
Girls & Math: How It Works - getp
http://xkcd.com/385/
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byrneseyeview
Talking about Girls & Math: How It Works:

Say, roughly,
([http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/))
"Women are rare in mathematically demanding fields. This is a problem I want
to solve, so I'd like to talk about the cause. Maybe it is because they are
discriminated against. Maybe it is because women have other priorities than
men. Or maybe it's a reflection of what we see in standardized tests -- that
there is more variance in male skill." And be told that you said "Girls are
bad at math."

I'm glad this is one of those issues so complex it takes a stick-figure
comment to say something about it that is both accurate and noncontroversial.

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mnemonicsloth
Here at myState University, the math department operates close to gender
parity, with maybe a slight majority of women in the Applied Math
concentration. Engineering is a total sausage-fest.

Which is funny, if you think about it, because engineers only need to know so
much math.

I'm not even going to talk about physics.

~~~
ivankirigin
CMU undergrad CS routinely checks the "people named dave" to female ratio. It
used to be greater than one. My year at CMU's robotics institute had 3 Daves
and 5 women.

~~~
edw519
I assume a school as reputable as CMU has already accounted for the "woman
named Dave" scenario.

~~~
icky
Davwina?

Davetha?

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wallflower
Engineering is hard. Doing difficult homework problems is not fun. I only know
a few engineers who were regulars on the college party circuit. The women in
my engineering school (who were the minority) were smart and liked
engineering.

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tptacek
No insight. Just a restatement of the problem. I'm no more knowledgeable about
the bias against women in engineering, and I'm not laughing.

~~~
fake
It's a comic. You know that, right?

~~~
tptacek
No. That's my point.

~~~
tehmoth
xkcd hasn't been funny for weeks, unfortunately

