Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Article: Princeton's Woman Problem

The point of the article however was to identify that Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth are still very much old boy networks. That the culture at those schools is much harder on women. That women leave those schools after 4 years feeling LESS confident than when they started. I was stunned that those women are spending huge amounts of money to be short changed in this way. I was stunned that these schools that are considered to be such beacons of higher education could be so incredibly misogynistic.

The leadership gap in college is not "a fact of life":


"A few years ago, Gutmann tells me, alarmed by what some peer institutions described as a �leadership gap� between male and female undergraduates�an absence of women in upper echelons of power, including academic distinctions such as Rhodes and Marshall scholarships�she took a look around Penn. She was impressed by what she saw. Women at Penn were taking over historically male organizations, at an impressive rate. Today, the Daily Pennsylvanian masthead is at least half female, and the last three executive editors have been women. Last year, women ran four of the six branches of Penn Student Government. Since 1984, roughly half of Penn�s Rhodes Scholars have been women. More importantly, she says, Penn women seem to feel empowered."

I attended one of those schools. I'm male but had no family connections to the school, and I did not feel disadvantaged by any "old boy network". I fail to see any actionable examples of discrimination in the original article. It starts as follows:

"When Catherine Ettman, class of '13, ran for vice-president of the undergraduate student government, her father advised her not to�because it might distract from her studies�and her mother worried about her safety knocking on doors. She won, defeating three boys."

If women want leadership positions, they should work for them, just like men do.

You conveniently ignore that Norway also has rigid gender quotas, for example requiring that 40% of corporate board members be women http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/world/europe/28iht-quota.html . Presumably a level playing field wasn't enough to get the politically desired results. Do you support such government coercion and sex discrimination?

I was going to reference the same article about MIT, because the presenceof women faculty and how they are treated do matter for students perceptions of what they can achieve. And I also have had the miss title while they are standing next to the sign that says dr., and you know what, I correct them! I went to 2 ivies awhile ago now at this point and I think is is very reflective of HYP and their reluctance to change attitudes from the old guard, I think the other top schools are much less preoccupied with the "natural" order of things. And the women in the article to me reflected students today, some conscious, some pretending things are different today and some totally unaware. I did agree with the one who said that this is what 27 year olds are worried about not them and you see that in med schools, which now have more women, but they are choosing specialties which are family and lifestyle friendly. It's an interesting counterpoint to the book I am reading, Cinderella ate my Daughter by Peggy Ornstein, about the pink v blue culture and it's affect on our girls. Interesting stuff about the princess cultubegin gining in 2001, marketed to 5-8 then so 10 years later, and here they are in college getting into Princeton but maybe there is a connection!

DeHe

This discussion reminded me of some things I'd read in Sylvia Rimm's books See Jane Win and How Jane Won. This is a good summary.
http://www.abcontario.ca/magazine/fall03.htm
P.S. and this
and this

I don't troll in the sense of saying things I don't believe just to rile people up. OTOH, I won't avoid saying something I think is true and relevant just because some people will disagree. Of course, people should not accept the books "Why Men Rule" or "The Bell Curve" as gospel on my say so. Googling "Why Men Rule" quickly leads to links that summarize the book better than I could in a few minutes.

Well...trolling or goading may not be the intention, but the tone of a message can come across that way when a very short post effectively says "Why are you "stunned??" Someone wrote a book about this!!"

When I'm trying to make a persuasive point, it's MY job to present the ideas I'm advocating for. It's not good enough to say "Someone wrote a book about this idea!" and leave it to the other guy to find the book and go read it. It's up to ME to present the ideas in the book coherently and persuasively.

If persuading people about an idea (such as "Gifted kids often need acceleration") was simply a matter of telling others to go read something, we could all just send a quick email to the schools saying, "It's all in A Nation Deceived! Just Google the name and you'll see!" And they would read it and say, "Oh yes of course; how about a skip plus 5th grade math?" and everything would be sunshine and light.

But things rarely work out this way. If they did, Nelson Mandela wouldn't have spent so much time locked up (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explains why!) and no one would get lashes under Islamic law (Voltaire wrote about the duties of a government to its citizens!).

My point is that if you want people to discuss ideas in books like Why Men Rule or The Bell Curve, YOU need to present the ideas and make your argument, not assume that everyone else should just go read the book and make your argument for you. The latter comes across (to me anyway) as being dismissive and deliberately goading.

I have my own theories on this one. After years of working in a technical field and finding myself having to modify my natural communications style, I finally realized a pattern. Having recognized this pattern, I then also noticed the majority of people in leadership positions seemed to fall near one point in this pattern.

It was not the people with the best language skills who seemed to be in leadship positions. In fact, it appeared to be those with somewhat limited, but not too limited language skills. Having thought about this, I figured the language skills were in some ways ideally suited to communicating with a wider audience. Those with limited skills would be able to understand them. Whereas those with greater language skills were also able to understand them as their advanced language skills give them the ability to deal with a wider variety of language styles.

Interesting to hear of a book name The Bell Curve. I wonder if it even comes close to my own bell curve. My own bell curve has an arbitrary scale of 0 to 10 (value is not an indication of better or worse). On this scale, society seems to most often choose people in the 2 to 4 range for leadership. In my opinion, people with the most flexibility to deal with language fall in the 6 to 8 range.

In my estimates of the gender differences, the centers of the gender bell curves are very slightly different. The male curve centers at 4.7 and the female curve centers at around 5.1. So overall, not much of a difference on average between males and females. However, at certain points on the curves, there can be significant gender statistical differences. So for example, at around the 3 point on my arbitrary scale, there are 4 men for every 1 female.

Most of this is nothing more than theory and a lot of estimation. Used some real statistics combined with a whole lot of estimates. Now, I realize I have indicated on average males have slightly poorer language skills. Then again, I am male, so does this make it ok. Either way, I feel it is important to try and understand how things work, whether the results are necessarily what we may want them to be.

I am not overly convinced by my own thoughts on this. Just a hypothesis at this point. I just thought it would be interesting to put it out there. The only reason I put out the rather poorly derived numbers, was to help clarify the idea. One was the fact, the positions of greatest skill in a given area is not necessarily at the end of the scale. Also, it indicates both males and females span the entire range, but in differing proportions. This is also an over simplification of what I have come up with.

Actually that's the second page of the article. The first page describes how the leadership gap has gotten worse in the last decade. It also has links to two other related articles that I found interesting.

Women cut back on their work more than men do after having children, which will cause fewer of them to attain leadership positions. I think mothers desire to spend more time with their children than fathers do. Even if paid family leave is mandated, studies have found that men are more likely to use the time off to advance their careers. The recent study below says having children costs high-skilled women about $230K in lifetime earnings but finds no effect for men.

http://www.nber.org/digest/apr11/w16582.html
How Childbearing Affects Women's Wages
Women [who score in the upper third on a standardized test] have a net 8 percent reduction in pay during the first five years after giving birth.

Having a child lowers a woman's lifetime earnings, but how much depends upon her skill level. In The Mommy Track Divides: The Impact of Childbearing on Wages of Women of Differing Skill Levels (NBER Working Paper No. 16582), co-authors Elizabeth Ty Wilde, Lily Batchelder, and David Ellwood estimate that having a child costs the average high skilled woman $230,000 in lost lifetime wages relative to similar women who never gave birth. By comparison, low skilled women experience a lifetime wage loss of only $49,000.

Using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), Wilde et. al. divided women into high, medium, and low skill categories based on their Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores. The authors use these skill categories, combined with earnings, labor force participation, and family formation data, to chart the labor market progress of women before and after childbirth, from ages 14-to-21 in 1979 through 41-to-49 in 2006, this study's final sample year.

High scoring and low scoring women differed in a number of ways. While 70-75 percent of higher scoring women work full-time all year prior to their first birth, only 55-60 percent of low scoring women do. As they age, the high scoring women enjoy steeper wage growth than low scoring women; low scoring women's wages do not change much if they reenter the labor market after they have their first child. Five years after the first birth, about 35 percent of each group is working full-time. However, the high scoring women who are not working full-time are more likely to be working part-time than the low scoring women, who are more likely to leave the workforce entirely.

Controlling for actual labor market experience and hours worked, the authors show that low scoring women face a one-time permanent pay reduction of about 6 percent when they have a child. High scoring women experience a net 8 percent reduction in pay during the first five years after giving birth, a penalty that reaches 24 percent a decade after birth.

Men's earning profiles are relatively unaffected by having children although men who never have children earn less on average than those who do. High scoring women who have children late also tend to earn more than high scoring childless women. Their earnings advantage occurs before they have children and narrows substantially after they become mothers.