61–66 of 66 posts
This is fantastic - now we can stop spending millions on "women in X", and instead spend the money on real science. Right?
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Did either of you read the article? The control group picked "their least important values and wrote about why these might matter to other people." The article says nothing about how either men or women perform without a values exercise.
I don't think that exercise, in itself, would make anyone perform worse at physics. While writing about why your values are important to you could very plausibly increase your confidence, I don't see how writing about why other people might care about things you don't value would decrease your confidence or performance.
Very interesting. It may need to be backed with some more data but it's promising.
My money is on statistical fluke, how many times was this experiment even run? If they're credible they should collect the average over a number of experiments (the higher the better).
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I am taking a class taught by the professor who wrote this book about the economics of higher education: http://www.amazon.com/Tuition-Rising-College-Costs-preface/d... One of the more interesting things he went over from the book was the discrepancy between males and females in PhD in the hard sciences. While many claimed discrimination, what it turned out to be a slew of different issues. Except from his lecture, t…
It's very plausible that older generations are much more sexist in certain ways. For example, Feynman getting the nearest "girl" to fetch his soup. http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-mac... There is also the issue of having children. One article I read ascribed a great deal of disparity at the top simply to time : If you take time off from your career to raise children, you have thousands fewer…
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> Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers. I keep hearing this "inferior to your male peers" bit, but oddly enough, when I was in high school, the higher-level math and science classes were mostly populated by girl…
physical sciences != physiology You're right that for the last couple decades, the life sciences have been increasingly dominated by women, but that's not what was being discussed.
I remain really skeptical. If you believe this, then doing a fifteen-minute writing exercise at the start of a fifteen week course in which you "write about your values" rather than a different fifteen-minute writing exercise where you "write about other peoples values" leads you to understand introductory physics significantly better at the end, if you're a woman, or understand introductory physics significantly wor…
I doubt you have spent time teaching undergraduate physics. Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic. Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior…
You pose this question as if the answer were obvious, but I'm not only stupid enough not to see it, I can actually think of couple of reasons it could go either way, and they do not feel construed (to me, anyway). On several occasions I've asked people enrolled a couple years ahead of me about their favorite subjects and pet projects and whatnot, and while they were friendly and everything, they were uncomfortable reflecting about their schooling in front of a (relative) stranger, and they grew even more uncomfortable when I tried to coax them to discuss our discipline by talking about my own pet projects or struggles.
On the other hand, It's perfectly normal for interviewee to be nervous and underperform, and twenty minutes of chat on relevant and familiar topic would seem to dissipate impact somewhat.