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Women and Mathematics

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Re: Women and Mathematics

#11

Post by russell »

I would suggest that girls form study groups. My daughter and 4 of her girl friends formed one in her senior year in high school for English, Calculus, Physics, etc. My daughter got a lot from it. Two of the girls were valedictorians; all went to top schools. It succeeded because they were motivated to get into good schools and the the simple model probably doesn't scale. School sponsored pairings in science didn't work so well because personality problems and differences in dedication.

Has anyone had experience (or their kids) with online study groups, particularly with collaborative aids?

Re: Women and Mathematics

#12

Post by newt0311 »

dilanj wrote: post #6

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank. With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming…

Did you consider the possibility that maybe people in general (and in this case, women) are capable of making their own decisions and maybe most women genuinely are not interested in pursuing a career in mathematics for reasons other than coercion by society/tradition/etc...

Re: Women and Mathematics

#13

Post by DaniFong »

antipc wrote: post #9
dilanj wrote: post #6

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank. With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming…

Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.) Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be…

I don't think dilanj is suggesting that no biologically driven differences exist. I think that the argument is that at MIT there's a preselected, science focused group of women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

And by the way, on color?

"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

Re: Women and Mathematics

#14

Post by DaniFong »

newt0311 wrote: post #12
dilanj wrote: post #6

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank. With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming…

Did you consider the possibility that maybe people in general (and in this case, women) are capable of making their own decisions and maybe most women genuinely are not interested in pursuing a career in mathematics for reasons other than coercion by society/tradition/etc...

To be fair, most men aren't pursuing careers in mathematics either. The population of professional mathematicians is a puny subset of the population at large. Even a tiny effects of cumulative cultural mores, when working on people subject to a threshold so far out they're so far out on the bell curve, can have an exponentially disproportionate effect.

Many of the women physicists I've become friends with spoke fondly of the first time they encountered a female scientist, either on screen, in print, or in person. They said it was the first time they realized that one could be a woman, and a scientist. It sounds absurd, but remember, this happened when they were kids. No imagine it happened just two years later. A few year's head start on knowing what you want to be can make the difference on what becomes your professional identity, and what you explore and do, ie: your training.

I was only speaking last night about this with my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She placed the turning point on when she heard about Jane Goodall, who wasn't just 'in' science, but revolutionizing it. I encountered science (and a notion of utilitarianism) through Marie Curie, what she discovered, what a revolution she sparked, and how it lead to her death. It was difficult emotionally, but I decided that to discover something so valuable, and so important, paying with one's life would have been worth it.

Re: Women and Mathematics

#15

Post by Prrometheus »

schtog wrote: post #8

Is it raining pixels on that site? I see white pixels moving from top to bottom of the site...

I don't have the best eyesight in the world, my whole family basically consists of mole people, so that site freaked me out. I thought something was going wrong with me.

Re: Women and Mathematics

#16

Post by d0mine »

newt0311 wrote: post #12
dilanj wrote: post #6

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank. With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming…

Did you consider the possibility that maybe people in general (and in this case, women) are capable of making their own decisions and maybe most women genuinely are not interested in pursuing a career in mathematics for reasons other than coercion by society/tradition/etc...

You've excluded external factors (society/tradition/etc...). What's left? - Some sort of intrinsic motivation (meaning in-born). So you are basically saying that women are genetically less than men predisposed to math (and to explain actual data (male/female ratio in math) you must assume they are much much less predisposed.

It is more likely that society/tradition/etc... do matter after all.

My point taken to an extreme is:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines consciousness." - Karl Marx

Re: Women and Mathematics

#17

Post by Prrometheus »

dilanj wrote: post #6

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank. With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming…

>"So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy."

And then we have one generation of childless hedonistic professionals, call Western civilization a wrap, and hand over the landmasses to the Latin Americans, Chinese, and Muslims (many of whom are very intelligent and successful scientists and engineers!) who did not view tradition as the enemy.

Indian culture interests me. I see a lot of Indian women in Grad school, but from my interaction with them they seem to respect cultural traditions and family values. I don't know how they manage to find time in their lives to be Mathematicians and wives and mothers, maybe the ones I know are just far to the right on the bell curve. But maybe the problem isn't with culture and tradition, maybe it's just the culture and tradition we've inherited needs tweaking.

Re: Women and Mathematics

#18

Post by cgranade »

DaniFong wrote: post #13
antipc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.) Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be…

I don't think dilanj is suggesting that no biologically driven differences exist. I think that the argument is that at MIT there's a preselected, science focused group of women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here. And by the way, on color? "In Wester…

In response to the blue/pink thing, there's always some set of societal discriminators between boys and girls (and later, between men and women), and to a one, they seem to me to be completely arbitrary. Shoulder pads, now a staple of women's fashion, didn't use to be such http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_pads_(fashion) , and long hair used to be seen as dreadfully un-masculine.

Frankly, I like to try and buck this kind of thing. I have long hair (longer than most of the women I know), and carry around a pink DS... not much, but it's a start.

Re: Women and Mathematics

#19

Post by cgranade »

antipc wrote: post #9
dilanj wrote: post #6

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank. With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming…

Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.) Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be…

What, pray tell, is this "PC establishment?" It is odd to see such a concept invoked to defend a set of societal stereotypes, when "PC" is intended to raise images of, well, societal stereotypes. As other commenters have pointed out, the blue/pink thing is relatively recent, so it can't be "anti-PC" to insist that blue and pink are somehow inherently tied to gender.

Really, what it comes down to in my book isn't that people are equal because it's politically correct, or even that people are equal at all. It's that we should judge people for their acts, not their gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever else. If a particular woman is worse at mathematics than average, then so be it. If another particular woman is better than average, let's celebrate that for what it is.

Re: Women and Mathematics

#20

Post by Prrometheus »

cgranade wrote: post #19
antipc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.) Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be…

What, pray tell, is this "PC establishment?" It is odd to see such a concept invoked to defend a set of societal stereotypes, when "PC" is intended to raise images of, well, societal stereotypes. As other commenters have pointed out, the blue/pink thing is relatively recent, so it can't be "anti-PC" to insist that blue and pink are somehow inherently tied to gender. Really, what it comes down to in my book isn't that…

The PC line is that everybody is equal, and if there are measurable differences between groups then it is due to white male heterosexual upper class capitalist oppression.
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