^Larry Summers got in big trouble trying to answer that question.
The comments section of the Crimson article is interesting as well…
@collegedad - Do some more reading, if you are interested, on the gender gap in mathematics. You can start here, jumping into the lion’s maw as it were, as Larry Summers tried to (so long as you are just an anonymous cc poster and not the President of Harvard, you should be safe): http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
I actually do have some references for you to look at too @SatchelSF . I wasn’t sure if you were sending me to your article to make me laugh (which it did) Hopefully you are not one of those entrenched math professors who feels threatened . If not you should be fine. I have a lot more references if you need them.
Riegle-Crumb, Catherine, George Farkas, and Chandra Muller. “The role of gender and friendship in advanced
course taking.”
Sociology of Education
79.3 (2006): 206-228.
Schmader, Toni, Jessica Whitehead, and Vicki H.
Wysocki. “A linguistic comparison of letters of
recommendation for male and female chemistry and biochemistry job applicants.”
Sex Roles 57.7-8 (2007): 509-514.
Shapiro, Jenessa R., and Amy M. Williams. “The role of stereotype threats in undermining girls’ and women’s performance and interest in STEM fields.”
Sex Roles 66.3 -4 (2012): 175-183.
Spencer, Steven J., Claude M. Steele, and Diane M. Quinn. “Stereotype threat and women’s
mathematics performance.”
Journal of experimental social psychology
35.1 (1999): 4-28.
U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics.
Bettinger, Eric P., and Bridget Terry Long. “Do faculty serve as role models? The impact of instructor gender
on female students.”
The American Economic Review
95.2 (2005): 152-157.
Weeden, Kim A., Sarah Thébaud, and Dafna Gelbgiser. “Degrees of Difference: Gender Segregation of US
Doctorates by Field and Program Prestige.”
Sociological Science 4 (2017): 123-150.
Woodcock, Anna, et al. “The consequences of chronic stereotype threat: domain disidentification and
abandonment.”
Journal of personality and social psychology
103.4 (2012): 635.
I’ll look at those,@collegedad13, I am always reading. They don’t sound very promising frankly, from the titles. But I’ll look.
Most “stereotype threat” and “role model” arguments do not address head-on the obvious logic that 100 million years of sex differentiation in mammals are unlikely to have left no innate differences, preferring to substitute quite recent conceptions of what is fair. David Hume, about 300 years ago, identified this category of error as the “moralistic fallacy,” the belief that what ought is actually what is. We see this error often.
Well, I am off to do some reading! (No, I’m not a math professor. Although I am no slouch, I can’t hope to understand math at the level of a McMullen or a Tao.) Do you have any recent articles you have read on latest genomic research (SNPs or GWAS correlations, e.g.) or on any biological correlates for the sex gap?
Thanks for hijacking an interesting discussion with a topic only 2 people care about.
@satchelsf there have other threads at CC on genomic research. Virtually all of that research trying to argue race or gender differences has been thoroughly discredited as biased and unscientific. The problem that many biologists make is to jump from correlation to causation. I will look at your Lion article later this evening to see the methodological flaws it may possess. Sorry I thought you posted it as a joke since so much of that research has been put in same room with conspiracy theories.
The original comments that triggered this tangent talked about “strong students” or “top students.” Different posters have different definition of “strong” or “top”. To some it means IMO medalists, future Fields Medal winners, and the like. To others it means higher stats than the typical applicant. Some have definitions that have nothing to do with scores or academic awards. This can lead to different conclusions about what types of colleges strong/top students attend.
Fewer than ~4% of college students attend LACs. With such a small portion of students attending LACs, only a small portion of strong students attend LACs, as do only a small portion of weak students. Only a small portion of Putman individual scorers attend LACs, but more than 4%, if you count Harvey Mudd, which I do as does the Harvey Mudd administration and nearly every other reputable sources that divides colleges by LAC. The 2nd sentence of the about page on Harvey Mudd’s website states, “We’re also unique because we are a liberal arts college.” Top LACs also are over-represented in various other measures of strong non-engineering STEM students, such as among colleges with highest math SAT/ACT scores or rate of generating STEM professors and PhDs. However, in sheer numbers, only a small portion of students attend LACs.
One college type that hasn’t received much discussion is public colleges. A much more notable portion of strong/top students attend public colleges and do not apply to HYPSMC… This is particularly true outside of high SES areas and in areas located further away from HYPSMC… For example, the first sentence of the study abstract at http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586.pdf concludes, “We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university.” I attended what I consider to be a typical NYS public high school. I was especially into math and regularly participated in math contests – not IMO or USAMO level, more like NYS Math League and math contests between other area HSs. Among the other students I knew who scored highest in such contests, roughly half attended a nearby SUNY for undergrad and roughly half attended a selected private college. One started out at CC to save money. He is now a STEM professor at a well known private college.