Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken G
...
1) Plenty of evidence exists, and is cited, that as environmental conditions equalize, women show equal math aptitude as men. Read the thread.
2) Evidence does exist that there are innate physiological differences between men and women. Most people are actually aware of this. No relevance to the issue of the thread could ever be established by a single post in 23 pages.
3) Conclusions that are in agreement with a "politically correct" attitude are not automatically false, nor are they automatically a result of political correctness-- when scientific evidence says something is true, it is still true if it seems politically correct...
|
With regard to item 1, my personal experience is that, with regard to research mathematics:
a. Most men are not very good
b. Most women are not very good either
c. Most research mathematicians are men (a vast majority)
d. Women research mathematicians are quite competent and capable of competing with their colleagues.
There are a number of women who have made solid research contributions in mathematics.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/alpha.htm
The argument as to whether there is a gender bias in mathematical ability is rather silly. It is silly for several reasons.
a. What passes for an assessment of mathematical ability is not overly relevant to real mathematics but rather to arithmetic and computing ability.
b. The general mathematical capability of the populace is dismal, and both the average man and average woman are pretty pathetic in their ability to handle any but the most mundane mathematics. If you restrict the attention to only that portion of the population with some significant mathematical capability you are already dealing with a very small fraction indeed, and dividing that small slice by gender is of marginal utility. It would be of greater interest to address the question of why most of the population can't compute the area of a rectangle or count their fingers.
c. Women are under-represented in technical areas, but the women who are in those areas, in my experience, are quite competent. This may simply be a result of a cultural bias that mitigates against their entering the area unless they have significant talent.
d. It doesn't matter if there is a genetic component or not, it matters whether the women and men in mathematical, scientific and engineering disciplines can do good work and produce good research. It would appear that professinals in these areas, at the highest levels, are very good indeed independent of X or Y chromosomes.
With regard to item 2, that point is not particularly relevant to mathematics, but is in general a far more interesting topic.
BTW this particular example of feminity holds one of the earliest patents for spread spectrum transmission techniques.