Gender Divides In Academia and Other Disciplines

See, e.g., Charles & Gruksy, 2004.

This is probably the table you are looking for. Feel free to make up some story about it based on a quick glance down the column and your prior beliefs about the likes and dislikes of gentlemen and ladies.

You haven’t “gotten around to contributing” to the Gender Divides thread? You mean you haven’t contributed. That’s fine. I’m just reading / catching up to that thread myself.

I actually meant something like: I feel like contributing

Ah. That wasn’t clear, you know.

You wield a blunt instrument, Holbo. Carry on, anyway.

@2 — Okay, here’s my story: I was always under the impression that my profession — technical writing — was fairly evenly divided between women and men, but being male myself, I figured I was probably overestimating the number of women in the field. Nope: 50.1 % women. So, yeah, technical writing! All professions should be more like us, except with some black people in them.

“Windows Vista was a piece of crap”

Matter of policy, decided at the top. The engineers knew.

Weird batch of arguments there, mclaren. I don’t think it’s widely claimed that Microsoft hires or hired the best software engineers in the world; nor, at the “starchitect” level, are structural issues a clearcut failure to meet the standard. (For a residential remodel, sure.) As for Wall Street, as far as I know, the reckless bankers were doing what they were hired to do — nobody had attempted to select and promote those new grads who could e.g. keep earnings stable even if real estate values fell. In each case, you’re pointing to a mismatch between two sets of standards, not to a failure to find merit.

The elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is the hypothesis that women have a narrower genetic variance than men…

The elephant in the room is an hypothesis for which there is no evidence?

And it surely wasn’t the case in Wall Street finance, as the collapse of so many firms run by alleged “geniuses” whose bad investments blew up and destroyed their whole firm, assures us so clearly.

The geniuses themselves did quite well, I heard.

mclaren @10: “The elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is the hypothesis that women have a narrower genetic variance than men, so purportedly there are both more male idiots and more male geniuses.”

Is there actual data behind this statement? I’d be very interested to see them, if so.

“Is there actual data behind this statement? I’d be very interested to see them, if so.”

We could always ask Larry Summers…..

Yes, Kieran is exactly right. Even D2 falls under the description. I particularly liked the n number of commentators who explained the disparity by saying that ladies don’t like assholes and provided an exemplar of an asshole for our edification.

mclaren 02.08.11 at 5:00 am

“The elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is the lhypothesis that women have a narrower genetic variance than men, so purportedly there are both more male idiots and more male geniuses.”

Feel free to do some *good* science on this – or to quote some good science.

Please note: sociobiology ‘just so’ stories don’t counts, and those which blithely ignore what happens in other cultures will be mercilessly mocked, and Larry ‘Harwh*re’ Summers makes sociobiologists look good.

Neil, thank you. I am happy to be corrected on this point. (It’s years since I read anything in this field.) But my point is that the known sex differences in IQ score cannot explain sex differences of the kind and magnitude shown here, and that (even) Simon Baron-Cohen would say this. Mclaren is clearly talking about IQ test scores (but assuming a genetic factor’s involved).

Anyway. Mclaren is referring, in fact, to the IQ data. Hence the mention of geniuses (bizarrely, defined as

The problem with a professional data set compared to your accademic one is that whereas PhD table listed all graduates from the same year, most of whom presumably had been studying for a similar period of time, professional map would include people who had been in the profession for 30-40 years, when in most professions men were far more overrepresented than now. In my sphere (the heavy end of engineering) we have very few women in their 50s in technical roles, but a significant (although admittedly distant) minority of women in their 20s. More pronounced might be medicine, where in the UK I believe more women than men are now entering the profession, but there is still a male majority in place. Looking for the current drivers in data on incumbents would be skewed.

@2 – that’s a hell of table. Almost every profession or occupation skews one way or the other,

The remarkable fine-grainedness of occupational sex segregation is a very important fact, yes. It’s also not uncommon for the gender composition of some occupations (e.g., bakers) to swing from one side to another in a fairly short period. Within-occupation gender balance is less common than you’d think, even if there’s more parity at higher levels of aggregation (of similar occupations).

The remarkable fine-grainedness of occupational sex segregation is a very important fact, yes. It’s also not uncommon for the gender composition of some occupations (e.g., bakers) to swing from one side to another in a fairly short period. Within-occupation gender balance is less common than you’d think, even if there’s more parity at higher levels of aggregation (of similar occupations).

So does this mean that it’s easier for people from different cultures to get along than it is for men and women? Or are workplaces on the small scale also segregated? Also, I can see how a workplace that managed to support a more diverse workforce might have some advantages, but is it a social justice issue at the point that for larger aggregates the gender balance is representative?

The legal profession (the only field where I know enough that my anecdotes constitute data) is divided into many subspecialties (e.g., real estate, matrimonial, bankruptcy), and some of these are much more male, and some much less, than the profession as a whole.

In general, the more fine-grained the occupational category/title, the more sex-segregated it will be.

Henri, I think that’s different phenomenon. For very small sample sizes, you would indeed expect imbalances from purely random effects alone. But for samples larger than a few dozen, that cannot really be a noticable factor anymore. For larger samples (which can still be very small compared to subcategories like “real estate lawyers”), there has to be some effect causing the imbalance.

Such an effect could of course be an amplification effect that is a priori neutral to the direction of the imbalance, where a random small imbalance in either direction simply encourages more imbalance. But that would still be real effect worth studying.

But we blind folk will hypothesize from the no evidence we feel. To me the no evidence in the vast majority of rooms feels like- Republicans.

I thought you blind folk mistake hypothetical elephants for pillars, ropes, tree branches, hand fans etc.

Zamfir (33.): Really? I’m not a statistician but there is no doubt that dividing a sample into pieces will lead to greater variability – no matter how large the sample or the pieces are. Now of course how much variability we observe may be significant. But that there will be an increase is clear.

The elephant in the room…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology

cites a handful of studies finding higher IQ variance in males. The difference is small, and theres also a paper cited there arguing that it has cultural causes. Though the mathematics of the normal bell curve are such that small differences in variance can cause quite large frequency differences when you look out several sigmas away from the mean – in either direction.

I vaguely recall that this higher variation in males phenomenon applies to a whole variety of characteristics, not just cognitive (e.g. includes such things as physical strength). But this IQ stuff was the evidence I could unearth just now.

I bet there’s someone here much more knowledgeable than myself ready to indicate whether the above constitutes good science.

Down with that sort of thing.

(sorry, I couldn’t resist, I just found out about it)

Variance is not an explanation, people. It is a description of a population. This is almost like explaining the fact that there are more men than women mathematicians by saying “it’s because the male frequency is higher.”

bianca steele 02.08.11 at 6:43 pm

“I remember reading (yeah yeah) that the difference in IQ variation explains why supergeniuses, in math in particular, have all been men; and that if you remove the very small number of supergeniuses in each generation from the distribution (would that be enough people even to account for the number of chess grandmasters currently living?), the male and female curves are very close. Even setting aside the fact that we’re not talking that many sigmas, are math professors really selected for the qualities that make for a Gauss?”

And if supergeniuses are rare, it’d be rather easy for cultural factors to stifle them, on the basis of race, sex, religion, ethnicity, family wealth, ….

But variance is an explanation, surely. (Fully realizing that I’m begging the questions both of whether the greater male variance is real, and if so, what causes it).

If the standard deviation of a certain characteristic in a male population is 10 units, and that in a female population 8, and we define as “exceptional” 40 units above the mean, (key point here – male and female means are the same) then a male would be exceptional at 4SD above mean, and a woman at 5SD. Therefore (assuming the M and F pops are of equal size) there’ll be more “exceptional males.

Contrast this with a second population, in which both M and F have a SD of 8, but the male mean is 2 points higher. Then, again, there are going to be more “exceptional” men than women.

So “variance” is an explanation of the (and again – I’m not claiming any of this is true, just thinking about what the math would look like if it were) claim that “there are more exceptional men than women, but the average man is no more exceptional than the average woman.”

Bloix wrote: “I was surprised to see that in my own profession, law, more than 2/3ds of lawyers are men. I would have guessed perhaps 60 percent.”

I think you’d have to have a very sensitive nose to distinguish ~60% from > 67% off the top of your head, i.e., without careful measurement. For most things, I think it would be pretty hard distinguishing 3/5ths from 3/4ths.

“So I’m wary of attributing predominance of men in certain professions to alleged higher IQ or skill. Given the realities on the ground, that just doesn’t seem credible.”

Yeah. There are lot of really good genetic reasons why we would expect some professions would be dominated by one gender or another. For example: you wouldn’t expect men to make up the majority of electricians because they have a high incidence of colourblindness; and you would expect them to make up most fighter pilots because of height. But however empirically and logically solid those sort of arguments are they just don’t seem to pan out in reality.

So I really wonder about the ‘maybe there’s a gene for this correlated with success for that’ arguments. Even tight arguments where we know there’s a gene and know it is important for success end up failing.

I be careful about argumentation from variance. The normal (pun intended) assumption that the distributions are gaussian probably isn’t valid here.

The one thing that does seem credible to me (as opposed to supported by actual data), is that there probably are more idiot-savants among the male population (because of the sex linked XY chromosome stuff). Maybe some significant fraction of geniuses have a milder form of the syndrome, and perhaps that has an effect upon the left-tail of the distribution? In any case, lacking in data which is detailed enough to constrain speculation, I don’t think this line of inquiry will have much explanatory power.

Speaking of flight and flight crews (or not): Most Capts and FOs are male, while attendants are mixed between females and male homosexuals. It is rare to see female pilots and heterosexual male attendants across the board. This also is exampled in aeronautic classes and in flight-attendant training classes. Do males fly planes better than females?

“the elephant in the room”

The elephant may be in some other room, but it’s not in this room. You can believe if you want that due to genetic differences the truly great lawyers always have been and always will be male, but what does that have to do with the gender disparity? I like to think that on my better days I’m a tolerably good lawyer, but I’m not off on some long tail on the right due to my maleness and there are, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of women lawyers who are as good as I am.

Bloix – you are 100% correct. The elephant (i.e. the variance explanation) is indeed elsewhere.

I posted some details of the elephant’s anatomy above @42 because a large number of posters up until then seemed to want to fumble around with its trunk, legs and tail. Now that the light is on, we may be able to discuss more relevant matters. There’s a lot of variation to explain in the occupations “from attorney to zookeeper”, and a lot of candidate theories. The variance explanation has had its flaws exposed.

A number of ignorant cranks here seem to be unaware of the scholarly literature supporting higher IQ variance among males. Let’s take a look at the peer-reviewed journal literature:

“Males have greater g: Sex differences in general mental ability from 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test,” Intelligence, Volume 34, Issue 5, September-October 2006, Pages 479-486.

Abstract: In this study we found that 17- to 18-year old males averaged 3.63 IQ points higher than did their female counterparts on the 1991 Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

“Sex differences in variance of intelligence across childhood,” Rosalind Arden and Robert Plomin, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 41, Issue 1, July 2006, Pages 39-48.

Abstract: Why are males over-represented at the upper extremes of intelligence? One possibility for which there is some empirical support is that variance is greater among adult males.

A number off inane comments have been made the claim that greater variability among males can’t explain why there are no female mathematicians. First, there are female mathematicians — just not as many of them as males. Second, it would make sense that if there’s greater variance in ability among males, then there’ll be a disproportionate number of high-ability male mathematicians compared to female mathematicians. Since academia is going to want to employ the highest-ability people, that would skew gender representation in academia among mathematicians strongly toward males.

However, the evidence here seems mixed. At least one meta-study fails to provide support the increased variance among males:

“Sex differences in means and variability on the progressive matrices in university students: A meta-analysis,” Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn, British Journal of Psychology, Volume 96, Number 4, November 2005 , pp. 505-524.

Abstract: A meta-analysis is presented of 22 studies of sex differences in university students of means and variances on the Progressive Matrices. The results disconfirm the frequent assertion that there is no sex difference in the mean but that males have greater variability. To the contrary, the results showed that males obtained a higher mean than females by between .22d and .33d, the equivalent of 3.3 and 5.0 IQ conventional points, respectively. In the 8 studies of the SPM for which standard deviations were available, females showed significantly greater variability (F(882,656)=1.20, p.05).

The other issue of course involves social skills. People advance in various professions not simply because of raw ability, but also because of their skills in making connections, promoting themselves, and so on. We observe in many professions mediocre performers who climb to great prominence because of their skill at self-promotion.

Bloix provides particular amusement with his absurd claim: “The elephant may be in some other room, but it’s not in this room. You can believe if you want that due to genetic differences the truly great lawyers always have been and always will be male, but what does that have to do with the gender disparity?” The gender disparity among lawyers is easily explained by aggression. Tests of testosterone have shown that trial attorneys have levels as high as serial killers. Countless highly skilled women have gotten muscled out of the top positions in office politics by more aggression male rivals. The fact that Bloix doesn’t realize this, or chooses to ignore it, marks him as a true lawyer — which is to say, as someone who spins vacuous sophistries to cover his lack of hard facts.

Please provide us with some peer-reviewed journal articles to support your claims, Bloix, or be silent.

I’ve linked to several peer-reviewed journal studies suggesting that the larger variance among men is real. I’ve also linked to a meta-study which concludes exactly the opposite — that women show greater variance. At this point the evidence seems mixed, so it’s hard to draw a conclusion about the variance hypothesis.

Do you have any peer-reviewed references to cite, Bloix, or are you going to continue with empty name-calling?

I think that the way in which people are shifting back and forth between “mathematicians” and “supergeniuses” reveals a few things: 1) that CT readers don’t know many mathematicians and 2) that mathematicians have a fantastic PR agency. Some mathematicians (like some philosophers, potters, musicians) are “supergeniuses”. The majority of them are normal Joes like you and me who happened to do a maths degree.

“The one thing that does seem credible to me (as opposed to supported by actual data), is that there probably are more idiot-savants among the male population (because of the sex linked XY chromosome stuff). Maybe some significant fraction of geniuses have a milder form of the syndrome, and perhaps that has an effect upon the left-tail of the distribution? ”

Which rather brings us back to Baron Cohen. For a part of his musings upon autism is that the (vastly) higher prevalence of autism spectrum in males aids in explaining the right tail as well.

And of dubious authorship. Richard Lynn? (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Richard_Lynn)

There’s a new study claiming that

“Explanations for women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. […] Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in
reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced
effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of
the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring
women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics careers today.”

Link: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.full.pdf+html

Interesting article, JL. I would note, however, that girls choosing not to pursue math intensive academic and career options is highly consistent with gender bias from teachers, fellow students and so on.

JL, that point about different countries is tricky. One big difference is that women who stick to traditional roles are not working at all in some countires, while their counterparts in other countries work in “feminine” jobs.

I think that the way in which people are shifting back and forth between “mathematicians” and “supergeniuses” reveals a few things: 1) that CT readers don’t know many mathematicians and 2) that mathematicians have a fantastic PR agency.

This is a good point. Equal mean but higher variance among men doesn’t really explain why there are vastly more (or fewer) men than women in job X, for pretty much any X.
If there were a job that could only be done competently by people in the top 0.01% of visual acuity, and this difference in variance existed in visual acuity, then you might well expect to find more men doing it just because there’d be more men than women in the top 0.01% (and in the bottom 0.01% too).
But there are very, very few such jobs.

Once you’ve discounted historical lag (thirty years ago there were actual barriers to women becoming pilots, so now there are still very few female pilots) and network effects (flying’s still a male-dominated profession and so women are less welcome as pilots, and/or believe that they would be less welcome) what else is there?

Fascinating article at

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.full.pdf+html

by the way – it makes an interesting case that the barriers to full participation by women in the sciences is no longer primarily driven by the features that are usually stressed (e.g. explicit discrimination.) I’d like to see a reaction from someone closer to the primary field, but the work does seem reasonable from an outside perspective.

“The surprising part is that this obvious notion isn’t used here; what you get instead is gender disparities plus no known differences in abilities/aptitudes equals discrimination. That’s not a good way to argue.”

Or rather, gender disparities plus no known differences in abilities/aptitudes equals something that should be looked into.

@83: Because there may be discrimination or hostile environment that the victims are too intimidated to report? It’s only one out of many possible explanations (in particular, various forms of bias coming from sources outside the academy loom large in my mind for many of these cases), but it still might be worth looking at.

Of course, you do have to maintain willingness to say “we looked, there was no bias on the part of the academics”, otherwise you’re not looking but witch-hunting.

Or rather, gender disparities plus no known differences in abilities/aptitudes equals something that should be looked into.

So then you think that the differential rates of incarceration mean that the discrimination angle should be looked onto, right? Have you done so, or know of any research that’s remotely as thorough as what we have for other venues?

This belongs on the other thread, but if we thought African American or lesbian and gay children with scholarships to prep schools were being discriminated against at those schools in ways we disapproved of, we would not care that the kids weren’t complaining of discrimination. We would investigate. If we thought the graduates of those schools were becoming more and more bigoted because of the unreported discrimination, we would investigate. Those are different from a situation where someone is certain they’re being discriminated against for a particular reason but never claims discrimination or tells anyone else what happened, which is what chris seems to think is at issue.

> Regarding pilots – I believe the design of military aircraft builds in certain stringent
> requirements for the physique of fighter pilots. This is certainly not the case in
> commercial aircraft today, but was up until the introduction of hydraulic controls a
> few decades ago (previously you needed physical strength). Though as long as the
> military is a recruiting pipeline for commercial airlines, the effect could persist.

In 1945 many of those who had been WASPs (Women’s Air Service Pilots), including those with hundreds of hours in the B-25 and B-26 (unofficial nickname “Widowmaker”), both of which required a full compliment of muscles to fly, applied for pilot jobs with the airlines. All were turned down. Similar story in the electric utility industry: from 1918-1919 and again from 1942-1945 tens of thousands of women took on heavy labor jobs as linemen and in power plants. All were fired in 1945 since they were “unsuited for employment if physical trades”. Somehow they hadn’t been unsuitable just a few months before when the draft was in full cry…

Cranky

From Heather McDonald, regarding wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/id/2284501/

These two quotes sum up her thesis nicely: “contemporary feminism’s intellectual decadence” and “a non-problem in search of a misguided solution”.

Isn’t it remarkable that nature works so marvelously that the natural inequali… er, differences among males and females map so well onto the modern occupational distribution! So the field of statistics which has a lower quotient of real mathematics naturally naturally captures the lesser capacity of “the female” [thus representing gender balance] while real mathematics reflects that natural facilities of the of “the male” and thus explains the over-representation of the male in mathematics.

Ya never can go wrong repeating, year after year, the same old reductionism and the same old same old: occupational segregation by gender is no big deal. If it does matter its natural. If its natural its immutable. If its immutable, stop yer whining.

I guess that explains why Larry Summers can get canned from Harvard for reveling in his oafishness and then go onto to oversee the trashing of the economy. Genius or idiot? Tough call.

I’m also amazed that we’ve reached a point where we can now bracket history [that was then when big bad sexist discrimination mattered but we’ve reached a point where finally we can see biology + meritocracy = the inequality we must accept and thus not change.

Next thing you know, sociological functionalism will return to explain why necessity is a virtue. Oh my gosh! There’s David Grusky now!

Assuming a normal distribution (it’s not, actually), you either get between 2.28% and 0.17% of the population, depending on exactly where the cutoff is. At either extreme though, the odds are that you probably know several of these “three-sigma” types . . . and they most definitely ain’t all mathematicians, or even degreed professionals.

The myth of the professional is one I find particularly hateful. I tend to look at a mathematician or a lawyer the same way I’d look at an electrician or a carpenter; none of them is more worthy of respect than another, and there are both good sorts and bad sorts practicing the trade.

I’ve met snotty self-declared “thinker” types who couldn’t construct a paper mobius strip without adult supervision yet seem to think that wiring up a house for three-phase AC is child’s play to give you an idea of how sickening this mythology is.

I read about one study which surveyed professional mathematicians and found that they have a mean IQ of 143. That’s 3 sd, right? That seems pretty smart to me.

Eh. IQ is a desperately bad system of measurement to use to measure above-average ability of any meaningful sort, as the architects of the canonical Stanford-Binet test would tell you themselves — the test was designed to catch specific deficiencies in children that would, hopefully, correspond with illiteracy or developmental disability (the idea being, very very roughly and papering-overly speaking, let’s identify kids who will struggle later in life with reading, and give those kids extra help early). And the test wasn’t even particularly stellar at achieving that goal, IIRC.

If you’re wondering why high IQ and mathematical-research careers go hand in hand somewhat, it’s because IQ tests measure a very specific and very peculiar set of abstract-pattern-recognition abilities that aren’t broadly applicable, but these abilities somewhat match an ability set that might help one through abstract calculus. I mean that emphasis literally, not facetiously: surely a variety of alternative skill sets could be brought to bear on that material successfully, if we expanded our mathematics teaching to more broadly engage students successfully from an early age.

Cripes, my IQ was last tested at 154 (the test was kind of incidental, as part of a battery of tests for medical services which I’m not about to detail on CT). All you have to do is google my various previous comments at CT to see I’m no supergenius in any useful or meaningful sense. I’m just good at visualizing and extending certain abstract patterns, filling in the fourth blank square following three squares or whatever, in part because that’s kind of, basically, what I do all day. My (math grad student) colleagues would surely test similarly high, and moreso the longer they’ve been at it. The test is totally rigged in our favor. Design an intelligence test that measures people’s ability to intuit meaning from conversations or passages of text, or basically anything that tests a broader skill set and is not overly based on permutations-and-combinations stuff, and surely I’d fall below median. IQ is just not a good test of better-than-average intuition or general talent, as Howard Gardner would attest.

My own pet theory on this is that the naive ‘mathematician = supergenius’ thing is closely correlated to high levels of math anxiety. If we taught language/literacy as unsuccessfully as we teach mathematics/numeracy, we’d see a ‘reader = supergenius’ meme develop over time.

So anyway, I like SoV’s statement at #99, and it frightens me to hear (from bianca in #98) that IQ is still being used for admittance into G&T programs. Sheesh. The IQ test should be a relic of bygone days.

I agree that IQ is a mis-leading way to understand “ability”, and that ability to do mathematics does not imply ability to do any number of important and interesting other things. And I don’t know why there are gender disparities in occupations.

But your high school math teacher, and even that tenured prof at East Jesus State University, are probably not mathematicians: they don’t conjecture and prove interesting mathematical theorems.

I don’t know if mathematicians are “supergeniuses”, but there aren’t very many of them: it looks like the American Mathematical Society has about 30000 members. From a population of 300 million, that suggests they are in the top 0.01% of the population in cultivated mathematical ability. (Yes, many more people could do mathematics if they wanted to, but they don’t, and haven’t worked at it.) Yes, not all mathematicians are in the AMS, and probably not everyone in the AMS is a working mathematician.

The discussion here suggests maybe 10000 active mathematicians, so “a few tens of thousands” is the right ballpark. By comparison, there are maybe a million lawyers. So mathematicians are a pretty rare kind of “normal Joe”.

AMS members are about 3.7 sigma out on a normal distribution of “mathematical ability”. If men and women have the same mean of this ability, whatever it is, then it takes only a small reduction in variance (maybe 5%?) to put the proportion of men to women at AMS-level ability to be greater than two. This doesn’t mean much (since it’s based on guesses, assumptions, and likely errors) but there it is.

I don’t think that this IQ variance stuff has much to do with gender imbalances in occupations. There are more female nurses, and male engineers. Is this because women are too dumb to be engineers?

There are also more female waiters, and male steelworkers. Is this because men are to dumb to be waiters?

I think there are other explanations, i.e. gender roles, that explains this much better.

@Henri- “Why should it be looked into, I don’t understand. Allegations of discrimination or hostile environment definitely should be looked into, but absent that, what exactly is the problem?”

Absent that? Wouldn’t it be cool to play around investigating different meaningless phenomena in a world absent discrimination and hostile environments?
Back in reality, though, sex discrimination is rampant, constant, and nearly ubiquitous, along with racial and other discrimination.

So much discussion of whether some tiny difference in variation can account for this, and it just seems painfully obvious to me: it’s about culture. Which can be seen as benign, but is also the source of discrimination.

Most of the commenters here are academics. The academy has some ideal, some notion, that women and men have roughly equal aptitudes and should be allowed to pursue those, as much as there are dissenters to that consensus. But the academic culture, currently, generally holds that gender discrimination is wrong. Culture outside the academy is different, and I think academics forget this. But most occupations fall outside the academy, and in some of them gender discrimination is valued. Gee, I wonder what causes those wide disparities? Such a mystery.

I’m a female carpenter. I know, having lived my life, that a ratio of 1.4 : 98.6 in my trade is not the result of greater male variation. And having seen agressive, assertive women ostracized, harrassed, and run out on jobsites where timid men are encouraged or given the detail-oriented jobs, the testosterone factor just doesn’t seem all that important.

It’s just irritating to see this data presented; and then see a bunch of people try to explain it by casting about in speculation, and then very generalized research on inherent difference. You’re just hopping right over discrimination as though it can be dismissed! On what basis can you assume that gender discrimination is not important? In what area of life is it irrelevant?

You could just ask the people in highly skewed industry whether they’ve experienced discrimination or not. If they have, then not all the distortion is due to inherent qualities. And when you’ve been told, at work, that you should be embarrassed to be taking a job that ought to go to a man, or that women are only good for sucking cock and fetching beer, the question of “what exactly is the problem?” is rather gob-smacking.