11–20 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is better for women now than it was before, but it is still far from perfect. Just look at the turn over rate and exit rate of women in these fields. Even the women who objectively "make it" are being driven out of the industry in droves.
Driven out by who? A mass group of secret conspirators?
He almost got kicked out of graduate school. Later went on to win the Fields Medal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Driven out by who? A mass group of secret conspirators?
Women report being driven out by men hitting on them and sexually harassing them.
EDIT: not calling anyone a liar.
I expect in a decade the current 2-1 female-male ratio in higher education is going to reach such crisis levels that even our media will be unable to ignore it, as they do currently.
The author lost me at "Mathematical genius resides within every one of us — most people just don’t know it yet." The movie Ratatouille captured the sentiment much better, "a great chef can be anyone". Which is not the same as "anyone can be a great chef". It seems the author is mixing up those two. I fully agree that gender, background, schooling, etc is not the key determination of genius. However, saying anyone cou…
Being a hard worker is easier than being seven feet tall, though. I know it's disingenuous to say hard work will get you everywhere, but working your ass off and being confident about it will get you pretty far.
The question asked is the causal network that contributes to mathematical genius and the distribution of contributing causal factors within the population -- P(genius | factors)
Various factors are clearly involved: P(genius | intelligence), P(genius | hard work), P(genius | self-confidence), and so on.
If we accept that those functions are probably not uniformly distributed and that some have a stronger impact than others, we can see that most arguments can be reduced to describing those functions or describing the distributions of those factors among the population.
Where most educated people's intuitions lead them astray is that the experience of segregation in higher education and employment has led them to vastly underestimate the actual variance in factors like intelligence, hard work and self-confidence among people.
Vanishingly few individual actually possess the right combination of factors required for mathematic genius.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Women report being driven out by men hitting on them and sexually harassing them.
Many women are not attracted to work in fields populated 90% by males. I believe this to be a more subtle problem that you suggest; you might eliminate all sexual harassment and it would still be the case. EDIT: not calling anyone a liar.
The author lost me at "Mathematical genius resides within every one of us — most people just don’t know it yet." The movie Ratatouille captured the sentiment much better, "a great chef can be anyone". Which is not the same as "anyone can be a great chef". It seems the author is mixing up those two. I fully agree that gender, background, schooling, etc is not the key determination of genius. However, saying anyone cou…
The author lost me at "Mathematical genius resides within every one of us — most people just don’t know it yet." The movie Ratatouille captured the sentiment much better, "a great chef can be anyone". Which is not the same as "anyone can be a great chef". It seems the author is mixing up those two. I fully agree that gender, background, schooling, etc is not the key determination of genius. However, saying anyone cou…
With common core, math is mostly now word problems, which makes them as much reading comprehension as abstract mathematical problems. This is going to be especially brutal for boys, who typically trail girls in reading skills early on. I expect in a decade the current 2-1 female-male ratio in higher education is going to reach such crisis levels that even our media will be unable to ignore it, as they do currently.
That is to say, many bright students who may be good at Math someday (like Hadamard) are unceremoniously kicked out of Math fields because of the sink or swim nature of teaching today either through lack of confidence or simple inability to muster the proper grades.
This makes you wonder: how many potential geniuses in Mathematics or other STEM fields are we losing due to darwinian teaching tactics? I suspect many more than we're willing to admit.