I wholeheartedly agree with your unbiased opinion, and I'm glad you didn't misinterpret the data to reinforce your personal opinion.
A similar situation occurs in athletics. In high school gym classes, men and women participate on roughly equal terms. In collegiate athletics male participation is much higher. Obviously, the conclusion we should draw is that, it's really hard to place the blame on some inherent physical gender differences
Some people would say that studies of this type are evidence of inate differences + differences in difficulty level between college and highschool...But their obviously wrong, because I want them to be.
Seriously though, this data supports neither Sean's conclusion or the ridiculous conclusion of the preceeding paragraph. All this study says is that: undergrad is where the distributions skew. The reasons for this well outside the scope of the study.
Dear Sean, your thinking does not respect the rules of logic.
Of course that until the high school, the percentage is mostly balanced because almost everyone at the same school must learn physics (if at least anyone does), regardless of the gender. You could have compared the high school physics grades which you obviously did not find helpful.
College is the first moment in which the young people can make their own choice, and a smaller percentage of girls choose physics while they prefer other fields. You don't need a PhD to see that if the fraction of girls were artificially increased, the average "success rate" of the girls would decrease.
Your conclusion that you have found evidence that the brain differences don't play much role is completely unjustified. You have not found anything. Once again, you just did not do your homework correctly.
Your belief that the ratio must reach 50:50 is just a belief, or a prejudice, if you wish. You have not justified this belief by any rational arguments. You're not that good at it - you're much better in your attempts to impose your beliefs on others.
Sean, I need to look at the raw numbers, but I'm not sure the graph you show justifies such a sanguine conclusion (about there being only a single "geyser"). It looks like the fraction of women drops by a factor of two at all the levels except the entry-level jobs.
The graph is also a little problematic because it assumes people go straight from grad school to tenure-track job, and goodness that's hardly ever the case anymore.
We should look not just at the gender partitioning but also at the raw numbers of men and women. I suspect that the first-order effect -- students of BOTH genders being turned away from the subject -- is by far the greater problem. It may affect women disproportionately but men do not go unscathed. Even at the undergraduate level, physics demands a degree of single-minded devotion that most people just can't muster.
George
George-- I certainly didn't mean to be sanguine; the situation is a terrible embarassment. But the claim of the study is that the successive drops in representation are essentially due to the time-lag in getting people from bachelor's degrees to tenured positions. Even if fifty percent of physics undergrads were women, it would take decades to equilibrate at the full-professor level, which seems to be what's going on. I have to admit I am surprised, I didn't think that was the dominant effect, but that's what the study claims (see bottom of p. 11).
About turning away both genders, I have mixed feelings. There certainly aren't enough jobs for the people are interested in physics as it is. We need to work on making physics more understandable and interesting even to those people who don't want to pursue it professionally, of course.
Everyone who thinks that various "inequalities" of outcomes and correlations in our Universe are "terrible embarassment" could consider to move into a different Universe with different laws of physics (and biology) - perhaps a Universe with an unbroken supersymmetry and unbroken gauge symmetries. That may be a Universe where everything is 50:50. However, I don't guarantee that such a Universe admits intelligent life.
Judging by the quality of the "arguments" supporting the social engineering in our Universe, these 50:50 Universes won't be terribly intelligent.
The rigorous scholar you have linked to has posted the transcript of his remarks. Rigorous scholars concerned about his presentation might want to consult them. Not that I'm suggesting our host might ever mischaracterize them.
http://www.president.harvard.edu.../2005/
nber.html
Rigorous scholars might also consider the differences between what drives high school physics class enrollments and college physics major enrollments. (I see I am not the first to make this point. )
But less-rigorous scholars might find that such things dilute their polemic. And after all, what is important is the general idea, the larger point, the social agenda, and not the truth of the matter, so to speak.
Of course that until the high school, the percentage is mostly balanced because almost everyone at the same school must learn physics (if at least anyone does), regardless of the gender.
This was not the case at my high school, where physics was not required for graduation. (In fact, the state of Ohio does not require high school physics, but that is a separate rant.) However, it might generally be more useful to look at the gender breakdown of students who take the AP Physics test.
About turning away both genders, I have mixed feelings. There certainly aren't enough jobs for the people are interested in physics as it is.
I wonder how much this reinforces the domination of physics by "hypermacho" men. I know that several of my women classmates in undergrad ended up majoring in math instead of physics, and I wonder whether it was more due to personal preference or outside influences.
There will be a panel discussion this
evening in the Ida Noyes East Lounge
at 5:30pm sponsored by Women in Science
at the U of C. The focus will be on
concrete changes that can be made to
increase the representation of women
in science at the U of C. Anyone who
wants more details is welcome to send
me email.
There are a lot of interesting things at work here:
First off no one has mentioned the huge demand for post-docs which is directly followed by the huge dearth of tenure track prof jobs. Looking at a graph like this its important to remember that there is a massive jump in the number of total jobs as you go between these two points.
Second, the overall demographics of college has changed profoundly in the last 25 years. Has the increase in % of women in physics even kept pace with the increases in % of total women undergrads? We are also ignoring that while real numbers of college students have ballooned, the real number of physics majors has declined, meaning a dramatic % change for both genders.
This leads me to my personal theory for the lack of women in physics or as I call it, "the theory of the double whammy."
1.) there is a definite, although not insurmountable prejudice against women succeeding in all fields (this has been slowly diminishing in time)
2.) there is an overall bias against hard science (this has been increasing in time for ~25 years), also not insurmountable but certainly present. [this is a result of the pigheadedness of the human race (labeling people "nerds" etc.) combined with the rise of anti-rational post-modernism, which has allowed anti-scientism to permeate all levels of education]
the theory is that neither 1.) nor 2.) is enough to stop someone who has a certain amount of determination, yet the fact that women have to face the combined effects of 1.) AND 2.) makes it extremely hard for them to not just say "screw it, i'll do something else."
Thus the theory of the double whammy explains why women have been able to make gains in traditionally male fields like medicine, law, journalism, and yet physics remains increadably biased.
You have not justified this belief by any rational arguments. You're not that good at it - you're much better in your attempts to impose your beliefs on others.
Ad hominem, anyone?
Dear Prof-Sean Anti-Lubos,
if you look at the comments carefully, you will see that I am not the only one who thinks that this article does not contain any arguments that would justify Sean's conclusions. Instead, it wants the readers to believe the conclusions without any good reason. The previous sentences involve Sean, so in this sense they are "ad hominem". I don't know how to say these sentences about Sean's discourse differently.
This is not the first article in which it is assumed that some conclusions were "derived" even though they obviously were not.
Best
Lubos
I don't know how to say these sentences about Sean's discourse differently.
You might have excluded the "you're not that good at it part," just as I excluded from my earlier remark the part where I call you a huge jerk.
Of the roughly 4 million in each age cohort, about 1 in 4 take high school physics, but only 18 in 10,000 male students get a college degree in physics. Why do the other 9,982 opt out? Discrimination? Bias? Or lack of interest and/or ability? The comparable figure is 5/10,000 for women. Why is it so implausible to you that the same factors winnowing the boys operate on the girls? Logic or Ideology?
I suspect that a high school student who interpreted a generic graph the way you do the AIP graph would be found unworthy of admission to U of C. It clearly shows the proportion of women decreasing at each career stage. If we were to continue the list to APS fellows and Nobel Prize winners, what would it be?
Most of us would probably pick Newton, Galileo, Einstein and Maxwell as the epitome of the theoretical physicist. There are perhaps a few dozen more only a step or so lower: Boltzman, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Landau, Fermi, Feynman, and Gell-Mann to name a few. How many women belong in that elite company? The only name that came to my mind was the experimentalist and chemist Marie Curie.
Of course there are now many brilliant young women in physics, so we may hope that will change.
Having graduated from a physics dept. (Eckerd College '97) that was fortunate enough to have 2/3 of it's profs. be women, and had more females than males graduate from our dept. in my class, I have to say that having female profs definately made a difference to my female classmates. More than one of them remarked about how other teachers in the hard sciences treated them differently, quite possibily because they were women. And that being able to turn to fellow females who had already succeded in the field was enormously helpful. The women whom I was privaleged to work with there were crazy smart, and I have not had the pleasure of meeting others like them since. So I think that Summers was probably wrong in his ordering of factors, but not in their existence. I think that the numbers we see now in physics regarding male/female representation are probably skewed somewhat, but I doubt we'll ever see exactly 50/50. The combination of skillsets needed to be a physicist may simply not exist in the same ratios in females to males, although I would love to be proven wrong.
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