Date published: 2007/08/09
The BBC says (to give publicity to a Radio 4 programme on the subject):
If you've worked your way to the top in a university maths, physics or engineering department - you're very unlikely to be a woman.
But why should this be?
In 2005, Harvard University president Larry Summers provoked a storm of protest when he suggested that at least part of the reason for the dearth of women in these fields was biological - in other words, the result of innate differences in tastes and aptitudes between the sexes.
...
Despite changing attitudes, there are still very few women at the highest levels in certain fields.In 2005/6, while more than half of all UK students in higher education were female, just 3% of maths and 2% of civil engineering professors were women, a recent study revealed.
Professor David Geary, of the University of Missouri in the US, suggests there are two key difference between the sexes that might account for the disparity in numbers.
The first is a difference in spatial abilities - the capacity to visualise things, particularly in three dimensions.
The second is an increased interest in objects and how things work.
According to Professor Geary: "Males are better in both of those areas, and both areas contribute to interest in maths and engineering, and performance in some areas."
But how can we be sure that these differences are genuinely innate and not a result of upbringing and the culture that surrounds us?
Professor Geary says: "These differences are found very early on in life.
"If you look at interest in toy cars or mechanical objects, boys like those much more from the pre-school years.
"Also, girls who have been exposed to a testosterone-like hormone in the womb show boy-like toy preferences."
But Helen Haste [a psychologist at the University of Bath] thinks the evidence on spatial skills is overplayed.
She says: "This is one of these things that's done to death.
"Even if we found a subject for which it was an absolutely crucial skill, we would expect 60% of the people taking that subject to be male and 40% to be female.
"More importantly, we're only surmising that spatial reasoning is such a crucial element in say engineering or physics that it would cause the kind of differences that we've found in the past."
...
According to Dr [Helena] Cronin, [who studies evolutionary theory and sex difference at the London School of Economics,] it's the numbers of men at the extremes of ability that are most telling: "For males, the difference between the worst and the best is far, far greater."This is a very important aspect of male-female differences.
"One way of looking at this is that among males there are more dumbbells, but there are also more Nobels."
The statement "In 2005/6, while more than half of all UK students in higher education were female, just 3% of maths and 2% of civil engineering professors were women, a recent study revealed" is typical of how you can easily distort a story by typical journalist sleight of hand. First of all, the BBC carefully fails to mention how many maths and civil engineering students are female, which is more relevant when considering the ratio of professors than the composition of the student body as a whole. The also fail to mention that of course professors were students (generally) twenty or thirty years ago, and the percentage of female maths and civil engineering students then would have been even lower than today. And the BBC singularly fails to mention the numbers for physics or non-civil engineering, which tends to indicate they are not so bad. All in all, the BBC is trying to make the story sound more dramatic than it is.
(And the statement by Haste that "Even if we found a subject for which it was an absolutely crucial skill, we would expect 60% of the people taking that subject to be male and 40% to be female" is truly bizarre. It would be interesting to see her "proof" of this "theorem". She is more sensible when she points out that the alleged spatial reasoning skill of men is probably a red herring.)
As Cronin points out, if you are looking at extremes (and professors are at the extremes), then the standard deviation of the distribution matters (more than the average). So if you believe that the male distribution has a higher standard deviation in some subject than the female distribution, then you could easily have more males at the top even if the female average is higher than the male average (it all depends on the exact distributions and what you mean by "at the top", i.e. how many standard deviations above the average you are looking at). Whether the male standard deviation is indeed higher is of course another question.
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