I didn't read either, but for some reason, I know there was a response to that article: Who Says Women Aren't Funny?

A man having both a career and a family is the norm and has been for...ever. A woman having both a career and a family is a challenge and controversy. Even if she manages to find a partner who will support her in her career (or take advantage of her success) enough that she isn't the one making career sacrifices, she then faces flak for not putting her family first.

But obviously kids in preschool and elementary school aren't choosing their interests with this in mind, so there are still other causes to consider.

A person's performance also varies with how they and others expect them to perform. And performance and interests influence each other. Maybe there are almost no women Nobel prize winners in chemistry and physics because there aren't supposed to be. Does anyone actually expect women to be good at physics? I realize the question of the thread suggests surprise, but is there genuine surprise, or do people actually take the data as confirmation of their suspicion that women's brains just can't be wired for physics?

I think there are way too many confounding variables to be asking about biological differences yet since many of those variables should be eradicated anyway for reasons of fairness.

Edit: Speaking of expectations reminds of something from an essay by Feynman. He's talking about eavesdropping on other students at lunch in college:

Richard Feynman, a very clever, insightful, observant person, didn't expect the female mind to get math. And he is having to argue that maybe trying to teach math to girls isn't a complete waste of time. This was less than 50 years ago.

[QUOTE=FoldnDark;41720354]For those of you who haven't already read this piece, I think it's appropriate here.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fe...hitchens200701

QUOTE]

+1. His backing science may be lacking, but his writing is not, nor was it ever

the gender pay gap difference has been debunked many times. here's a good piece on that. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gend...complete-myth/

as for doctors:


i'm not surprised, since that means her work will be affected. this is a big topic in the UK because female GP's will surpass male ones very soon and most of them will end up working part time because of kids or not return to work at all since they have a loaded husband. therefore the money used for training them is wasted and someone has to pick up the workload. for things to change female doctors who want kids would have to marry down the food chain like men do and have the husband work part time or stay at home. but knowing most women's nature, it won't happen anytime soon with most women with higher level social status/careers . that's why you see holywood actors marrying waitresses and billionaire ceo's their secretaries while the other way around is rare as hen's teeth. it's the natural order of things : do you think a lioness would respect a maneless, tiny male lion?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3983741.html

the escorts thing is the easiest : men want sex, women want conditional sex. like billy crystal wisely said, ''men need a place, women need a reason''. plus, a woman can get laid walking to the bar across the street or getting hundreds of messages on a dating site within an hour. i remember this guy doing an experiment on a casual sex site with 2 fake profiles, both average looking : woman got 800 offers , guy got ZERO. that's why there's no strip clubs for women and playgirl has a mostly gay customer base. even the few male prostitutes/escorts out there are mostly in business because of gay demand. same with modeling, porn , anything to do with sex and nudity, women win by far. pretty much only gay men want see random naked guys. even most women ogle at women more than they do at men. seinfeld nailed it, as usual.



you also mentioned girls lacking confidence, well i don't think so. it affects boys a lot more and from younger age as well:

http://www.theguardian.com/education...ols-gender-gap

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education...ereotypes.html

see?it can go both ways. who is the idiot in just about every sitcom , cartoon or ad on TV? the husband/boyfriend. thank god he has a smart and wise woman with him otherwise he wouldn't be able to put his pants on by himself... if he can find them!

but that's my point, men and women are not competitors, we are complimentary. i hate many aspects of ''masculinity''. anything from the lack of empathy, the aggression that's most times uncalled for, the cockiness... and in my life the women in my family have always been there for me, a lot more than men. nature didn't make us so different for no reason, it did it because it was the best way for us to survive and evolve, just like the division of labor gave a huge boost to the industrial output. the people who are deviations from the norm should be encouraged to pursue whatever they want and not waste their talent. but quotas for everything most women don't want to or aren't capable of doing are just non-sense.

a great quote from a comment to the telegraph article on boys losing confidence and thinking they are dumb so early in life:

sums up almost every article/news i've ever read/seen in 90% of the UK/US media:

men earn more, boys score better in IQ tests, boys do better in school, men get more degrees = OMG the system is just wrong, something has to be done, this inequality cannot continue!

women earn more, more women go to college, more women get degrees than men, girls do better in IQ tests = YAY, you go girl, now that's equality!

How are you in anyway qualified to measure this? How many people can you name, male or female, born after 1980 that are on pace to accomplish as much as Allen?

You mean the guy which a chaired professorship at Harvard and one of the presidents closest economic advisors? I could use some run bad like that.

after his statements...he was shot down by the pc police .

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...b-1033373.html

there are countless men for each woman who has achieved anything in any field, especially at the apex of it. i didn't say no women can do it, i only asked why are there so few compared to men. silicon valley is a sausage fest and it gets even more ''festy'' when talking about the ''genius'' level. look at the biggest 15 online sites , every single founder is a man.


someone was wondering if a woman had ever won a fields medal: no, none has. and it's probably gonna stay like that for many, many years since math seems to be the most male dominated science of all.

You said women are not doing better now than before with no evidence. If you look at citations by women or other metrics the percentage has gone way up in many fields (off the top of my head the number 1 cited theoretical physicist of the 90s was female) so its hard to take a lot of our claims seriously.

I disagree with those articles. Summers got removed from the Harvard presidency and didn't get the FED chair because he is sort of a jerk and people don't like him, even before he said anything about women in science. I had 2 faculty members admit that they agreed with what he said but signed petitions that he should resign just because they didn't like him and thought he was a bad president.

A famous study by Lewis Terman followed the lives of 1444 grade school students with an average IQ of 151 (~1 in 3000 people). These people ended up having more successful lives (measured by profession and income) than average, but their levels of success correlated equally well to their socioeconomic status as their IQ.

Another study by David Feldman examined the lives of the 26 people with 180+ IQ in Terman's group. It's difficult to determine how rare people are in this IQ range as we don't have any studies on distribution in this range, but the hypothetical distribution of scores around the mean would predict about 1 in 3.5 million.

Feldman found a number of success stories in the group, but nothing he considered "outstanding". He concludes "While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of "genius" in its common sense meaning, i.e., transcendent achievement in some field".

So whether we set the bar for having a top intelligence (measured by IQ) at 1 in 3000 or 1 in 3M, success is by no means guaranteed by this measure for either gender.

Feldman's study also gives evidence for societal biases limiting the career potential of both the 7 women in the 180 IQ+ group and 10 women in a group of 26 he randomly selected from Terman's group (average IQ of 151). The numbers of women who were primarily homemaker in these groups were 3/7 and 8/10. Now there's nothing wrong with being a homemaker and that can be a very fulfilling life, but given a lack of societal bias you'd expect a higher proportion of these ultra-elite intelligence women to pursue a profession.

The bias mentioned above isn't surprising given that the women from Terman's study entered adulthood in the 1920s. As dessin d'enfant mentioned, a co-winner of the last Nobel Prize in Physics did the work that earned the prize in the 1960s. Even if we (wrongfully) assume women today don't suffer from any society bias, it will be a long time before that equality is reflected in the genders of Nobel Prize winners for Physics/Math.

zerochill,
Did any of those researchers examine the possibility of societal bias against extreme intelligence in men as well? There are examples of extreme outliers struggling to fit in, and I think a lot of success at the very high end depends as much on politics as it does on innate ability in a specific field. It's also not that unheard of for individuals to be excluded because they are a lot more intelligent than the group, which obviously makes it difficult to accomplish things.

Curious if they examined any of these factors for both men and women, or they exclusively looked at societal biases with women.

You read him wrong. What they found was that high IQ women are less likely to have careers outside of the home than high IQ men. It was a comparison of men and women. The implication of their being a difference is that there is some sort of bias.*

Terman found that super high IQ was related to good social skills, decent social lives and normal personalities. This is exactly what one would expect. A well-working brain works well.

There is sufficient anecdotal evidence that people who claim to have high IQs don't get along well with others, but that has nothing to do with their IQ. Annoying people don't tend to succeed in life as much as people with normal personalities. Obviously someone who is really smart will do the proper problem solving to get what they want. Failure in one of life's major problem solving tournaments (getting people on your side by figuring out the right things to say and the right ways to act) implies a lack of problem solving skills, and hence a lack of intelligence.

*what that bias might be is currently unknown. It isn't a bias against smart women specifically, it is a common finding that women are more likely to be housewives than men are to be househusbands.

Again how on earth is society preventing girls<18y from making teams in international math Olympiads in fractions of near 50% of all students or winning medals in them in fraction to all winners that is not worse than their competition participation fraction (in 2013 around 10% at start, worse at medals). And why is it similar scarcity/rarity in so many different culturally, racially and politically countries.

This is why i gave my arguments using that ideal in my opinion example. Because unless something terrible happens at homes worldwide in say the first few years of life targeting only math (or high IQ tests), since both girls and boys get taught at school the same math and geometry and since the exams find specifically super high IQ kids that like math or could like it more later and get it well now (but usually just kids that are exceptionally good at math early on ie less than 1 in 1000 type students) exactly what is it that prevents the girls from being close to 50-50 in the selection of teams that take place with only condition the score in exams in national Olympiads where the base each year is hundreds of thousands or millions of students in each country.

I mean you cannot possibly argue society is inhibiting girls to a 10 to 1 ratio in super tough math when there are a ton of great female students in all schools of the world or a ton of girls that go to Medicine, Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math etc later... (by ton i mean 60%,50%,30% type numbers in universities anyway, but why on super tough math problems they drop to 10%)

I do not recall at any point in my school experience a bias of my teachers/professors against female students in class interactions, in exams or in grades or in any form of expressed openly sympathy. Later society can do all kinds of bs but the question is what happens the first 17 years that doesnt prevent girls from being near 50% in most things like grades, entries in universities etc but drops down dramatically in tough math exams which i might add that for most students, male and female, the first time they ever see them, present a shock, even for very best students, because they rarely will solve 3 or 4 out of 4 (in 3-5 hours say) (and success may be even a 2.5/4 or 2/4) when at school they typically ace everything every year and such scores would be terrible there.

I'm not sure why you are worried about it. Encouraging girls to learn crap isn't bad. Equal pay for equal work isn't bad. There isn't any good reason for there to be a caste system (other than that women are much better at producing milk than men and they get too top heavy when pregnant and that they aren't very good at boxing).

It isn't that complicated. When someone does something special (woman gets degree and is financially/academically successful) we cheer a bit louder than when someone does what is expected (woman makes babies and vacuums the house sufficiently well that a call to children's services isn't in order). It is how we move forward. If you are sad that no one is encouraging you, perhaps you should try harder so your accomplishments can be lauded. If you are sad that you don't get special consideration because you are male, well tough ****.

Ok, one. One in a thousand isn't even special. A short mention on the last page of the local newspaper at best.*

Two, for someone to want to be a mathlete** one has to want to be a mathlete. That is where the difference lies. Their are plenty of excellent girl brains to be found (approximately equal numbers of excellent girl brains as boy brains exist). Making them want to be a mathlete is the really difficult part. Most boys are uninterested.

What is required isn't intelligence (intelligent people are a dime a dozen - nearly can't sneeze without hitting one), it is obsession. That is the reason why an encouraging atmosphere is needed. The slightest bit of non-encouragement guarantees that one will not be a mathlete. It takes a ton of encouragement to get reasonable people to do unreasonable things e.g. work obsessively hard for an uncertain payoff when it is just more personally +ev to do otherwise.

*Assuming small town size.

**You can insert Nobel Prize for mathlete throughout.

Not buying it. Sheldon Cooper is a caricature of an actual phenomenon. Most people are illogical, so a highly logical person with a high IQ can have great difficulty making sense of them by applying his advanced logic. In Sheldon's case, this was caused by being advanced many grades in school, so his social growth was stunted. People who do math/physics/engineering think in a very intense and very thorough anal way, and their minds work very quickly. It's not easy for some of these people to gear way down when dealing with ordinary dull people. When these mediocrites don't meet their highly demanding requirements, they can experience impatience and even rage. They may do this frequently with people whom they rightly judge can't help them with their goals, but you probably wouldn't view this as a normal personality. They may also do this when it is counterproductive to getting what they want. That's not a negative reflection on their intelligence. They know intellectually that it's not in their best interest to act this way, but they do it anyway out of emotion. By your own admission, IQ tests cannot accurately measure extremely high IQs, so it's nonsensical to cite studies that make claims about what personality traits are correlated with these high IQs. Maybe the people in these studies just weren't that smart.

I don't buy the Sheldon argument. A smart person should be able to figure out people. Smart people figure out difficult problems. People aren't even a difficult problem.

The studies were of of extreme outliers (one out of a million or so).

As you well know:

"No professionally designed and validated IQ test claims to distinguish test-takers at a one-in-a-million level of rarity of score. The standard score range of the Stanford-Binet IQ test is 40 to 160.[7] The standard scores on most other currently normed IQ tests fall in the same range. A score of 160 corresponds to a rarity of about 1 person in 30,000 (leaving aside the issue of error of measurement common to all IQ tests), which falls short of the Mega Society's 1 in a million requirement.[8] IQ scores above this level are dubious as there are insufficient normative cases upon which to base a statistically justified rank-ordering.[9][10] High IQ scores are less reliable than IQ scores nearer to the population median.[11]"

-wiki


Those with IQs at the 1 in a million level (171) on a non-standardized test qualify for the Mega Society. From the above article:

"Notable people who have taken the Mega Test, meeting the Mega Society entrance requirements, include author and columnist Marilyn vos Savant, mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, Christopher Langan, Keith Raniere, and the former governor of New Hampshire and former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.[5]"

LOL. Savant couldn't reason her way out of a briefcase with a 4 digit combination lock, and Langan couldn't figure out a way to get a college degree before being expelled and being forced to work as a bouncer.

Teralol


They also need to design a new IQ test, one with no time limit or huge limit a day and 10 times harder questions and relentless statistical opportunity to take away bs accidents that can happen in brief tests. In fact i am more impressed by those that cant answer a question fast enough to score top, they still score of course 150+ etc, but given enough time they will get it right because of persistence and even imagine more complex solutions and ideas on the way to it. That is the true essence of valuable intelligence. The ability to have the strength to remain focused and emotionally committed to learning and solving a problem given that you are already very smart to begin with but careful enough to know that there is more value in thinking something at a slower pace and considering it in more depth in order to be confident you are not missing something important. You need to be both very smart but also ethically interesting and responsible and open minded in how you approach a problem. And none of this is tested properly.

I think we are copacetic. Savant and Langan were curiously absent from the study. I have yet to meet a smart person who leads with "I am smart."

Why design such a test?!? Life is the test.

Persistence is a personality trait. It is not related to having intelligence.

The Mega Society test has no time limit and is unsupervised.

I'm on Bruce's side. Their are lots of nerds and geeks who are great at math and logic, but struggle in social situations. Plenty of them right here. People can be an extremely difficult problem precisely because they don't all act logically.