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

The following tech article is one where the comments following it are rather immature and offensive. Now if I had not worked in a corporate office in a technical field, I would have thought the commenters were 12 year old boys. My experience tells me they may very well be from highly educated men in higher management positions.

http://www.dailytech.com/New+BreastOnAChip+Model+Created+for+Breast+Cancer+Research/article20740.htm

The only difference I see in the corporate environment is the men hide this when the females are not around. Sitting in a meeting with a bunch of men making or giggling at such ridiculously immature comments is just plain scary. It is not the offensiveness which bothers me as much as the immaturity of the comments. If this is any indication of who runs the world, a lot of what is happening in the world makes sense.

I'm still trying to decide which is worse:

a) hiding it when there are women around, or

b) NOT hiding it because the only women around are "just one of the boys" and won't (shouldn't?) care.


I've been treated to some of that by being "one of the guys." I was never sure if it was just that they truly WERE more open around me... or if it was a subtle form of hazing to make SURE that I was actually one of the boys. Since, you know, if it offended me, they'd know I needed kicking out of the super-secret clubhouse or something.


Hmm. Never have figured that out. My DH maintains that it is just that guys are inherently kind of not that deep, and that I'm overthinking it, which would tilt things toward the former explanation. Being female, I don't have a lot of insight into the male psyche, sophomoric or otherwise.

The resignation of Dr Summers was a travesty. He cited the data to support his claim. And Harvard embarrassed itself. This is just another reason to question if Harvard is really open to intellectual inquiry and debate or is an "Old Boys network" - it certainly reacted like one.


DW pretty much agrees with all of this. "Its still an old boys network." She reminded me of this book and the times she outperformed her male colleagues yet was ignored.

http://www.amazon.com/Tough-Choices-Memoir-Carly-Fiorina/dp/159184133X



Outside of the military, virtually no other organizations have an objective process to train and advance people. Its left up to whim and vanity most of the time.

My alma mater often disgusts me. Have you heard of the case of Harvard Law student Stephanie Grace, forced to apologize by the shool for broaching the topic of racial differences in IQ
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113659595336161 ?

Good grief.

1. Larry Summers resigned because the faculty was tired of him micromanaging them. He was not popular. As an example, he overturned tenure decisions for humanities professors that made their way up to him because the research did not pass what an economist considers good research. The whole what he said about women at the NBER was irrelevant to his resignation (except to the extent that at least one of the tenures he overturned was that of a woman). The controversy about the Allston campus, for example, was a much bigger deal. He just didn't play politics well and thought his decisions were always right.

2. He DIDN'T cite research. He was completely and totally unaware of any of the work done by psychologists on the subject. If you read the transcript, all he did was offer a suggestion that this whole nature vs. nurture thing should be looked into. Eventually people brought out Steven Pinker's work but that work is by no means uncontroversial. There is an enormous line of literature on the "nurture" side that you can read about in a book by Virginia Valian if you are so inclined.

3. I can't believe this garbage is resurfacing on the internet after all these years. And does Bostonian think about ANYTHING other than proving how men are superior to women biologically? Seriously, every single post is about a boy genius, testosterone being superior, boys not needing to show their work, affirmative action destroying the world, etc. etc. etc. It makes for an unwelcoming environment.

Yes, this.

I think Summers' comments on gender and science played an important role in his demise as president. If you look at the BBC story http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4738030.stm on his resignation, they cite the furor around his comments as a reason.
So does James Watson (of the double helix) in his book "Avoid Boring People".

A transcript of Summers' speech is at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june05/summersremarks_2-22.html , and an article from the Harvard Crimson about it is at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/14/summers-comments-on-women-and-science/ . Here is an excerpt showing that he did cite research about the higher variance in achievement test scores in males than females. There have been similar findings for IQ scores.

'But Lee Professor of Economics Claudia Goldin, whose own research has examined the progress of women in academia and professional life, said she �was pretty flummoxed� by the negative response to Summers� speech, which�in her view�displayed �utter brilliance.�

Summers spoke from a set of notes�not a prepared text�so a transcript is not available. But in an interview with The Crimson this evening, Summers said that his speech was a �purely academic exploration of hypotheses.�

Summers� speech came against the backdrop of widespread faculty criticism this fall following reports that only four of 32 tenure offers made in Harvard�s Faculty of Arts and Sciences last year went to women.

Early in his speech, Summers noted that women remain underrepresented in the upper echelons of academic and professional life�in part, he said, because many women with young children are unwilling or unable to put in the 80-hour work-weeks needed to succeed in those fields.

�I said that raised a whole set of questions about how job expectations were defined and how family responsibilities were defined,� according to Summers. �But I said it didn�t explain the differences [in the representation of females] between the sciences and mathematics and other fields.�

Goldin, who herself prepared a memo Summers cited in his speech Friday, said the president �had mountains of research� on the subject, although he spoke extemporaneously.

Summers referred repeatedly to the work of University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie and his University of California-Davis colleague Kimberlee A. Shauman, who have found that women make up 35 percent of faculty at universities across the country, but only 20 percent of professors in science and engineering.

Their analysis of achievement test results shows a higher degree of variance in scores among men than among women. According to Ascherman Professor of Economics Richard Freeman, an organizer of the conference, the research found that �there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.�

Summers suggested that behavioral genetics could partially explain this phenomenon.

Freeman and Goldin both said that after Summers� mentioned the �innate differences� hypothesis, he explicitly told the audience: �I�d like to be proven wrong on this one.�

By that point Hopkins, a renowned cancer researcher who last year was inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, had left the conference room. She said she was concerned that it would be �rude� to get up midway through Summers� speech, but �it was just too upsetting� for her to stay.'

<end of excerpt>

Finally, you are imagining things if you think my post about a boy genius was made for political reasons. Someone else posted about the same boy, just because they thought it was an interesting story. Maybe you are the person obsessed with gender issues, although I will admit to being interested in them.

Gently putting my toe in the pool, I happened to be following the thread relating to showing work in math. Here's what the post said:

"but some people (perhaps more boys than girls) with better math than verbal skills can solve certain math problems but not necessarily explain how they solved them."

Maybe the "perhaps more boys than girls" parenthetical should have appeared at the end of the sentence, so as not to distract the reader.

I read this to mean that, in the larger universe, there exists a population of people who are comparatively more skilled in mathematics than in the verbalishness. I further understood that this disparity (lower relative verbal skills) might hinder the ability of these people to explain their work -- regardless of chromosomal makeup. Lastly, and parenthetically, I recognized as a suggestion that within this population there might (perhaps) be more boys than girls. That is to say (I suppose) that more boys find themselves with a verbal skill deficit...

Does Bostonian not actually say, then, that the boys are, in general, more stupider?

I think it a mighty brash leap from "boys are more stupider" to "boys don't have to show their work."

As for Bostonian's comments on boy geniuses, testosterone, and affirmative action, I don't know what he contributed. Although... after seeing how he disparaged boys in math v. verbal skills, I'm quite curious to read what he's got to offer on the other topics.

I was once sitting around the regulars table at the bar discussing education. On this particular night, half of the people at the table were scientists, which was not unusual given where I lived. The topic was on how schools often only test whether people can perform the skill, but not whether they understand what they are doing. As an example, multiplication was brought up.

Well, the one scientist with a masters degree suddenly asked "What do you mean in regards to the multiplication example?". At first we thought he was not being serious. After explaining multiplication, he was happy to now know what it was and had not realized his entire life he did not know this.

(I can't stop laughing at "verbalishness".) I'm not saying that the resignation of Summers was or was not proper, or that he should or shouldn't have been able to say what he did without repercussions-- although from what I recall, he was simply voicing honest concerns that he considered to be in support of advancement of women in academia. I was merely noting that when such a stink arises, creating obvious pressure under which someone resigns (not necessarily in the absence of other factors), it's some evidence that women are wielding a lot more power.

I guess that the women here who have experienced discrimination have one honestly held viewpoint, and a man who hasn't seen it for himself can have an opposing viewpoint, especially when some studies back him up. I am positive that discrimination against women exists, that it is a lot less prevalent than a century ago, and will lessen much more with each passing generation. That's about all I'm sure of. There can be compelling anecdotes about horrible instances of discrimination, but they don't translate into knowledge about its impact on women as a whole.

I wonder whether gifted / highly capable women experience more or less discrimination than women in general.