
Girls outscore boys on tech, engineering, even without class - rbanffy
https://www.apnews.com/6fd828468c28441fab669d9635438353
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wahern
Nearly a half century since publication of the seminal paper which easily
describes this phenomenon without resort to bias against women. :(

> The research paper by Bickel et al. concluded that women tended to apply to
> competitive departments with low rates of admission even among qualified
> applicants (such as in the English Department), whereas men tended to apply
> to less-competitive departments with high rates of admission among the
> qualified applicants (such as in engineering and chemistry).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkeley_gender_bias)

Not that bias doesn't exist, but it's ridiculous we still immediately assume
that's the underlying problem, or at least that it could be remediated by
treating it as a case of simple bias.

And in these cases Simpson's paradox is also an example of comparative
advantage, so it's doubly disappointing that scholars are missing the forest
for the trees. In 2019 this type of phenomenon shouldn't even be counter-
intuitive; not for anyone who made it past the first couple years of college.

An astute observer in 1975 could have predicted that women would eventually
outnumber men in law and medical programs. This has indeed come to pass, which
makes the notion that engineering programs are peculiarly biased against women
awkward as you'd have to argue that law and medical programs were _less_
biased in the intervening 40+ years than modern engineering programs. I'd like
to see someone try to make that argument; pretty sure any women who made it
through those gauntlets during the 70s and 80s would roll their eyes.

Which, again, isn't to say there isn't bias, just that it's unlikely to be the
dominant factor in the disparity. And if it's not the dominant factor, you're
not going to get very far by treating it as such.

