Intrinsic Aptitude

Does "fertility decisions" sound really freaky Orwellian, or is it just me?

"At any rate, I would actually read the paper, but I'm super-busy. Maybe I'll read it tomorrow."
Someone email Matt and tell him Jonah Goldberg stole his password and is posting things on his site.

Re: "Does "fertility decisions" sound really freaky Orwellian, or is it just me?"

How about "breeding choices"? Is that better?

I wonder how this study relates to the controversy regarding Larry Summers. I recall him hypothesizing that innate differences in aptitude between men and women might account for differences in faculty numbers, but I don't recall if it was with regard to sciences in general, or perhaps engineering. I do think that in fields that reward proficiency in spatial reasoning, such as math, engineering, and chess playing, you will tend to find men overrepresented due to innate differences.

For the sciences as a whole, however, I agree that men probably don't have an innate advantage. My impression when I was in school was that women are very highly represented in fields like biochemistry.

In short, there's not some cabal of woman-hating old male scientists going "heh, heh, heh let's keep the ladies out of our field so we can all party at strip clubs!"

Richard Feynman, we miss you.

Not that he hated women.

Colleges, at least the ones I have worked at seem to have a very ingrained "old boys" network, almost all the major grant money is brought in by 60 something year old men, and they, have no problem reminding everyone of that. I wonder if this starts with the NIH who rewards grant money to people they know and most these people just happen to be fellow blue hairs. Couple this with the fact that in acedemia, at least in the Bio-medical research part of it, you can always explain away failure, and you get a situation were their is no need to promote te best and brightest; because ultimately success doesn't matter.

Summers was talking about the sciences, math, and engineering.

My recollection is that Summers also acknowledged the lifecourse effect, and gave it (I think) primacy among the three causes he listed.

I'm sorry, reading the phrase "the patriarchy" has much the same effect on me as the phrase "fair trade." There might not be anything wrong with the phrase itself -- there is indeed a patriarchy, and I suppose trade should be fair -- but they just give me the unavoidable opinion that the author is full of shit. I think "I'd appreciate your vote" falls in that category, too.

Why would any of these effects be worse in science and engineering vs. the humanities? Women who study the humanties have babies too.

Why would any of these effects be worse in science and engineering vs. the humanities?

For the same reason that it was much easier to cut humanities classes than science classes in college--you couldn't really BS your way through the latter.

both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.

As an unmarried, childless male, I have to say that this sort of irritates me. It's kind of an inverse attitude towards the one taken towards single women: If a woman is unmarried well into her career, it means she's serious about dedicating her life to it. If a man is unmarried, it's an implication that he is irresponsible and just wants to drift through a life of extended adolescence.

(what about married, childless women vs. married, childless men? has anyone read the full paper?)

"I wonder if this starts with the NIH who rewards grant money to people they know and most these people just happen to be fellow blue hairs."

What a good idea. The NIH should make efforts to find peer reviewers who are unacquainted with the researchers in the field they are reviewing. I'll pass it along the next time my study section meets.

"Couple this with the fact that in acedemia, at least in the Bio-medical research part of it, you can always explain away failure, and you get a situation were their is no need to promote te best and brightest; because ultimately success doesn't matter."

If acedemia is the portion of science burdened with acedia, I expect this statement is perfectly true.

For the same reason that it was much easier to cut humanities classes than science classes in college--you couldn't really BS your way through the latter.

I could go on a long screed here, but I don't have the energy. Fuck the haters. Up with the humanities and everything transcendent in the human condition.

Sounds like the sort of thing that promising 40 hours a week of free childcare to tenure track professors would go a long way to eliminating.

"irresponsible and just wants to drift through a life of extended adolescence."

I haven't read the paper, but this could be due to self-selection. ie. unmarried childless males are more irresponsible, drifting through an extended adolescence. Or they can't get along with people as well, and this hinders careers. Or they could be discriminated against. But it doesn't automatically have to be the latter.

Well, actually, this report is completely in-line with there being a cabal of old men deciding to deny women the opportunity to advance.

The old-line view is that a family man is more stable, and has a woman to take care of pesky details that might interfere with his research and other academic duties. If a woman comes along with kids, she obviously has conflicting priorities, and so can't possibly have the time to commit fully to the academic job.

So, while it might be possible that it's a "lifestyle choice," the fact that ALL of the negative consequences falls on the women definitely reinforces the idea that the power brokers in the system view women's responsibilities as different from men. There is the built-in bias that, even if women don't want to spend time taking care of their kids, they should, or are lying and actually do, and so shouldn't be put into the burdensome position of tenure-track academia.

Why would any of these effects be worse in science and engineering vs. the humanities? Women who study the humanties have babies too.

Exactly. Leaving academia to have kids may have some effect, but it can't be that strong -- the prediction from the hypothesis that family issues are a strong effect is that women who are more sensitive to / interested in family, children, emotions, etc. will drop out at higher rates, leaving those less interested in such things.

It's pretty clear that this implies that females interested in psychology should be dropping out at higher rates than females interested in physics, math, or engineering, given the different average interests and personality profiles of the two groups. But we observe the opposite: psychology is about 50-50 overall, with some sub-fields majority female. Fields with more children-oriented women are equalized sex-wise.

So, even if the "family issues" effect is significant, it cannot be too powerful.

Has no one (including Matt) yet noticed that he already blogged about this very same paper five months ago? Memories fade quickly, I guess.

This is the perfect snapshot of decaying empire. After you control for the pandemic bias against women, why, it turns out that scientists don't discriminate at all. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along...

What we're really talking about, of course, is the systematic waste of the talents of a full half of the population, frittering away the best minds of every generation on laundry and burping babies. Because, after all, we rule the world and don't actually need to worry about doing anything right.

This is the same situation the British Empire found itself in, when 500 millions of the world population stood ready to take orders from the British, and the best they could come up with was "Tote that bale- Hoe that cotten." And eventually their subjects said "I don't need no Colonel Blimp to tell me to hoe and cut cotten- I already know how to do that."

And now we're being told we need immigrants from India because we don't have enough qualified tech people to run our systems. That's because our women are doing really important stuff, like watching daytime tv while they babysit.

We are, quite literally, not half the people we used to be.

Constantine- Feminists spend a lot of intellectual energy to find example of situations where the patriarchy hurts men to try and rally men to their cause. The single guy phenomenon is certainly one of them.

Serial Catowner- Are you serious? We are wasting the intellectual horsepower of the women in our society more than we used to? I mean, sure, the status quo isn't sufficient, but its a lot better than it used to be. And its a lot better than the most of the rest of the world.

A lot of women really just prefer to spend more time with their kids. The rewards of rank (having the corner office, making gobs of money, shitting on the little people) just aren't as important to the median woman. That's not to say women should be restricted, or that conservatives are right about anything at all.

Gotta luv it- 'the status quo is better than it used to be'.

That's the mark of a true optimist.

radar:"The old-line view is that a family man is more stable, and has a woman to take care of pesky details that might interfere with his research and other academic duties. If a woman comes along with kids, she obviously has conflicting priorities, and so can't possibly have the time to commit fully to the academic job."

I'm sure this is true to some extent. However, have you ever raised any kids? Turns out, it's a shitload of work, even if they're in daycare 60 hours/week. And the workload is heaviest at the beginning (the first, oh, ten years), and means that working 90 hours/week is more difficult. Which means, tenure is more dicey.

serial catowner: "What we're really talking about, of course, is the systematic waste of the talents of a full half of the population, frittering away the best minds of every generation on laundry and burping babies."

I'm sure this is true to some extent. However, have you ever raised any kids? Turns out, it's a hell of an amazing thing. Very little of it is about laundry and burping babies. I've done science, and I've raised kids, and I wouldn't be surprised if lots of people, even men-people like me, didn't like raiising kids more than doing science.

Ah, in the feminist utopia there won't be any children to burp, or laundry to do. Or maybe robots do it.

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