical ability'. No matter, whether or not this is interesting is somewhat orthogonal to the main discussion you seem to have raised, since it offers no support inherent gender difference.
You are, of course, welcome to your personal opinion that there is an innate sex difference. In several of your earlier posts it seems that you were claiming more ... that in fact there was strong evidence to support your opinion. I'm glad you realize that this simply is not true.
265: A lot of the discussion has been in regards to things like chemistry, math, and computer science; and even within academe, I'm not sure how one would implement your advice for women's studies or minorities studies in those fields. Or even what the analogous advice for non-academe would be.
I missed a lot of this conversation, but to throw in some more points:
1) Really smart math people can be very insecure. Put 20 of them in the same classroom in a really tough class, and you're not going to get many questions that reveal how little they know about what's going on.
2) At top universities, it is a general rule that no one really gives a damn if you go into math or not, male or female. The idea is that mathematicians are amazingly self-driven, and encouragement is simply a waste of time that slows down the weeding out process. Now this attitude sucks, and is probably harmful to the mathematical profession, and is not exactly universal, but it's not like math is this hotbed of gentle encouragement that just happens to be sexist.
3) The rewards in pursuing math are largely intrinsic. Not to say that external encouragement plays no role -- there's a reason they set up all those math competitions. But a LOT of the motivation really does come from within -- you simply have to find spending 3 hours on a problem interesting, and this is something that's rare.
Look at places like Styuvesant High School and Harvard. Lots of smart young women who excel in lots of subjects, including math. Lots of encouragement for everybody. Lots of strong achievement-oriented egos. But the skew towards males in math seems worse than just about for any other subject, and it gets worse the higher up you go. A priori, math would seem to have fewer barriers to entry for women -- you really just need pencil/paper/some good problems to work on that appeal to you, and you can stand out. Performance on problem-solving competitions are about as objective a measure of achievement for high school students as I can think of (compare to essay writing). And yet...
273.2: This may be correct, but I was talking about a lack of encouragement at the high-school level and at my mediocre university. So.
I don't understand how 273.3 is relevant to anything. Yes, it's rare. So?
A priori, math would seem to have fewer barriers to entry for women
World just started yesterday alert! World just started yesterday alert!
objective a measure of achievement
We're not talking about acheivement. We're talking about ability. And to say that a particular test, because it is not essay writing, is very "objective," is a very shallow way to look at objectivity. "Objective" means more than just "has a clear right and wrong answer." If we're looking at innate ability, which we are. Unless you want to say that any test with clear right and wrong answers just accurately shows ability or intelligence. In which case there are a lot more problems with your comment than I thought.
Barbar, your comment seems to make sense, but it in fact makes no sense. First you say "there is no encouragement for anyone" at top schools. Then you say "Look at Harvard.. lots of encouragement for everybody." Unless you're talking about some alternate-universe Harvard that is not a top school.
Then you say that really smart math people can be very insecure (to what end you say that, I can't divine), followed by a statement that Harvard is full of "strong acheivement-oriented egos." Which is it?
I am shocked on this thread by how many people continue to try and deny that institutional and cultural sexism is the cause of underrepresentation.
To clarify, once you get into Harvard, no one gives a damn whether you become a mathematician or not. But Harvard has basically a 50/50 distribution of students, who have already cleared most of the hurdles of social access and social support (they're at freaking Harvard for god's sake). And in Harvard's hotshot freshman year math class, you might have one girl (or two) in a class of 20. Maybe. In the Math Olympiad Program for high school students, 3 or 4 of the top 30 kids might be girls. Maybe. How many other academic subjects have these sort of ratios?
I'm not denying that institutional and cultural sexism are a cause of underrepresentation. But THE cause? Harvard and Stuyvesant have basically neutral gender ratios but you'll see splits between 70/30 and 95/5 in the top math classes, generally getting worse as you move up. If sexism is the cause, this means that math is far and away the most sexist subject out there. Meanwhile, IN MY IMPRESSION, the amount of social capital needed to become a mathematician is a small fraction compared to the amount needed to become a lawyer, doctor, biologist, or investment banker.
I realize that feeling this way means that I'm sending all of my feminist cred out to die, but sorry.
273: Mmm. I have to agree with m.leblanc, both on the basis of what you said (that is, you described serious mathematicians as terribly insecure and fragile. Wouldn't it make sense that a society (like, oh, our own) in which girls and women are frequently reminded of their probable inferiority (by people, like, oh, Shearer) would have an effect on performance and commitment at that level?) and on the basis of a certain amount of personal experience.
I'm good at math in the 'engineering math' sense -- I never had any potential as a pure mathematician, the merest of episilon-delta proofs in calculus kind of flummoxed me, but MIT's multivariable calculus class, for example, was a pretty easy A. And I went to a Stuyvesant-peer NYC high school that had until about a decade before I went there been a single-sex girls school, so it should have been a pretty encouraging environment for girls. And still, as I've discussed before here, boys and girls had very different experiences in math classes -- boys participated and girls didn't. This didn't seem to reflect a difference in aptitudes, in that AP scores didn't differ, but it certainly looked to me as if the boys were much more likely to come out of those classes considering themselves to be mathematically adept than the girls did.
Further, the AP Physics course I took was very close to single sex -- there were four girls, and about twenty boys. This can't be explained by aptitude, given that there were far more than that many girls taking Calculus, which covered all the same math. And there was a group of boys who were socially recognized as the ones who were the best in the class; I was not, despite equal or better test scores. So that 'everyone gets the same amount of encouragement' thing? Not so much.
276: And you shouldn't worry about your feminist cred. It's not impossible that there's a biological basis for some of the difference, and you're not a bad person for suspecting you might be. I think you're just underestimating the magnitude of the social forces.
I am shocked on this thread by how many people continue to try and deny that institutional and cultural sexism is the cause of underrepresentation.
I think you're overstating things. Most people have acknowledged that sexism plays a part; instead, people are wondering if there are what amount to biological reasons for some part of explanation at the very, very top end of the field, and noting that it hasn't been knocked out as an explanation.
How does any of this relate to women's underrepresentation on top law reviews? (Or, the affirmative action programs many top law reviews have to prevent such underrepresentation)? That's one puzzle I've never understood. Harvard, for example, has no sort of preference for women in admissions -- they're evaluated just like men, and yet make up roughly half the class. But they're far from gender balance on the law review. There's a slight differential in applications between the genders, but not nearly enough to explain it. It's a problem the school and the law review seem genuinely interested in addressing, but don't know how to remedy.
I don't have a good explanation for this.
I would guess that you have a feedback loop through class participation. I think there's a very strong relationship between class participation and law school grades, because a good part of what you're doing in a law school exam is getting inside the professor's head; not just knowing the law in an objective sense, but telling the professor what he wants to hear in the form he wants to hear it. My grades, which were quite good, were very much a function of how much I was able to empathize with the professor. And while you can learn the law through reading and listening in class, I think it's hard to build that empathy without a back-and-forth with the professor. Overwhelmingly men talked and women didn't. (I did, but the heavy participants were usually ten guys and me.)
But I'm bitter about law review, for reasons unconnected with gender. (Something bizarre happened to my writing competition entry. I had law review possible-but-not-certain grades, but certainly absolutely no question grades that should have placed me on another journal -- pretty much everyone got on some journal, and I was top 10-15% on grades. After the writing competition, I didn't get placed anywhere. Being an idiot, I did not realize at the time that this had to have been an error, and needed to be straightened out. So no journal, which meant no clerkship, which meant no possibility of academia.)
276, It's quite possible that there is some significant genetic component, it is also quite possible that there isn't. The point is that assuming it is a first-order effect in a society that we *know* places constraints of various types on women is just silly. We don't know if the effect is significant but we do know that there are in general significant social effects, etc., that *can* be modified, and we have no reason at all to assume that this somehow doesn't apply to math.
In my experience, there is less of a gender bias in math than there is in physics (but not astronomy) and several engineering disciplines at least. Probably similar to most non-physics `hard' sciences. Of course, this is anectdotal (but reflects on several schools, etc.). For some reason, women tend to be better represented in statistics than mathematics, too (again just in my experience). While I agree that things like a `math olympiad' and top fast-stream freshman courses for better prepared freshmen skew more heavily, I find that very suspect as a proxy. Mainly because here you are *most* vulnerable to the socialization and encouragement effects in high school, etc. I have no evidence that things have changed much since I went through, and at that time it was certainly true in my experience that girls were not encouraged in this direction.
I must admit I don't follow your logic in the social capital comment, care to expand?
My colleague `anonmathy' got sucked in by my commenting on these attitudes last night; they found some of what was written quite obtuse. It seems you are falling into the same trap as JBS was --- acknowledging that there are institutional and cultural reasons for problems, but failing to make the connection between that an a lack of good data in this direction. If you accept that lack as true, then most of what you (& he) have said is simply irrelevant. If you don't, I'd love to see the data. Nothing commented on here so far satisfies.
FWIW, almost all the law review slots at Harvard are apportioned on a grade-blind basis-- the law review essay competition is the sole criterion. They reserve a few (6?) slots for academic high-performers, but that's not most of the story. At least at Harvard.
Hmm. NYU it was 50-50 grades and writing competition -- not different slots, but each person's ranking was determined half by their grades and half by their writing sample. I still wonder what the hell happened to mine.
(And there was an affirmative action component -- in an excess of highmindedness, I left my sex blank on the spot where you were allowed to indicate it.)
(Oh, and soub: I'm not sure what information you're worrying about, nothing jumped out at me. But if you'd like a redaction, just email me at 'LizardBreath@unfogged.com'.)
I left my sex spot blank
ATM
Oh that's weird -- I was switching word order around as I read. Never mind.
286: no worries; that was more my thinking `aloud' than anything else. It's not a particular post but a cumulative thing --- I had just realized that anyone who read unfogged and new me (or looked for me) could probably id me without too much trouble.
Yeah, even I think it's plausible that there's a biological basis for the gender skew in the top 1% of mathematicians, I certainly don't think that's the null hypothesis you should be starting from for explaining faculty underrpresentation in mathematics, let alone the hard sciences. (And honestly, looking at the Putnam stats, I think JBS's argument holds even less weight -- there have been two female Putnam Fellows so far in the Aughts, one more than the entire '90s and two more than in the '80s. That's some mighty fast brain evolvin' you girls are up to!)
Yeah, I'm roughly in the same spot -- there's just too much stuff to redact.
When we can find a test that can accurately identify some "biological" basis for differences in ability, without any problematic selection bias, cultural, or institutional bias, then maybe it'll be worth talking about whether there is a biological basis. But nothing of the sort has happened, and until then, I think it's a smokescreen to talk about this when there are so many other things we can talk about and can do to affect the representation of women in math and science.
don't get me started on law review/clerkships/academia....I have actually published a law review article (not just a note), which seems like it's more relevant than how I did in the cite checking competition during 1L year, but I somehow need to publish two more to have any shot. When exactly that will be, I have no idea.
Yep. There's a bit of a sticky intellectual honesty problem here, in that it is absolutely true that a biological explanation has not been ruled out, but that (IMO) one of the serious obstacles to women's advancement in the sciences is the broad support for the assumption that women's capacities are inferior in that regard.
It is not wrong to entertain the possibility of a biological explanation, or to research possible biological explanation. But a lot of heated public emphasis on one's personal conviction that the explanation is biological feeds into the social pressure that acts to discourage girls and women. So, while I don't want to call anyone a bad person for entertaining a hypothesis that hasn't been disproven, I do want to discourage people from publicly emphasizing their belief that when some evidence finally is found to settle the 'innate or environmental' question, that women will be shown to be underrepresented in the hard sciences for innate, rather than environmental, reasons.
293: Oh, the emphasis on law review is simply insane. The idea that membership in an organization devoted primarily to proofreading has anything at all to do with your potential as a scholar is lunatic.
I must admit I don't follow your logic in the social capital comment, care to expand?
My feeling is that if you're poor or not socially connected or whatever, it's easier to do well at math than at basically any other subject (talent levels being equal). I'll admit this is pretty hand-wavy, but it's based on things like: where do immigrant kids stand out? What's the socioeconomic status of the parents of Harvard Law students vs. Harvard Math PhD students? And so on.
I have no interest in putting aside efforts to increase the representation of women in math/science; I just feel compelled to say something when people look at the % of women Putnam fellows, watch it go from 0% to 2% to 8% over the course of couple of decades, and then nod their heads ever more convinced that discrimination and sexism is the main cause of the difference.
294: Certainly it isn't a crazy hypothesis ... but to speak as if it has some solid empirical backing is daft; and the mere repetition of the idea can be a contributing factor to the problem.
I just feel compelled to say something when people look at the % of women Putnam fellows, watch it go from 0% to 2% to 8% over the course of couple of decades, and then nod their heads ever more convinced that discrimination and sexism is the main cause of the difference.
I realize I am beating a dead horse now, but Barbar, how does what you say make sense? The fact that the percentage is increasing so quickly is an indication that sexism is a cause of the difference. Right? Because as much as sexism and discrimination are serious problems, they've been so serious that what we have now is substantially better.
I have no interest in putting aside efforts to increase the representation of women in math/science; I just feel compelled to say something when people look at the % of women Putnam fellows, watch it go from 0% to 2% to 8% over the course of couple of decades, and then nod their heads ever more convinced that discrimination and sexism is the main cause of the difference.
Barbar: I'm figuring we're on the same side of this one, and so I'm trying to persuade you as an ally. The deal is, you really don't know if innate or social factors (phrasing it as discrimination is going to confuse you. I wouldn't say the girls in my AP Calc class were being discriminated against, but I think they came out of it less likely to pursue a mathematical career than the boys for reasons unconnected with their aptitudes) explain the difference -- saying that the difference is just too large to explain by social factors doesn't work (says the female litigator. We've got some pretty darn big differences in outcomes that are explained by social factors here.).
I am not asking you to believe that a biological cause has been ruled out. I am asking you to accept two things: (1) The existence of such a biological cause for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences really, genuinely, has neither been proven nor has it been almost proven. There's no evidence for it beyond the existence of the underrepresentation itself, and (2) That insistence that biology is very likely the cause of the underrepresentation is itself a significant component of the social forces that keep women out of the sciences. And that given those two things, insistence on the probability of a biological cause is not a neutral guess about how the evidence will come out when there is some, it's an actively harmful thing.
Remain agnostic, do research in the area, it's an interesting question. But when you state your personal certainty that the number of women with the capacity for excellence in mathematics is smaller than the number of men for inherent, biological reasons, you're part of the social problem.
I would like to retract my 298 and replace it with the text of 299, which deserves to be said twice.
Also, Kobecubed!
296: Ah, ok. Well then I think you are quite incorrect; you have identified a real effect but both oversimplified it and applied it too broadly.
I think the sort of social capital you are talking about is very relevant in, say, law and investment banking to use your examples. On the other hand, I see no significant difference amongst the sciences, at all. Medicine is somewhat a special case, I think and best left out of generalizations.
As for questions like where do immigrant kids stand out, there are a lot of factors beyond social capital and parents wealth. Note that american culture does not value education particularly. Becoming a scientist or mathematician takes significantly more *academic* effort than becoming a lawyer, or doctor, or investment banker. I think in immigrant kids you often see people who both work harder and value academics more. This is further complicated by the fact that much of what we've been talking about here are undergraduate numbers, etc. which isn't even half way there. At the graduate level demographics are quite different for many reasons.
Umm, Kobecubed would be a million.
m. leblanc is demonstrating her female difficulty with math -- kobe^3 = 1000000, not 300.
I remember when we called it "cross-posted".
Women don't write inherently interesting blogs because they're naturally not interested in the vicious give-and-take that characterize public political arguments. Women are more inclined to the kind of first-person testimonial genre that forms a small, private community than to the public staking of position that yields high-level abstract debate.
This thread is driving me nuts.
We've got: fewer women on the NYT op ed page; fewer women in the math department at Harvard; fewer women on top law reviews.
And yet, hmmm, we have to admit that maybe there's a biological basis for women's mathematical inferiority!
Give. Me. A. Break.
We've got: fewer women on the NYT op ed page; fewer women in the math department at Harvard; fewer women on top law reviews. And yet, hmmm, we have to admit that maybe there's a biological basis for women's mathematical inferiority!
You're right. The biological inferiority clearly isn't just limited to mathematics.
I'm hearing some sort of strange, muffled noise. Like someone talking out of his ass. No, wait! It's like someone talking out of someone else's ass! Apostropher, are you all right in there?
And while I'm at it, I'm going to say that the ad hom in JS's 266 pretty much ends any discussion worth having with him, imho.
Apostropher, are you all right in there?
No, I'm out of cigarettes. Send help.
Get some fags in that ass, Apo needs his nicotine!
The fact that the percentage is increasing so quickly is an indication that sexism is a cause of the difference. Right?
We seem to be jumping around between "a cause" and "the cause" pretty easily. I fully agree that sexism is a cause, and changes over a short period of time work as evidence that sexism exists and has an impact.
LB, I fully agree that there is no proof of biological causes. In fact, I think such a proof (or disproof) would be utterly fascinating, since honestly we really don't know much about the biology of thought. Furthermore, I strongly suspect much of what people think of as "innate differences" in math ability are actually differences caused by private practice, not superior genetics -- but again, I don't know.
I'm also not brining up my comments in the context of a discussion of "is sexism a problem." Sexism is absolutely a problem. My comments are not meant to challenge that.
311: I agree. I don't think there's a single woman here who feels she has been unfairly shut out of Princeton's math program.
JSB may be good at math, but can he bake?
311: huh? I don't necessarily want to invest a lot of energy defending JBS, but did the person who pointed out that JBS was a Putnam high scorer unleash an ad hom that ended all possiblity of civil conversation?
I mean JBS. The thing that creeps me out is that JBS will probably go on to a position in some math department that will enable him to act on his personal opinion.
316: No, because that was pointed out as an aside in an actual argument, rather than presented as a capstone that pretty much declares that *anything* women say on this subject is by definition unreliable. The whole "I, man, objective; you, woman, emotionally invested in your argument" thing is beneath notice.
314: If it helps, silently insert "only known" between "the" and "cause."
317: If you google his name, you'll see he already has an industry job, has been out of school for a while, and--I don't know how the market works, so I'm making assumptions--doesn't appear to be likely to be an academic.
317: Whether or no, the fact that people make arguments like this *at all* perpetuates a hostile environment.
319: And wouldn't you love to be a woman working in his lab.
321: faster, stupid woman! fasssster!!
318: uh he brought it up directly as a rebuttal to the point that he was emotionally invested in the argument.
No, he did not. He admitted that he probably was emotionally invested, pace claims to "objectivity."
324: he said he was 1) emotionally invested, 2) trying to be objective, and 3) not the only emotionally invested party. Sounds like a rebuttal to an accusation to me.
Sounds like a dismissal of his interlocutors to me, and a really hackneyed and offensive one at that. YMMV.
325: The `trying to be objective part' is false, though, or else extremely inept; i.e. to a worrisome degree.
Not to mention an implicit claim to (male) superiority.
328. No doubt. What I really can't understand is why more apparently intelligent men don't see this as a huge red flag. I mean, given any knowledge of relevent history and any sort of reasonable objective analysis of the current situation. The ones that have never thought about it at all, I understand.
I think Hirshman's controversial proposal of dissuading women from going into liberal arts is part of the solution to the problem of the social forces against women in sciences/engineering. I am going to do my part by dissuading my daughters.
I don't see persuading anyone to go into pure mathematics is a particularly good idea; but things like google may be changing this.
330 - My parents would only pay for my sister's and my college as long as we were in hard sciences. My baby sister is being groomed for math/engineering/statistics. I think my baby brother could be a poet-dancer if he wanted, but my father would be damned if his daughters would ever be financially dependent on a man.
What I really can't understand is why more apparently intelligent men don't see this as a huge red flag.
Because it's not, dear. The only reason you object to objective, rational arguments is because you're too emotionally invested in imagining your own equality to think clearly.
330: Don't be too quick with passiing over maths. While a career in pure mathematics is quite limiting, an undergraduate degree in it, or even moreso in applied math is really quite flexible.
332: What if I don't have the chromosomal makeup for that sort of emotional investment?
330: Do either of you regret it?
335 - Regret that our parents chose being techie for us? Naw. Neither of us are so hardwired in any particular direction that we were fighting our own inclinations. On the other hand, I didn't choose science because it was a particular gift for me. I'm just good at it, not spectacular, like the people with deep intuition. It was a little more natural for my sister.
The job security from being over on the techie side is extremely comforting.
What I really can't understand is why more apparently intelligent men don't see this as a huge red flag.
Because if differences in demonstrated math outcomes are due entirely to sexism, then some silly people might think that it follows that mathematics is as profoundly sexist as any other human endeavour, probably more so, due to the sheer magnitude of the differences. Some people might have an "emotional investment" in not believing that... you can draw your own conclusions why.
337: Yeah, this is why I said above that 'discrimination' is a word that's going to confuse you. There's a whole lot of room for social influence between 'an evil cartel of Monty-Burns-like old men trying to keep women out' and 'it's all biological', but I think it's very easy (and, you know, reasonable decent people can react this way) for men to overreact to discussions of structural sexism as accusations of personal evil, and retreat to a claim that social forces have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right; but I'm not claiming that social forces have nothing to do with it, I'm trying to explain why a "red flag" doesn't go off when the possiblity of non-socially-conditioned male mathematical superiority is raised. I don't think I'm overreacting to discussions of structural sexism, either; I'm sure structural sexism impacts everything, I'm just expressing the thoughts behind my skepticism that it impacts math twice as much (or five times as much or whatever) as anything else.
337, 339: Well, I've already pointed out that I think you are quite wrong about maths being so notable this way, so your `probably more so' doesn't follow. You keep saying that math in general is so much different than anything else but I don't see the evidence.
Other than that, why wouldn't we expect mathematicians to also be products of the culture they are from?
My comment was, by the way, more general: whenever you see this kind of thinking being presented, logically you should immediatly suspect it if for no other reason that historically it has overwhelmingly tended to be wrong.
There, I think what's going on is that you aren't focussed on this issue, and so you're misinterpreting what the red flag is. I've been saying, "Sure, could be biological, not ruled out, we just don't know" throughout this thread, and I'm pretty much a hardliner on this stuff, and no one's getting mad at me about it. So the red flag isn't "the possiblity of non-socially-conditioned male mathematical superiority."
The red flag is assertions that we're pretty darn sure that non-socially-conditioned male mathematical superiority is what's going on. Circling all the way back to Summers, he said that biological differences were more important than discrimination (albeit less important than personal choices), and he said it about the hard sciences in general. And that's ridiculous -- no argument about being out on the long tail of the utmost possible aptitude mathematically applies outside of pure math and physics. I'm nothing special, but the reason I'm not a research chemist isn't lack of mathematical ability -- the kind of math aptitude I have is plenty. And there are plenty of women at my level or better mathematically: several in this thread. So someone like Summers is talking crap, and talking sexist crap.
Again, look at Shearer in this thread -- I was kind of obnoxious to him, repeatedly asking him if all he was claiming was that the cause of the overrepresentation of men could be biological, because that I could agree with. And he ignored it until I'd asked him the same question five or six times, then said he agreed with it, and then went on to argue that he was really pretty sure that the main explanation for the difference was innate. That's someone who knows there's no research based evidence to support his belief in the innateness of the difference, and wants to hide behind the 'I was just suggesting that innate differences might be possible' dodge. But when you pin him down, he's really arguing that the differences are innate, and he doesn't care if there's no solid evidence for it yet.
Red flag.
My comment was, by the way, more general: whenever you see this kind of thinking being presented, logically you should immediatly suspect it if for no other reason that historically it has overwhelmingly tended to be wrong.
And if it wasn't too context-dependent to make sense, I'd want this on a T-shirt.
334: Then obviously you've been pussy-whipped by the feminazis.
This thread is beginning to make me think that while men may have superior mathematical skills, that certainly hasn't translated into the ability to form an argument that isn't circular.
The most perfect of geometrical forms! It's because of their greater mathematical aptitudes.
A mathematician stands on a frictionless surface. (You may assume that the mathematician is a perfect sphere.)...
Whoa there, Cala. Better let the men handle the physics. You ladies should stick to constructing non-circular arguments and baking.
343: Ah, of course. I knew it had to work either way.
341 gets exactly what I was trying to say.
344: It's depressing, isn't it. Falling into these sorts of arguments is easy for everyone ... realizing it when you are called on it shouldn't be so hard, you'd think.
You know the one about the Nobel-winning physicist kidnapped by the Mob, and held captive until he comes up with a general theory of horseracing that will allow them to win all the time. So after a year of captivity, he emerges with a theory: "First, assume a spherical horse..."
The differences that explain the overrepresentation of males in certain spheres (imperfect social spheres, not horse-like spheres) are obviously innate. The differences are breasts.
Put aside the oppressive fiction that positions at Harvard or the NYT are determined by ability. Remember that these are social groupings, defined and perpetuated according to social patterns.
Social groups like to reproduce themselves (this is somewhere between parthenogenesis and an auto-de-fe). Each member, knowing himself to be the pinnacle of ability, talent, and all other good qualities, naturally looks for someone like himself to whom to pass the mantle. Someone who knows the rules, someone who carries the sword of superiority.
Successors are chosen by ritual combat. Geertz(who died recently) described this metaphorically as a Balinese cock fight. What Kuhn described as a scientific revolution is simply the killing of last year's king by the new king in order to assure the fertility of the academic field.
So obviously anyone who appears different - who manifests breasts - will be be disqualified. Those people are other: strange, dangerous, fearsome. Non-U, so to speak. Of course they're underrepresented.
This will all change as soon as there's a new paradigm in which academic cred is gained by discoursing knowledgably about bras, the fit and manufacturers thereof.
On the one hand people are arguing pervasive sexism explains the lack of females in high level mathematics. On the other hand there are people like 263 expressing shock and dismay at encountering an actual sexist. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here.
There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here.
I couldn't agree more fervently.
351
I'd have to ask, but my sense certainly was that 263 was shock and dismay at someone with a decent mathematics background holding on to such a illogical argument even after being called on it. You have all the pieces of the puzzle, and you're bright enough to put it together, but for some reason you refuse....
Other than that inventive reading; you also seem to be mischaracterizing pretty much everyone elses posts here as well.
The point isn't that we know that pervasive sexism is the problem. It's that we don't have any evidence that it isn't a (the?) significant, and since we know that pervasive sexism exists in this culture and has been a significant effect elsewhere, well then it is illogical to dismiss it as a primary contender for what is actually going on.