Significantly more Women graduate with a BS from US collages than Men. Is that yet another gender imbalance that needs to be addressed by schools? Or is that a societal issue and having collages focusing on increasing Male admission and graduation rates a waste of resources?
Silly, if there are more women and having a degree is valued by society then there is no problem. If there were fewer women then that would be a problem that needed to be addressed urgently.
57:43 = ~33% more women get a BS degree than men which is a fairly large gap IMO.
As to the gender gap in the hard sciences 52% of undergraduate Chemistry degrees go to women which arguably makes them under represented, but only relative to their overall dominance. Chemistry is often looked at as a gateway to Medicine so it's arguably a great choice for an undergraduate degree. However, I would argue getting a PHD in Astronomy or Physics is a poor economic choice which is one of the reasons why so few women do so.
PS: Any argument that women can't hack / are unprepared for the hard sciences falls apart based on chemistry numbers.
With all due respect, I think it is in the DNA. Looking at our evolution during the past million years, may be women were dominated by men. They might not have had enough freedom to follow their curiosities until several thousand years back. So it will take more time to have their brain evolve to levels that current men's brain is at. Have we done enough comparative studies of men's and women's brains?
If there is a biological reason, I think it would be more likely that it is because men have reasons to take risks and women haven't - other than men, women can almost always reproduce, no matter if they are rich or poor.
it will take more time to have their brain evolve to levels that current men's brain is at
Wait, did you actually compare women to cave men or half monkey? Maybe that's why blacks aren't represented well in highly technical or high paying jobs, cause they only came down from the trees recently?</sarcasm>
OK I'll bite: The problem with your 'evolution theory' is that men and women aren't separate species and interbreed, a lot. Half the DNA in each women comes from a man, and half the DNA for a man comes from a woman. If "women DNA" were 'stupider' than "man DNA", then (like lots of genetic traits (e.g. skin colour, height)), you'd see it evening out over the generations. If there was a "dum dum gene" that only lived on the X or Y chromosome, you'd have to explain why it doesn't seem to affect people who don't have XX and XY (some men are XXY, some women are X, etc.)
It's entirely possible for both things to be true.
In a village of 1 man and 10 women, and that man impregnates each women, resulting in 10 babies. If you look at that set of 10 babies, then each baby will have half their DNA from a man and half from a woman. However of the 10 babies, the set of male ancestors is 1 person, but the set of female ancestors will be 10.
The variance in aptitude in men is greater than the variance in women, even though the average point for women is higher than that of men.
To put this another way (vastly simplified), there are more male geniuses and more male idiots. However if you were to grab a random woman off the street, she is likely to have greater aptitude than a random man you grab off the street.
So in US highschools where grading is bounded and the same testing is forced on everyone, we see women routinely trouncing their male counter parts in GPA scores.
Then in college, where people have a choice more men go into difficult but unprofitable majors (e.g. Physics), additionally women have a bias against certain subjects (e.g. Computer Science) due to the low-status accorded to it, and thus choose other majors like Law or Medicine.
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Bringing it back to Genetics, that means the 'dum dum gene' (gene which causes aptitude variance) is on the Y chromosome, thus women aren't affected by it at all.
The variance in aptitude in men is greater than the variance in women
Yes there are several diseases that negatively affect intelligence that are much much more common in males (e.g. autism). However genetics (and evolution) is not fair. It's not a trade off, where if one subset of humanity (men) are more likely to have autism doesn't mean that Genetics will give that subset more genius genes "to make up". Evolution is blind, the universe is apathetic.
This "genetic disadvange in one area ergo must be genetic advantage in another" idea is only used to explain why people in a privileged position are "entitled" to their privileged position, and a deflection away from the main issue of privilege.
If the universe worked that way, then why are the IQ tests for (in the USA) lower on average for african americans? What genetic advantage do they get in return? If Asians are good at maths, what genetic disadvantages do they get to to counter act it? If Jews are better with money, what genetic disadvantages do they get in exchange? If this theory was true, it could have answers for these. If gay people are geneticly more inclined to mental health issues than straight people, what genetic advantages do they get in return?
Also if was genetics that explains how "men are smarter than women and hence that's why men earn more than women", then you'd have to explain why there has not been a lot of genetic change in the last 100 years, but women are now earning much much more than they were 100 years now. (One of the answers is because of institutional misogyny which artificially kept women earning less than their ability. Since that has reduced in scope, women are earning more. So how do you know it's not institutional misogyny now?)
The article mis-states their case: women earn 52% of chemistry undergrad degrees and 41% of straight-up math degrees. The problem is not math itself but the culture surrounding Engineering, Physics and Computer Science in particular.
I think the problem is the culture in Elementary Education, Public Health, Social Work, and Medicine: if they weren't poaching all of the women who are CS's by right we'd stabilize at three women for every two men like is the just and natural result for university studies.
(The following line might have been feminist once: women have agency and are not puppets for men. When you see a group of women doing something, if your first thought is "What have men done to cause this?", Occam is not on your side.)
As far as math is concerned, not even close to 40% of advances in the field are fostered by women.
In fact it seems that even though more women get Bscs in math, actual cutting edge research in math continues to be made by 10% of women at best, roughly the same ratio as a generation ago.
Still not a single Fields medalist is female (despite the tremendous backstage games to change that) and that is not because of bias, very few (if any) women currently deserve it.
I don't know that there is any reason to think these social outcomes are rooted in genes. It looks to me like it's rooted in something else. Care to share where/why you got the idea that it is genetically determined?
What is the maximum number of children a man can have? What is the maximum number of children a woman can have? What does this imply about the best strategy for maximising number of descendants for men and for women?
Male mating strategies exhibit far higher skew than female ones. Men have higher variance than women in every trait I know of, from heighth to IQ scores to income. Men take more risks.
Here's[0] where you'll find the most convenient counterarguments or pointers to same. Here's[1] the best book I've encountered on the general topic. The introductory chapter is excellent.
Article does not pass the smell test. College is not where people go to decide if they are mathematically oriented or not. Everything that precedes it does.
Do bias, discrimination, and biological differences not drive preferences? Kids internalize the bias of the culture around them at an early age.
Why is this a mystery to the authors?
Referenced Quote from Article:
"While bias, discrimination, and biological differences may have some secondary influence, they found, women simply prefer careers that don't involve math over careers in engineering, physics, mathematics, operations research, computer science, and chemistry. Why this is so remains unanswered."
