From a thoughtful essay by Christina Sommers: MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, … (a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers … [who suggested] men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. "It is a system," Hopkins says, "where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive. … The list of cultural norms that appear to disadvantage women … includes the favoring of disciplinary over interdisciplinary research and publications, and the only token attention given to teaching and other service" …
My best physics teacher so far has been a woman. She actually cared that you learned. She got emotionally involved. When at one point I failed to understand something and gave up on it, she got visibly concerned "Is everything alright with you (at home, emotionally, etc.)?" She worked it out with me. No other teacher has ever paid so close attention. I got my best grades with her.
There is a lot of good stuff in this essay, but doesn't she oversell it a little bit? Take this paragraph towards the end:
"Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade. Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats that they may soon be facing. The business community and citizens at large are completely in the dark. This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically consequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers."
Do we really believe this could be a significant roadblock for scientific progress?
An Argentine woman Ph.D. meteorologist told me that there are an unusually high number of women in the physical sciences in Argentina. Since the sciences pay quite poorly here (a Ph.D. physicist teaching in the national university and working in a research center will earn about 1000 dollars a month, not enough to support a family at middle class standards) so she claimed that the low wages kept men out of the field and allowed women (who in Argentina normally provide the second income in a family and want a job with flexible hours) to be relatively dominant.
That reminds me of something I read 15 or 20 years ago, maybe by Pournelle, but I'm not sure. Paraphrasing (definitely not quoting) from memory, "Engineers solve problems by breaking them down until each part can be solved; bureaucrats and lawyers get their job security by combining problems until they form a mass no one could possibly solve."
Nancy Hopkins complained about the competitive environment "where winning is everything." I saw an interesting article in New Scientist the other day about girls actually being just as competitive as boys, it was just that they competed via social exclusion instead of less subtle means.
It may be relevant to consider women's choices to work or stay home with kids. Kahnemann and Krueger published a study to determine how happy people were during various activities (PDF link). As it happened, the subjects were all Texas working women, providing insight into this question. Table 2 on page 13 ranks 19 activities by enjoyability. "Intimate relations" (meaning challenging intellectual debate, right?) ranked highest, as I'm sure most of us would find unsurprising.
Unfortunately from the perspective of the work-vs-raise-kids question, both activities were among the lowest ranked of all. Work was 2nd from worst, and childcare was 4th from worst. Only commuting was worse. Socializing, eating, exercising, etc. were highly ranked as enjoyable. The discouraging conclusion is that if your choice is to stay home and raise the kids vs work away from home, either way you're going to be miserable. It appears that childcare is slightly less horrible than working, for these women, but it hardly makes the choice seem an attractive one.
This would suggest that giving women more and better choices could improve overall happiness. This study does not tell us whether men also dislike working as much as women; but it's possible that at least part of the problem is that working women feel guilty about leaving their kids part of the day, making their time away that much less pleasant. If society were more equal in sharing child-raising burdens then this might help, as working women might feel better if they knew that their husband was taking care of the kids. This is of course speculative. It would help to have data comparing work happiness among working men and working women with various family situations in terms of childcare responsibilities.
The hard sciences are poorly compensated. We should rationally expect women to move first into well-compensated appealing professions before they "choose" to become manual laborers, sewerage workers or physics grad students.
Engineering, computer science, and even math, pay much better than psychology, sociology, literature, nursing, teaching, and women's studies. Yet men predominate in the former, women in the latter.
Re: I recall seeing data that during the 90s dot-com boom, female participation in Computer Science here in the UK spiked to near parity but dropped off rapidly after the bust, indicating that compensation is key.
An extremely unlikely-sounding state of affairs. I would need to see some pretty good supporting references, rather than a recollection, before taking it seriously.
Finney has a good point. It's like I explained to my father-in-law when he was appalled that his daughter becoming a kindergarten teacher was an 'absurd waste of a good brain," that people have other desires in life besides reaching their genius potential.
Laura ABJ, are you thinking of the research discussed here? The Language Loggers believed the research to have been mis-reported, with several follow-up posts on headlines and stories based on it but not (strongly or at all) supported by it. You may know of better research.
This may not be the place to get into the weeds of that specific question. My experience supports your comment on interests, although I have seen just the opposite too. I just felt a [citation needed] coming on.
Another point to consider with regard to the deathbed-reflections issue is that retrospective memories of happiness often differ from contemporaneous evaluations. Even if someone wishes at the end that they had spent more time with friends and family than at work, they might actually have been happier during those high-intensity working hours.
Josh- I am not certain of this, because it's hard to know what agendas funded what research, but there seems to be evidence that gay men are hormonally and neurally (fMRI) more similar to women than heterosexual men. Gay men also display interests that are considered typically female- psychology, people, empathy, fashion, home-making, child rearing...
You might consider men biased with respect to maximizing their deathbed perceptions of life, but wouldn't it be just as reasonable to say that men prefer a higher glory to relations ratio than women on average?
My best physics teacher so far has been a woman. She actually cared that you learned. She got emotionally involved. When at one point I failed to understand something and gave up on it, she got visibly concerned "Is everything alright with you (at home, emotionally, etc.)?" She worked it out with me. No other teacher has ever paid so close attention. I got my best grades with her.
There is a lot of good stuff in this essay, but doesn't she oversell it a little bit? Take this paragraph towards the end:
"Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade. Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats that they may soon be facing. The business community and citizens at large are completely in the dark. This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically consequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers."
Do we really believe this could be a significant roadblock for scientific progress?
An Argentine woman Ph.D. meteorologist told me that there are an unusually high number of women in the physical sciences in Argentina. Since the sciences pay quite poorly here (a Ph.D. physicist teaching in the national university and working in a research center will earn about 1000 dollars a month, not enough to support a family at middle class standards) so she claimed that the low wages kept men out of the field and allowed women (who in Argentina normally provide the second income in a family and want a job with flexible hours) to be relatively dominant.
That reminds me of something I read 15 or 20 years ago, maybe by Pournelle, but I'm not sure. Paraphrasing (definitely not quoting) from memory, "Engineers solve problems by breaking them down until each part can be solved; bureaucrats and lawyers get their job security by combining problems until they form a mass no one could possibly solve."
Vicki Hearne had the answer long ago, which I've copied out here.
Roughly that men abstract away details in order to reach a decision, and women add specifics until it's complex enough to interest them.
Nancy Hopkins complained about the competitive environment "where winning is everything." I saw an interesting article in New Scientist the other day about girls actually being just as competitive as boys, it was just that they competed via social exclusion instead of less subtle means.
It may be relevant to consider women's choices to work or stay home with kids. Kahnemann and Krueger published a study to determine how happy people were during various activities (PDF link). As it happened, the subjects were all Texas working women, providing insight into this question. Table 2 on page 13 ranks 19 activities by enjoyability. "Intimate relations" (meaning challenging intellectual debate, right?) ranked highest, as I'm sure most of us would find unsurprising.
Unfortunately from the perspective of the work-vs-raise-kids question, both activities were among the lowest ranked of all. Work was 2nd from worst, and childcare was 4th from worst. Only commuting was worse. Socializing, eating, exercising, etc. were highly ranked as enjoyable. The discouraging conclusion is that if your choice is to stay home and raise the kids vs work away from home, either way you're going to be miserable. It appears that childcare is slightly less horrible than working, for these women, but it hardly makes the choice seem an attractive one.
This would suggest that giving women more and better choices could improve overall happiness. This study does not tell us whether men also dislike working as much as women; but it's possible that at least part of the problem is that working women feel guilty about leaving their kids part of the day, making their time away that much less pleasant. If society were more equal in sharing child-raising burdens then this might help, as working women might feel better if they knew that their husband was taking care of the kids. This is of course speculative. It would help to have data comparing work happiness among working men and working women with various family situations in terms of childcare responsibilities.
The hard sciences are poorly compensated. We should rationally expect women to move first into well-compensated appealing professions before they "choose" to become manual laborers, sewerage workers or physics grad students.
Engineering, computer science, and even math, pay much better than psychology, sociology, literature, nursing, teaching, and women's studies. Yet men predominate in the former, women in the latter.
Re: I recall seeing data that during the 90s dot-com boom, female participation in Computer Science here in the UK spiked to near parity but dropped off rapidly after the bust, indicating that compensation is key.
An extremely unlikely-sounding state of affairs. I would need to see some pretty good supporting references, rather than a recollection, before taking it seriously.
Finney has a good point. It's like I explained to my father-in-law when he was appalled that his daughter becoming a kindergarten teacher was an 'absurd waste of a good brain," that people have other desires in life besides reaching their genius potential.
Laura ABJ, are you thinking of the research discussed here? The Language Loggers believed the research to have been mis-reported, with several follow-up posts on headlines and stories based on it but not (strongly or at all) supported by it. You may know of better research.
This may not be the place to get into the weeds of that specific question. My experience supports your comment on interests, although I have seen just the opposite too. I just felt a [citation needed] coming on.
Another point to consider with regard to the deathbed-reflections issue is that retrospective memories of happiness often differ from contemporaneous evaluations. Even if someone wishes at the end that they had spent more time with friends and family than at work, they might actually have been happier during those high-intensity working hours.
*correction-gay men are hormonally and neurally (fMRI) more similar to women than heterosexual men *ARE*.
IE- I mean gays and women have more in common than straights and women- not that gays have more in common with women than straight men.
Josh- I am not certain of this, because it's hard to know what agendas funded what research, but there seems to be evidence that gay men are hormonally and neurally (fMRI) more similar to women than heterosexual men. Gay men also display interests that are considered typically female- psychology, people, empathy, fashion, home-making, child rearing...
Robin,
"Some say men are biased to glory over relations"
You might consider men biased with respect to maximizing their deathbed perceptions of life, but wouldn't it be just as reasonable to say that men prefer a higher glory to relations ratio than women on average?
Is there any reason to believe that gay men have a "more female type psyche" wit respect to this context?