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Introducing Grace Hopper, a woman, into the conversation.

There is a reason I worked for 15 years as a computer programmer but have been unemployed (stayed at home with the kids) for the past 10 years. Company went out of business and I had some health issues that redirected my life's priorities. I tried to do some consulting at home for a few years but the whole coding as culture made it hard for me to every want a full time job in the industry again. Now that my kids are older I've been rethinking what I want to do next.

I've been reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect (DKE) lately. For the uninitiated, this means that incompetent people not having the ability to recognize that their performance is poor (even if it's pointed out to them). This is because the skills you need to recognize poor performance are the same skills you need in order to perform well. The flip side of the DKE is that highly competent people tend to underestimate their performance relative to others (because if something is easy for them, they tend to believe it's easy for everyone). This effect has been documented many, many times.

Basic example. Many Americans say, there's two of them instead of there are two of them. They presumably believe that there's two is correct usage. Say they're given the phrase there's two of them on a grammar test. They'd mark that expression as being written correctly and would be sure they got the question right. They don't know what they don't know, and therefore are incapable of recognizing their own poor performance. Likewise, they wouldn't be able to recognize someone else's good performance. Now scale that, and you get the idea about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I read the following information in a review article, and it applies perfectly to the debate about whether boys are inherently better at math and science:



In other words, males may overestimate their abilities (due to being less competent), while females underestimate their abilities (due to being more competent).

Source: Dunning D et al. (2003) Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence Current Directions in Psychological Science 12(3): 83-87. PM me if you want a copy.

HK....that's just horrible. Hugs to you and your daughter. I hope she has a better experience with her other interests! They were probably just jealous of her many talents and, you know, manners.
At least she figured it out now, instead of five years from now when she's stuck in a miserable career.

Your study showed that these gender differences in perception exist when competency is equivalent, so, no. Women are not dropping out of the sciences because they're too smart for them.

That's not what I was saying at all. The DKE says nothing about how smart you are. It describes an effect of overrating skills (in general) among those who have poorer skills and underrating them (as compared to a group) among those with higher skills.

The study quoted found that women underrated their abilities in scientific reasoning, and that this problem may play a role in their higher dropout rates.

This finding is a counterargument to the idea that males are more capable than females in STEM fields. Guys say they're better. That doesn't make it so.

She didn't really see it as "horrible." I mean, sure-- there was definitely subtle and not-so-subtle sexual harassment happening, mostly at the hands of fellow-students. But she's not particularly thin-skinned there. She was just glad to know before getting a degree in the subject, as you say. She's quite pragmatic about that.

It's ironic that the girl who already had a research publication in the field was the one being treated as "merely decorative" by all of her classmates in those CS classes, though. I think that rather speaks to val's point. DD found it quite annoying to have to ARGUE with a lab partner about the right way to do something, when they had no clue and assumed that she didn't either.

I have read a couple of books about Apollo but had never heard about her, (or for that matter the role of any women in the Apollo program) so I decided to look her up. From her Wikipedia page, I learned that Margaret Hamilton was director of software for Apollo & Skylab and that her software compensated for hardware alarms that were coming up during the final landing phase of Apollo 11.

The strange thing is that I can barely find her anywhere else. And what I did find was odd.

I have Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an Option" at home. Looking through the 20 pictures in the middle of the book, there is not a single woman in any of them, except for Gene's wife in one photo. Hamilton is not listed in the index, nor did I find her mentioned during Gene's description of the alarms that happened during Apollo 11's landing.

In addition, when I searched for a description of the landing sequence, I found an article by Don Eyles (http://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html) about the Lunar Module Guidance Computer, which doesn't mention Margaret Hamilton at all, or even the word "women". Don has a picture showing some of the people involved in writing this software--and not a single woman in sight.

Don instead gives credit to a person named Hal Laning for writing the software. Hal Laning has a wikipedia page, which describes some of the same work that Margaret's page does, but neither mentions the other person.

Has Margaret's role in history, and that of other women in STEM, been diminished, or is there something else going on?

Hard to say, but NASA honoured her recently:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/sep/HQ_03281_Hamilton_Honor.html

And let's not forget Rosalind Franklin, co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA (there is dispute as to the exact roles played by Franklin, Watson, and Crick, but none that her crystallography image was crucial).