From the Atlantic:
The comment section is interesting
Many men still consciously or unconsciously underestimate women?
In equally shocking news, water’s still wet.
But seriously, it makes me sad that my generation is still dealing with this BS. It makes me happy that I’m in a pretty female/queer dominated field. I don’t have a lot of the same experiences as my female friends in more STEMy fields.
My D who is a Physics major gets treated like she is stupid all the time (she is also quite pretty). She actually really relishes letting guys say something condescending, then quietly demonstrating her competence and leaving them staring. But she would obviously rather not have the problem. This study is no surprise to me. Guessing the males not only overestimate their fellow male students, but often themselves as well.
Two words: Womens’ Colleges
Who cares about the classmates opinion if many medical school classes have more females than males? Apparently, medical school adcoms have different opinion and adcom opinion is the only one that counts. And looking forward - how about one of the most selective specialty in medicine? Complete women domination there! People who treat others based on the gender or as one may discover later - based on what college they graduated from - these are immature losers! And others who published the losers’ opinions are in the same crowd. They are all irrelevant!
Wow. That’s depressing. A bio class, no less (which they intentionally picked because enrollment numbers are pretty gender-neutral). I can well imagine things are considerably worse in physics, @intparent. I’ll have to ask my D what her perceptions around gender bias are at Olin. They go out of there way to maintain a 50/50 gender ratio, but if that study is any guide, that doesn’t seem to eliminate these kinds of attitudes. I know HER perception is that some of her most badass peers are women, but I’d be curious to hear if she thinks the guys feel that way.
Gender bias, racial bias, etc. It’s all out there. Many moons ago my GF received the same kind of bias when she started Sociology grad school at a top school because of her southern accent. We humans tend to be “the dumb” sometimes.
Might have to do with classroom discussion. I asked my son and he told me he believes the strongest student he knows is a girl but he said he knows that because he worked in projects and had private discussion with most of the students in the class. On the other hand he said the classroom discussion is totally dominated by two male students so if he is to parachute in the classroom and chose someone he would probably chose one of those two boys. I asked my daughter and she said the same. Classroom discussion totally dominated by 2 very aggressive, attention seeking boys fact which really annoys her. She believes the teachers could do a better job ignoring them once a while because it is not that the discussion is always conducive to learning but a bit of show off.
The authors controlled for classroom participation.
Question, how does that work in a class of 760? Those are likely large lecture classes, with smaller breakout sessions. Not much “interaction” in a lecture of 760 students. In the smaller breakouts, this would work, except the students would only have been exposed to other students in that much smaller group.
Oh well…
@momneeds2no, while I am a fan of women’s colleges (both of my Ds applied to and got into Mount Holyoke), there are a couple of issues with that. First is that the absolute top undergrad STEM schools are co-ed – MIT, Caltech, Mudd. My kid got into one of those, and really couldn’t justify turning it down. The quality of her experience is bearing that out, too. Second, this likely isn’t just an issue for undergrads, and in most STEM majors grad schools and their STEM workplaces are primarily male. So undergrad women’s colleges merely delay this.
I haven’t seen a thread on the item below, but to me this is just more evidence on the same theme:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439
(Sorry, on my phone, or I would have looked for a different link than the BBC article, but you get the basic info from it).
Did they control for ‘hotness’? Were the “celebrities” good looking and/or tall? (One needs to be very careful with such studies as to not find the ‘answer’ buried in confirmation bias.)
OTOH, is there bias in academia? Of course. It occurss in all departments, including STEM. And we needed a study to know this?
Honestly people are always pretty poor estimators of intelligence. A lot of the smartest people just quietly do their work and don’t show off, while B students often show off their “understanding” of the material in a very show-offy way.
Women rarely brag about their scores. You really have to at least talk to a person for a few minutes to find out if they are good students.
IMO, it takes one to know one when it comes to smart students.
Glad my son is not like that (he majored in bio). He has a low opinion of people who aren’t all that smart (it’s a genetic trait!) … but he gives props to smart folks, and gender is not a consideration in his view of what constitutes smart. At least there’s that. 
In veterinary school, it was exactly the opposite. The women all assumed that all the top students in the class were women. The women dominated class discussions. It took them two years to figure out that they were being trounced by a guy. They were shocked.
I’m sorry to read this. My experience as a Bio major in the late '70’s was very different. The professors and the male students were very supportive of the women in our Bio department.
One of my closest friends from college became a dentist. She was in for a shock when she got to dental school and the attitudes among a lot of people there were not nearly as progressive as at our alma mater.
Supportive is not the same as thinking they are the best students… they can be supportive, but be privately thinking they aren’t the top students.
I do remember that the student who was commonly thought of as the “smartest” in the department (for very good reason) was a woman.
Along the same vein there was an interesting research study that was done and reported on a couple of days ago. The study found that women make better coders than men. However 80 per cent of the coders in SV are men