The Mathematical Gender Gap

Following the link from Fred, I ended up at La Griffe du Lion. I'm surpressing an attempt at a Dave Barry-esque translation. Anyway, Monsieur Lion runs a series of statistical analyses on some data which suggests that women are not as good at math as men. Fairly obvious stuff actually. He then goes on to explain why Harvard, and other elite Universities, especially those heavy into research, have a tough time recruiting women faculty in areas such as math, physics and engineering.

At the end, he answers some questions.

Q: If, as you claim, 71% of the 99^th percentile is male, that still leaves 29% who are female. What have you done to bring senior female faculty up to this level in Mathematics, Engineering and Physical Sciences?

LS: Full professors in Mathematics at Harvard represent ability in the top 0.0001% of the population, not the top 1%. We could therefore reasonably expect to find no more than one or two women at that rank, with two being extremely unlikely. I haven't done an analysis of Engineering and Physical Sciences, but I suspect prospects for women there are similar but less stark.

I go to a school which is much less prestigious than Harvard, but it is worthwhile to note that in my three years of classes, I've only had one female engineering professor. Moreover, such classes are hardly fraught with women pining to be professors themselves.

Q: OK, so we can't expect gender equity in Mathematics, Engineering and Physical Sciences at Harvard, but can we at least expect 29% of the workforce in these fields to be women?

LS: Not likely. Men and women exhibit other behavioral differences which are apparent almost from birth... Girls lean more toward fields like psychology, while similarly talented men incline toward engineering or physical science. A study... by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at almost three times the rate of boys. For all these reasons, we should regard 29% as an upper bound to the percentage of women in the technological work force. In practice, their numbers will be significantly less.

This fits nicely with my experience at an engineering university, Michigan Tech. The school offers other majors than engineering and it's a good thing they do. For some reason the women really seem to enjoy biology. Last fall, a biology class was taught in the same classroom as my electronics course. I've never seen a class so dominated by women, at least at Tech. In electronics, despite having at least forty students, only two or three were females.

Q: If all this is so, why are we meeting here today?

A: Good question. We are meeting here today because feminists, in order to support their androgynous fantasies, encourage able young women to enter technological fields even when their interests lie elsewhere.

La Griffe draws blood. There is no other reason for the complete disregard for the readily obvious and scientifically proven evidence he presents.

I can't speak for Monsieur Lion, but I do not think he writes this to prove men are better than women. Such is certainly not my aim. Moreover, despite the fact that I am seeking an engineering degree, I am in no way brilliant at math. It is something I am good at, to be sure, but the odds of me getting a professorship at Harvard, assuming I would get my PhD and then apply for the position, are a statistical zero. There are undoubtedly many women who are better at math than I am.

So why even mention any of this? Two reasons come to mind. First, feminists who disregard the facts give powerful evidence as to the poisonous nature of their idealogy. I recently started reading Warren Carroll's The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution. Therein he explains how the early Communists refused to accept that capitalist countries could improve the conditions of the worker, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. If capitalism was not wholly evil, revolution was unneccessary. Such a stance would of course be untenable to the faith of a True Believer.

Similarily, feminism posits, without a lick of proof, that men and women are equal, not in the sense that they should be treated with the same respect, but that they are essentially the same. Any discrepancies are temporary, and merely the result of culture. To a feminist, biological differences in areas such as mathematical aptitude are held to be chimerical, Camille Paglia notwithstanding.

Second, personal experience, though anecdotal, has led me to readily accept the Griffe's conclusions. Each year, someone runs a column in the Lode, explaining the newest plans on behalf of the administration to increase female enrollment. It remains to be seen whether anything can be done to close the gender gap. Yet I hardly think excellence in mathematics to be the indicator of superiority some feminists seem to think it to be. If Mother Nature is content to endow her some of her sons with certain algebraic attributes, I find little reason to object. Feminists would do well to remember that there are a number of things women do better than men.