Sex Differences in Math Ability Real and Important

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The talent required to do mathematics at the level of a Fields Medalist is extraordinary. The pool of competitors spans the adult population of the world not yet turned 40 on January 1 of the year Medals are awarded -- approximately 2 billion....On average, there are three Fields winners per award year, so that the ratio of competitors to slots, N /NS is approximately 7 x 108. From this we estimate the minimum mathematical ability of Fields Medalists to be an incredible 5.8 SD greater than the male population mean. Approximately 1.3 percent of the Medalists will be women. Since the prize is conferred quadrennially, we expect a female Fields Medalist to emerge approximately once every 103 years, that is, every 4/[3(0.013)] years. None has yet surfaced. _SexDifferencesMathAptitude

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A recent study claiming to find "few gender differences in math abilities" is a good example of deception by "science headlines." Published in the most recent "Psychological Bulletin" (an APA publication), the study looked at TIMSS and PISA scores for almost 500,000 students aged 14-16 years, in 69 countries. Although differences in math abilities between boys and girls do not develop most strongly until well into puberty -- around age 16 to 18 -- and grow larger thereafter, the Villanova researchers chose to look at younger students. Even so, the study found consistent differences in math aptitude between boys and girls.

SAT scores in the US consistently show a significant gap of almost 40 points between males and females who take the test.

Sex differences in math and spatial abilities go deep -- to the genes. Billions of dollars have been spent over the past few decades to bring the numbers of female math PhDs and Fields Prize winners into parity with male numbers. To no avail.

Men and women exhibit other behavioral differences which are apparent almost from birth. To some extent they mirror sex-differentiated behavior in animals. Boys are more aggressive, girls more nurturing. Female babies react more to facial expressions, males to moving objects. By adolescence these behaviors have morphed into girls' interest in social relationships, and boys' interest in machines and devices. Obviously, such divergence of interests influences career choices. Girls lean more toward fields like psychology, while similarly talented men incline toward engineering or physical science. A study6 by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at almost three times the rate of boys. For all these reasons, we should regard 29% as an upper bound to the percentage of women in the technological work force. In practice, their numbers will be significantly less. _Source

Even the relatively few girls who are genetically endowed with superior math talent tend to choose non-mathematical pursuits in life.  In the modern free choice era of education, there can be no doubt that women make these life choices because of their own inner desires.

Of course, there are also innate gender differences that work to the advantage of women.   These differences are celebrated by feminists, not denied. ;-)

While women have been able to approach 50% of math BA's and math MA's, the genetic ceiling seems to be holding down the proportion of math PhDs for women near 25%. (2005 Gallagher, Kauffman) As easy as PhD's can be to get at some institutions-- and as desperately as women are recruited to these programs-- the low level of math PhDs for women suggests either a shortage of interest or a shortage of aptitude.  The same phenomenon is evident in the more math intensive and theoretical areas within physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering.  And if you look at elite institution PhDs, the differences are even greater.

Denial of innate differencs in aptitude between men and women, and between various ethnic groups, is an important structural support of leftist egalitarian philosophies and politics.  But genuine honest science continues to reveal these important differences.  No amount of leftist resource misallocation  will change the underlying nature of the facts.

Bogus Bias: Feminasties Attack US Science

Ideologically brain-bound feminasties are attacking American science, trying to dismantle and destroy the most productive scientific establishment in the world, attempting to invent a fictitious bias to justify the carnage. Title IX has already plowed a destructive swathe through college athletics--now the feminasties want to wreak similar collapse in university science departments. But where is the bias?

You’ll find sweeping assertions of discrimination in academia against female scientists if you read the executive summary of the National Academy of Sciences’ 2006 report, which was issued by a committee led by Donna Shalala. But if you look in the report for evidence of bias, you find studies showing that female graduate students in general (and those without children in particular) are as likely as men to finish their studies, and that they’re as likely to have mentors and assistantship support.

...Although I don’t think the data show widespread bias against women studying for Ph.D.’s and faculty jobs, there are obstacles that keep women from wanting to study science in graduate school or pursue a career in academia. Along with Lab readers like Tamara and Oliver Young (and some of the Title Niners), I suspect the chief one is the difficulty of balancing their careers with with family responsibilities, particularly childrearing. _NYT

Politically motivated feminasties are taking a wrecking ball to everything they can touch. Far from wanting to maximise productivity and creativity for US science, these whining women of politicized science want to achieve power they have not earned. Affirmative action is all about placing unqualified, inexperienced people into positions they are not suited for.

Such political gender-mandering "bull-in-the-china-shop" shenanigans will only make it more difficult to do good science and engineering in the US. It might be unkind to suspect that the leftist backers of such measures may actually wish to reduce the quality of US science, but since that will be the end result of their ham-handed interference, it is an easy suspicion to happen upon.

Why Jenny Flunks Math 55

Math 55 is supposed to be the hardest math course in US higher education. "Honors Calculus and Linear Algebra". Classes meet three hours a week, and class homework requires up to 60 hours a week. Few women take Math 55. Fewer still ever pass.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields.

...So why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty atti­tudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female pro­fessors in math, science, and engineering. Just 1 percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24 percent to sexist discrimination, and 74 percent to differences in what characteristically interests men and women.___American__via_SteveSailer

But the truth may be a bit less politically correct. La Griffe du Lion looks at sex differences in mathematics and concludes:

Mathematics is a man's game. A gender gap appears early in life, blossoms with the onset of puberty and reaches full bloom by mid-adolescence. It indelibly shapes women's prospects for doing significant mathematics. In this account of cognitive sex differences, Prodigy shows how sex-differentiated ability in 15 year-olds accounts for the exiguous female representation at the highest levels of mathematical research. A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years.

Another look at women and minorities in science concludes:

Prospects for women and minority doctoral scientists in engineering and other math-intensive areas are examined. A calculation of the ethnic-gender profile of this segment of the workforce is made for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Rank ordering on mathematical reasoning ability predicts that women will top off at approximately 27 percent of this market. Similarly, rank ordering predicts almost 99 percent of math-intensive doctoral jobs will go to whites and Asians of primarily Chinese, Japanese, Korean and South Asian descent. Asians will continue to be represented in these fields well beyond their numbers in the general population. A study of the math-intensive academic marketplace predicts that women will top off there at about 22 to 23 percent.

In fact, women are already topping off at roughly 24% in the physical sciences which are more math intensive. If you read the Christina Hoff Sommers article you will find that politically, this lack of gender equity is simply unacceptable. Regardless of how many other academic fields and professions that women may be coming to dominate, if even a few fields remain where male dominance appears unchallenged, political feminists will cry foul. And when that happens, billions of dollars suddenly change hands, department heads and college deans will fall, and congress suddenly shakes a leg to please.

This is simply power politics for high powered feminist heavyweights, such as those mentioned in the article. But for academia, it sounds more like the death knell of minimally politicized science and math. The further entrenching of ideology into every aspect of academic thought and training. Make the world conform to your insular views, at all costs. Regardless of who is finally elected US President in November, there is no doubt who is at the wheel. PC--a cold and killing dogma.

Limits to Matriarchy

Women are making gains in science, engineering, and virtually every area of higher education and the professions.

So what we are talking about, in all likelihood, is an America where women are better educated than men and where education matters more than ever. Put those facts together, and you get some implications worth pondering....Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed.

Women's superior education will increase their earning power relative to men's, and on average they will be marrying down, educationally speaking....Many tradition-minded cultures in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia already regard the Western economic and social model as emasculating. Radical Islam, in particular, abhors feminism. As the United States and Europe continue to feminize, will the anti-modern backlash, already deeply problematic in the Muslim world, intensify? As sex roles and expectations diverge, might hostility and misunderstanding mount between the West and the rest?

Women will...lead. Think about this: Not only do girls study harder and get better grades than boys; high school girls now take more math and science than do high school boys. If there is a "weaker sex," it isn't female. Reason

In a high technology society--dependent upon cutting edge scientific discovery and technological invention and innovation--females who wish to achieve the very highest levels in certain fields are at a distinct disadvantage. Not because of sexism, not because of marriage and child-rearing. Because of the female brain.

Female babies react more to facial expressions, males to moving objects. By adolescence these behaviors have morphed into girls' interest in social relationships, and boys' interest in machines and devices. Obviously, such divergence of interests influences career choices. Girls lean more toward fields like psychology, while similarly talented men incline toward engineering or physical science. A study6 by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at almost three times the rate of boys. For all these reasons, we should regard 29% as an upper bound to the percentage of women in the technological work force. La Griffe du Lion

IQ tests are specifically designed to achieve male-female equivalence in overall IQ scores. The sex differences are largely in specific areas of problem solving.

On average, men perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that require the subject to imagine rotating an object or manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, in guiding or intercepting projectiles.

Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of words and on tests that challenge the person to find words that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly identifying matching items and performing certain precision manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a board. Kimura SciAm

The IQ curves above illustrate an even more important phenomenon--men are overrepresented at the extreme right extreme of the curve. Above 130, the ratio of males to females is 2:1. Male superiority increases as you move farther along the tail to the right. At the highest levels of math intelligence, the male advantage is 10:1 over females. That is why to this point, no women have won the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics.

The talent required to do mathematics at the level of a Fields Medalist is extraordinary. The pool of competitors spans the adult population of the world not yet turned 40 on January 1 of the year Medals are awarded -- approximately 2 billion. (Again, the precise number is not important.) On average, there are three Fields winners per award year, so that the ratio of competitors to slots, N /NS is approximately 7 x 108. From this we estimate the minimum mathematical ability of Fields Medalists to be an incredible 5.8 SD greater than the male population mean. Approximately 1.3 percent of the Medalists will be women. Since the prize is conferred quadrennially, we expect a female Fields Medalist to emerge approximately once every 103 years, that is, every 4/[3(0.013)] years. None has yet surfaced.

La Griffe


We have reached the place where women can impregnate other women, without the use of male sperm. Theoretically, a society of women, without men, is possible. Certainly women can perform in virtually any profession or occupation. But without men--without the male brain and brawn--could a female society compete against outside societies of males and females?

Male superiority at top levels of math-intensive fields of science, engineering, computer science, and other fields important to a competitive high tech society, suggests that although women are soon to out-graduate men by 3:2 in higher education, within small but important enclaves--at elite levels--men will continue to dominate. The discoveries, inventions, and innovations that a society without males would have to forego, would hamper their competition against outside societies.

Even in areas of near-equivalent intelligence and ability, the males' greater aggressiveness from higher testosterone levels, can lead him to persist longer and against higher odds. Male competitive drive can often be the deciding factor in a contest against other males, or against females.

Even in the age of robotic weaponry and long range energy weapons, a society needs large strong men to defend it against the outsider males who would like to kill all its men and possess all its women. A society made up of only women, would lack that aggression, competitiveness--that killer instinct--that more gender-balanced societies possess.

Males are being systematically disadvantaged in North American education from the earliest age. Males learn differently than females, but a female-dominated educational system is unable and unwilling to accomodate the males' different needs. Christina Hoff Sommers made that point in War Against Boys, but her message fell on the deaf ears of an increasingly feminist establishment that lacks even basic sympathies for the males in decline.

This is an ongoing saga, which is apt to grow a bit intense. Stay tuned.

Because American Schools Are Creating Mediocrities Out of Promising Young Minds

A recent post on Slashdot accentuates an ever worsening problem:

I am a new graduate student in Computer Engineering. I would like to get my MS and possibly my Ph.D. I have learned that 90% of my department is from India and many others are from China. All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that? I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?

Slashdot

But the question is not only relevant to engineering grad schools. It could be asked of US graduate training in math, computer science, physical sciences, and the more technical areas of biological sciences.

US higher education is considered the best in the world, when looking at technical and scientific training, and business and economics. (The arts and humanities have turned into indoctrination centers, but that is another topic.) It is logical that qualified students from China, India, and other less developed nations would travel to the US and take advanced training.

But it is also true that many of the graduate spots filled by foreign students would not have been filled by North American students anyway. Why is that?

First of all, I am not saying that this phenomenon is entirely bad for the US and Canada. Attracting the best minds in the world is not a new phenomenon for North America, and has benefited the region for well over a century. The problem is the minds that might have happily entered these technical fields had they been better prepared in preparatory school and grammar school.

Feminists complain endlessly about the problem that Larry Summers clearly and correctly (though timidly) mentioned in his famous talk that caused feminist science professors to faint dead away. Women are not entering technical fields at the same rate as men, and are particularly not achieving the highest levels of these fields, comparable to men. (Feminist professors are still holding a grudge against Summers, blacklisting him and preventing him from speaking wherever he may go)

But do the feminists differentiate between the foreign male students, graduates and professors, and domestic students, graduates, and professors? Well, men are men, and they are all the enemy, so to speak, so no. But do these outspoken feminists truly believe that the top universities discriminate against women AND domestic men when admitting graduate students and assigning professorships? How very odd.


As an aside, you may wish to go to Slashdot to see how quickly the discussion veered onto unrelated topics. That's one reason I rarely bother with Slashdot. With a few notable exceptions, the comment quality has dropped significantly.

The abysmal nature of lower education in North America, especially the US, has disqualified most domestic students who might have taken higher ed degrees in technical subjects. This is only part of the downward path of education in N.A.

But in the US, and Canada, the best way of becoming very rich is through business. Some scientists and engineers can leverage their technical and scientific training to a success in business. But so can high school and college dropouts.

Foreign students who wish to immigrate to the US and Canada can better do so by achieving a Masters or PhD in a useful subject. Thus part of the motivation for foreign students. Clearly, domestic students lack a comparable motivation, which is a huge part of the problem with lower ed training for science and technology. The reason for that lack of motivation will be explored in future postings.

In a Free Society, Women Do What they Want

Over the ten year period from 1994 to 2004, female graduate students in the US have continued to make substantial gains in proportion of total enrollment across the board, in science and engineering.

This is to be expected in a free society. What is most interesting is the particular areas where women have broken through the 50% enrollment barrier--making them the majority of graduate students in those fields. In Psychology, Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences, women constitute the majority of graduate students.

In the math intensive fields, women remain less than 40% of total graduate enrollment. As detailed in this La Griffe du Lion essay, the curve for mathematical aptitude is different in women vs. men. Given that most people choose to do what they are good at, it is not surprising that more women graduate students choose fields with less math emphasis.

At the very highest levels of achievement in math-intensive fields--the Fields Medal in math, or Nobel Prizes in the physical sciences (chemistry, physics)--one does not expect to find a large proportion of women.

Over time, one would expect more women to enter fields that had been excessively skewed in favour of men historically. Such has happened in Psychology--where women constitute nearly 75% of all graduate students in the US. Such has also happened in medicine and law. They certainly should be entering those fields--huge and expensive outreaches to attract women to these fields have been ongoing, and expanding rapidly, for decades.

At this point, it is most important that both men and women are allowed to enter the field that interests them the most. Trying to force women into certain fields, as a recent NAS committee attempts, besides being massively expensive, is both illiberal and unwise. In a free society, women do what they want.