Saturday, February 14, 2009

Trouble in Gender Equality Paradise

Another piece of troubling evidence that men and women are ... how shall I put this ... different:
This is the very interesting finding reported by Susan Pinker in The Sexual Paradox. She is specifically studying the problem that got Laurence Summers into so much undeserved trouble: why are there many fewer women than men at the highest levels of math, science, and engineering? Her answer: when given the choice, women with high aptitude for math, science, and engineering are more likely than similarly gifted men to choose something else.
The oughta' be a law.
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2 comments:

  1. SPWeston11:16 PM

    The link to http://gruntledcenter.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-choice-women-have-more-they.html may have broken.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lee8:21 AM

    To me, this makes perfect sense, but then again, I don't have an ideological requirement forcing me to believe that men and women can't be different.

    It is not unusual to find boys who are lopsidedly good at math and science, and humdrum at English and the humanities. Girls who are good at math, on the other hand, tend to be good at all of their studies. This fact is reflected in the SAT scores.

    Women, in other words, tend to have more options. Little surprise, then, that they tend to take other options more readily.

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