Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

Info about Quillette (the source of this article):

https://theoutline.com/post/2307/quillette-claire-lehmann-co...

Conservatives love playing the victim The website Quillette is trying to convince people conservatism is subversive.

Unsurprisingly, Quillette has become a hub for reactionary thought. The website, which started publishing in 2015 and is funded by a modest Patreon account,

The best way to get a sense of the typical Quillette reader is by perusing the comments section under any essay, especially those about feminism and the leftist threat to western civilization. Quillette’s readers see themselves as inheritors of the western tradition of dispassionate, boring debate instead of what they likely are: people trying to kill time at work by sounding off in the comments. They hate “leftist identitarians” and “corrosive marxists” who ruin this dispassionate, boring debate by deigning to have an emotional stake in the subjects they study.

It's also important to keep in mind that 90% of hard science professors lean liberal (PKrugman, paraphrased: because those whose jobs involve evaluating facts tend to reject propaganda). And that US conservatives have a propaganda agenda to attack universities:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/12/a-hist...

Yet the trope of portraying American universities as a threat to society emerged with particular intensity in the 1970s and ‘80s. Neoconservatives including the journalist Irving Kristol and the philosopher Allan Bloom developed a discourse around what they saw as the moral laxity and corrosiveness of the 1960s counterculture.

In other words, when it comes to America’s colleges and universities, conservative anxiety is best expressed as being about a small set of marquee positions of honor and prestige in the liberal arts that happen to be largely staffed at present by those whose political commitments lean left

A lot of people would take the opportunity of someone to go to work for them while they spent time in the great outdoors with the kids.

I have dual German - Canadian citizenship, and I've been surprised at how paternalistic German men can be in their expectations or comments around women's careers and child-rearing responsibilities.

If you're a technically-minded woman, who's more interested in her career than being a wet-nurse, you've got problems no matter where you're living.

> Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.

Have you also considered a possibility that there is no explanation, and the gap is simply due to internal variability in the underlying dynamical system?

Although personally I favor the "different interests" explanation, let me expand on this a bit. Humans love explanations, even of random events, that's how superstition comes about.

There was an interesting biological experiment done with ants. If you put two identical piles of food the same distance from an anthill, you would intuitively expect that ants will eat from each pile in 50/50 ratio. However, it's not what happens; in reality, the ratio fluctuates over time, at points being 20/80 and can reverse to 80/20.

Why? Because behavior of each ant depends on strength of pheromone path to food that is produced by other ants. In other words, ants, to some extent, copy behavior of other ants. And this copying is enough to produce a large difference in ratio even in cases that are objectively absolutely equal.

So is it hard to conceive that humans also copy behavior of other fellow humans (actually, the above example is from Paul Ormerod's book Butterfly Economics), and that women might prefer a job where already are other women? Or where isn't an overwhelming majority of different people (i.e. men)?

The influence on individual decision can be very subtle, but yet can, statistically, lead to large differences in outcome.

I find the notion that this topic is NOT being discussed and being suppressed somewhat hilarious. Find me a single women in STEM who has not read or heard extensively about the idea that men are biologically predisposed to be better than women at 'abstract reasoning' etc. Historically, the notion that women might be just as capable at men at technical disciplines is what's NEW! I personally know of at least a dozen gifted young women scientists at the very best institutions in the world quitting the field because of advisors and others explicitly belittling them based on their gender. While these are anecdotes, they're representative for the question of who becomes faculty in STEM since that's my world: These were people who were identified from a young age as being likely to be future faculty in the sciences, performed off-the-charts well on every metric you can think of, publishing papers in journals in undergrad, and you know what? They heard this discussion ad nauseam, and in combination with the random sexism thrown their way, decided to bail (as frankly I would have in their shoes).

A related read that I found quite illuminating: http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05...

(I run in fairly left-leaning liberal circles and you know what I hear about? NOT actually being PC (whatever that is -- define it, I dare you) but people complaining about something being PC. This has been going on since the year 2000 so much that I'm pretty sure jokes about something being PC are PC, while actually being PC is not PC..)