Jake Young has a good discussion of gender differences and performance in the sciences. His conclusion is one I agree with: there are real differences between men’s and women’s brains, but they are not of a sort to account for the differences in representation in scientific fields. For that, we have to go to culture, and the imposition of extrinsic limits on what people are allowed to do.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
His conclusion is one I agree with: there are real differences between men’s and women’s brains, but they are not of a sort to account for the differences in representation in scientific fields
For what it’s worth, there are probably even real innate differences between men’s and women’s brains (on average…although the overlap is so great that knowing the average will probably give almost no information about the brain of any given individual anyway.) However, currently, we have no way of knowing what those might be. Prejudice is so strong in this culture that girl babies are treated differently from boy babies and the differences in treatment continue throughout life. With that much confounding, how can we possibly hope to get the right answer with respect to what the innate differences are?
As a female with well above average spatial skills (I am a 3D animator) I would put forth that there are definite overlaps in so-called gender defined abilities. I also love buying shoes. Lots of shoes.
Perceptions about what is “normal,” and a desire to conform to be normal are also major factors.
I wonder how much success in science correlates to factors other than intelligence. Not everyone needs the same amount of sleep for instance. Some people suffer from seasonal affective disorder and might as well just write off the short days of winter as a total loss. There are basic time management skills. I swear that some people have twice as many hours in a week as I do.
This should correlate to overall productivity rather than the quality of one’s best output. But people with more productivity are going to get better opportunities, so it’s not entirely obvious. What I gathered from academia is that while the truly brilliant researchers can get away with a lot, most of those aspiring to such a career have to spend as much time being sales people and managers as problem solvers. Public speaking skills also count for a lot. Early promise is not a great predictor of success in an academic career.
I think that like anything else, science is a job and success requires a combination of traits. It’s sort of silly to try to link it to any cognitive trait. Based on women I know in scientific fields and not, the main issue seemed to be one of preference. Many smart women are not that interested. Actually even most men are not interested in science and engineering, at least in the US. You could try to figure out how much of that is cultural and how much is innate, but there’s clearly no simple explanation in terms of some cognitive measure.
If the data here are, as they seem to be, being presented as representing inherent differences, I’d be very interested to see how they control for cultural factors which vary based on a person’s gender, and might be expected to differentially inhibit the proportion of a given person’s mathematical abilities that person realizes. The inexcusably credulous habit of ascribing any observed difference in developed (and thus measurable, as distinct from “potential”) ability in a given mental task between men and women to genetic and/or hormonal differences is one of the biggest assthorns of pop-science reporting.
Bleh, hit enter too soon.
Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised a bit if these particular factors were sufficient to account for all observed discrepancies in mathematical abilities. Half in a vapor bath and half in the snow, indeed…
I do believe(agree) that the limits put on what people, as a gender, race, orientation etc., are both expected and allowed to do can inhibit potential prospects. The popular culture of the day dresses up women like prostitutes and romanticizes things that really ought not to be thought of as good things; creating bad habits, social dysfunction in general and a poor body image.
Is there some sort of chart or something that shows which demographics, ie. age, wealth, ‘race’, these differences are in?
I’m with Dianne on this, that “…the overlap is so great that knowing the average will probably give almost no information about the brain of any given individual.” It’s the flaw in any argument about whether this class of people of that class is better. What matters in every case is the capacity and performance of the individual, not the class to which they belong.
The Chronicle did a few stories a year or so ago about women and the glass ceiling in academia – I’m completely fuzzy on the details, but something about a large-scale study on when and why women tend to drop from the ranks. An awful lot of it was due to increased family pressure; the burden of childcare and parental care still disproportionately falls on women. Even with good quality assistance available, they tended to spend a lot more time away from academic pursiuts. (to support what PaulC said)
Prejudice is so strong in this culture that girl babies are treated differently from boy babies and the differences in treatment continue throughout life.
Can you name a single culture in which this _isn’t_ the case?
It’s likely not prejudice, but an evolved inherent tendency on the part of caregivers. And it’s not all culture: even when people try to raise their children in artificial cultures where traditional gender roles don’t exist, male children still tend to play with mock violence than female.
As rational, intelligent people, our responsibility is to treat individuals as individuals, not statistical groupings. That does not mean that we must deny the effectiveness of reaching conclusions about statistical groupings.
The best orchestras used to have no women because “they weren’t good enough.” When only the first audition was heard through a curtain, and the sex of the candidate was revealed later, perceptions changed enough so that orchestras rapidly became about 1/4 female. I think the proportion would be higher still if the entire selection process was based on text communication and musical sound, without the candidate’s sex being revealed.
I’ve ranted about this elsewhere, because I think there are a couple salient points that always get left out. PaulC touched on one: who says it’s intelligence (of any sort) that contributes to academic career advancement? I’m sure a huge segment of the population has enough smarts to make a go of it–the first big difference is who has the opportunities (purely social factor). And once you’re in, is it subtle shades of cognitive ability that determine who is promoted, invited to speak at conferences, made department chair? Of course not, it’s an extroverted personality, self-promotion, and other character traits one might expect among those raised in a society that constantly rewards them for being of a certain race and sex.
People who argue for innate differences often claim that averages are close to same, but that males have increased variance in certain abilities and are therefore over-represented at the extremes. A big assumption is glossed over: that in academia we’re talking about some extreme edge of the smarts curve. It’s ridiculously self-regarding, and there is no reason to think it.
Fix pervasive, constant, demeaning sexism and then let’s see where we’re at. I have a feeling we won’t have to make arguments about innate abilities.
That does not mean that we must deny the effectiveness of reaching conclusions about statistical groupings.
And what, in your view, have been the effective results of reaching conclusions about statistical groupings by sex? More money in the pocket of insurers, perhaps, but where’s the practical benefit for individuals?
The purpose is to better understand the world. Practical benefits are just pleasant side-effects. Very little knowledge is ever gained with the express purpose of accomplishing some specific goal.
As a female doctoral student at MIT, it seems to me that by far the largest factor is the family question. When I get my PhD, I want very much to go on in academia; I love the work, love the field, even love the intensity (usually).
But I also really want a family, and it’s not clear at all to me that both are possible: if I have kids, there’s no way I’m going to put them second to my career, but I seriously question my ability to get and keep a job at a good institution if kids are on the table. My spouse, also an academic (a mathematician), is very supportive and I’m sure would do as much as he could to make childrearing as equal as possible. But no matter what he does, the burdens are going to hit me far more unequally: I’m the one that has to be pregnant and breastfeed, and all of the cultural default assumptions (which we have to continually fight against) say I’m the one that needs to deal with the kids most of the time.
As a result of this every female doctoral student or post-doc I know is already agonizing about the kids question, and every guy I know — if they are even in a relationship and/or want a family — just “assumes” that it will work out. [Incidentally, I include my own spouse in this; I’ve brought the issue up enough that he is consciously aware of the difficulties kids are going to mean, but he still just doesn’t worry or think about it much; he is simply not in the habit of needing to do so].
I think this hits harder in computer science / math / physics because these are the fields that, more than others, require 70-80hrs/wk to compete at the top levels. One simply cannot have kids and do that, even if your spouse chips in 50% (which is a physical impossibility anyway due to breastfeeding and pregnancy). [Plus, I fear that trying to split childcare 50/50 would just make it so neither parent could get and keep a good job in academia.] Every female professor I know either has no kids or raised her kids first and entered academia at an older age. Many of the male professors have families and kids, and a wife with a career that is not nearly as high-powered as theirs.
Is it any wonder there are less women in the highest reaches of science?
What will happen, I wonder, if we work to reverse systematic discrimination, but the disparity remains? Will it be taken as proof that the discrimination is still there and that we need to try even harder to eliminate it?
Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. There’s a word for that…
Over and over? How about we try it at least ONCE before giving up??? Sheesh.
But we have been trying for decades, and frequently the continual disparity is cited as evidence that we need to work harder.
Uh, I have a sister who is a biology asst. professor (about to come up for tenure) at a major research university, and from my familiarity with her career I have news from you. “We” haven’t been “trying” nearly as hard as you seem to think- both structural barriers (eg. childcare problems) to women’s advancement, and plain old, semi-covert and occasionally even quite openly expressed sexism, are alive and well. So no, the experiment has not really been tried yet, not even once. Real progress has been made, but the playing field is by no means even yet.
That’s exactly the attitude I’m talking about.
What attitude is that? The attitude of not ignoring reality? That’s an attitude you could use a good deal more of, and not only on this subject.
Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. LaBonne, but you believe that there are obstacles to women’s advancement that aren’t connected to actual discrimination and prejudice, right?
So that even if we eliminated the beliefs about women not being appropriate for the scholarly world, and the behaviors that those beliefs engender, you think there would still be a disparity in the male/female ratio? Is that correct?
I don’t know the answer and neither do you, until those barriers are actually eliminated.
Using PZ’s mugshot as evidence, the male brain is ever expanding, so to the point of shoving the hair folicles out through the skull and onto the pillow case, onto the breakfast table, these expelled hairs everywhere, clear evidence that the brain is ever expanding, whereas with the female, the proof being the lush head of hair and a stablized brain that has found its optimum size.
Whoa whoa whoa. Let me quote a bit:
You DO believe that there are factors involved with women’s advancement that aren’t products of discrimination. Calling them ‘barriers’ if you don’t believe they actually make that advancement more difficult strikes me as very odd.
So: if these ‘structural barriers’ persisted, but bigotry was removed, you’re saying that you DON’T believe that the inequality in the gender ratio would resolve. The subject of your belief is not an empirical matter beyond our ability to experiment with — I’m not asking what would happen, I’m asking what you *think* would happen.
As I’ve commented elsewhere, it’s flatly exploitative for an employer to demand so much time/energy that it interferes with their employees’ reproductive cycle. It’s treating the workers as consumable resources, instead of as human beings with intrinsic value.
I don’t agree with wht appears to be your narrow definition of “discrimination” as being only things that even you are able to recognize as crude bigotry. If the playing field isn’t level, it isn’t level. (And it’s still a long way from that.) When it IS level, THEN we can finally worry (or perhaps not worry) about biological barriers, if there turn out to be significant ones. “Whoa” yourself. You may now continue your diatribes solo.
In other words, as long as the disparity exists, there is a problem — a problem that needs to be remedied not only by removing artificial barriers and abolishing prejudiced judgment metrics, but by actively striving to erase the disparity.
No matter how much childcare is offered, women who wish to have children have an inherent disadvantage. Pregnancy is a massive drain on time and resources, and in a highly competitive job environment, pregnant women are going to take a hit to their competitiveness.
Fair practices does not mean that we offer a handicapping system so that everyone can compete equally. Fair practices means that we offer a level field, then let the players bring whatever advantages and disadvantages they possess to it. Unequal competition is the point of the exercise — we merely need to ensure that the inequalities are inherent to the players and not impose upon them externally.
It’s clear that you want a handicapping system put in, so that women are not only not prevented from succeeding, but are actively helped to overcome a disadvantage biology puts upon them if they make certain choices. If that position isn’t shameful, why won’t you state it openly and clearly, instead of hiding behind rhetoric about ‘fairness’?
I said no such thing. Your inability to read is the reason why I am not interested in continuing this discussion.
Grok,
Good point, and good post — it’s a question of priorities, and always has been. Women who want families and a high-profile career will have to work much harder than men, so long as women must bear the children and nurse them.
And so perhaps women should wait until they have tenure to procreate ;)
You didn’t use those specific and particular words, no. The concept those words encode, however, is clearly expressed in your posts. You regard the absence of programs intended to assist women who make particular lifechoices (specifically, childcare facilities offered by academic institutions themselves to their employees) as a barrier to women’s achievement which needs to be removed.
You don’t mean ‘level playing field’ to refer to an objectively level field, you mean it to refer to one in which women can compete equally with men because the field is shaped to compensate for a disadvantage. A handicapping system.
If this isn’t the case, please explain yourself — and explain what needs to be done to create the level playing field of which you speak.
Bullshit. Never once did I talk about forcing outcomes to be equal. I said we need to genuinely level the playing field (which, contrary to your abysmally ignorant comments, is still a considerable way from happening) and then the outcomes will be whatever they will be. And I also said, and I now repeat, that nobody, including you, actually knows WHAT the outcomes will be in that case, because it’s never yet been tried. Now please go learn to read plain English.
P.S. You might try re-reading the comments that got Larry Summers in trouble. Apart from the embarrassing amateur excursion into genetics, he actually said some quite sensible things about the need to make the academic career not just more female-friendly but what more often than not amounts to the same thing, more human-friendly. Ironically given the way he got himself in trouble, he actually understands what I said above a lot better than you do.
But you won’t explain what you mean by ‘level playing field’. Your earlier comments suggest that you consider the absence of active assistance to be an obstacle just as prejudice is. Why won’t you state clearly and openly that you don’t believe that if it is not the case?
The preceeding was your response to my queries about the distinction between prejudiced/bigoted discrimination and not actively seeking to aid accomplishment. The response indicates that the distinction I asked about isn’t one you’re concerned with, Mr. LaBonne. Your next statement strongly suggests that you consider a level playing field to require active assistance, and that the levelness of the field will be determined by the outcomes.
If that wasn’t what you intended to express, I’ve given you ample opportunities to correct me. Instead of correcting my understanding of your statements, you’ve chosen instead to bash the conclusions with follow inevitably from them. Curious.
Grok-
Men get to have not only a family and an academic career, but also someone else to worry about the child raising and housekeeping issues. Why shouldn’t you expect the same?
Things do not HAVE to be this way:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2000/10/2000102703c.htm
The unwillingness to change institutional strucures that worked fine for “high-powered” men with slave-wives IS discrimination. Changing those structures is not “actively aiding”, it is fairness. It is also beneficial to society, by ceasing to waste the potential contributions of good brains (of both sexes, by the way) whose owners do not wish to be workaholics.
P.S. None of which is intended to suggest that raw sexism is a thing of the past and structural issues of family-friendliness are the only things left to work on. On the contrary, if you would listen with an open mind to the stories of large numbers of female professionals, you would soon realize that the former is far from dead.
And so perhaps women should wait until they have tenure to procreate ;)
It would be nice for this to be a realistic option. :) But here we run into another biological limitation: few women have tenure before 35 (or even 40 for that matter), and one’s chances of being able to bear a healthy baby — much less two, if you want your child to have a sibling — are much lower by then. So you pretty much can’t wait, whereas if you’re a man — as long as you marry a woman younger than yourself — this is a very feasible option.
I agree with whoever said that an employer should not expect so much time/energy that one cannot do their job and have a family as well. The costs of this fall disproportionately on women, but it’s not very fair to men, either: I know many men, including my father, who chose not to have an academic career because of quality-of-life issues.
Many are fond of saying that “you need to be obsessive to be a successful scientist.” Maybe you only need to be because we’ve set the system up that way — and by having this insane work expectation, we’re excluding many (women and men) who might be very good scientists after all.
In this vein, the cover story for the current issue of the Carleton College “Voice” (the magazine the college produces and sends to alumni) is about how Carleton kicks ass at graduating women who then go on to earn Ph.D.s in the “physical sciences”: physics, astronomy, chemistry and geology. More women graduating from Carleton go on to earn Ph.D.s in those subjects then do women from Princeton, and Princeton’s about twice Carleton’s size. (Not to mention being at least somewhat more prestigious)
As a Carleton grad., it doesn’t necessarily seem odd to me that the few upper-level physics courses I took were one-third female, though I understand that’s weird elsewhere. (I was a math major who only occasionally dabbled in stuff taught over in that other building) I think that’s a big part of it – it’s not odd or unusual to see women in upper-level science courses, so more women take them, so it’s not unusual to see them there… etc. How you start that cycle probably involves difficult deep cultural adjustments, but Carleton’s got a bit of a head start, having been co-ed since its founding. (The first graduating class – 1874 – had two students, and was co-ed)
Anyway, the text of the article is available online at http://apps.carleton.edu/voice/2006summer/feature5.php. Sure, most of it is speculation (and a good bit of tooting their own horn) but they do present some decent ideas about what Carleton does differently from other similar institutions.
It’s a shame that the flamewar between Steve and Caledonian completely buried this comment by David, which IMO cuts straight to the heart of the problem. The fact that this point is reached sooner for women than for men is merely incidental if it shouldn’t be reached for *anyone*.
However, if some potential employees are willing (and able) to tolerate such an exploitative employer and others are not, how can you expect employers to change their practices rather than simply taking the employees they can get and running with them?
We’re not talking about literal slave labor here, but about workers who, ultimately, *choose* to accept those terms and conditions of employment in preference to seeking another job or another career.
The employer has measurably more overhead when employing three 40 hr/week employees than two 60 hr/week employees, for roughly the same amount of work output. (Especially when they’re on salary!) How can you convince employers to abandon the attempt to improve their efficiency? Unionize? Remember that corporate managers’ and executives’ primary responsibility is not to their employees but to their *shareholders*, whose interests are always going to be, to a certain extent, opposed to those of the employees.
Also, I think we should be careful to distinguish between policies adopted for other reasons that *unintentionally* have an unequal impact, and intentional discrimination. Unequal impact may be undesirable, but attempting to tar it with the brush of genuine bigotry simply weakens the word “discrimination” into uselessness.
There may still be a few managers out there who actually think “I’ll promote Bob rather than Alice because he’s a man and women aren’t qualified to be leaders” rather than “I’ll promote Bob because he has better leadership qualities” (which just happen to be the qualities typically associated with, and socially promoted in, men) or “I’ll promote Bob because he worked harder over the last 6 months” (ignoring the fact that Alice was pregnant over those same months); while all three of these phenomena are problems, IMO, the term “discrimination” should be reserved for the first attitude.
PaulC: Ever since I kept meeting people who need half the amount of sleep I do, I have suspected that a large proportion of productivity (and even genius) might be rooted there. Do you happen to know any investigations of this?
Daniel Morgan: I predicted a (male implantable) artificial uterus within 50 years in 2000. We’ll see …
My former division had an unusually high number of women attaining PhD for the field. Largely because the head of the division actively encouraged women to come for their graduate studies, but also because he expected everyone to have a life outside of work, and expected it to sometimes come first. He never treated students or staff as inferiors, but really listened to what anyone had to say. Best academic boss EVER, as proved by the turnout for his lifetime achievement award.
That’s a very good point. Unfortunately, as with doctors, the system is so deeply ingrained that abolishing it would likely lead right back to its recreation. How can we force the academics/doctors/etc. to change?
Keith Douglas:
Nope, but I’d love to hear about some. My sleep requirements are pretty average, but the comment about seasonal affective disorder (mild, undiagnosed, and not a consideration since I moved to the Bay Area) reflects more on my personal experience.
The “reduced sleep requirement” theory has at least one fictional embodiment that popped into mind (proving if there was any doubt what I geek I am) when I read Keith Douglas’s comment: the character of Jordan in Real Genius, played by Michelle Meyrink:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/quotes
AFAIK, needing less sleep isn’t associated with brilliance or intelligence, but it is associated with greater productivity.
Caledonian: The direct result of needing less sleep would be greater productivity, but this has other consequences. For instance, you have more time to learn, so even if your raw cognitive capacity isn’t any better, your skill set might be, as compared to those at the same nominal level. Your increased productivity also means that you can produce superior quality work in the same number of days, which is going to open up opportunities to work on higher profile projects that will make it look like you’re actually better, not just more prolific. So I think that sheer productivity is not to be overlooked as a success factor.
Even when it comes to “genius” I can think of scenarios. When Andrew Wiles decided to attack Fermat’s Last Theorem, he knew he would be focused on a potentially losing proposition for years. Suppose you had a problem to solve and even sketched out a set of approaches to try. You might guess that it takes a certain amount of time and that you cannot afford the risk to your career. But if that time could be cut in half, it could appear to be a reasonable gamble.
This presupposes that you can make good use of your extra time. A whole other area is just self-discipline and a lack of deleterious compulsions like gambling or drug addictions.
Quite true. I just don’t recall any evidence suggesting that needing less sleep in any way implies more sophisticated cognitive skills.
I wonder if there are any negative consequences of squeezing sleep into a smaller period of time? Presumably there’s a reason why we need to sleep for eight hours when our biochemistry mostly refreshes in four.
That’s a very good point. Unfortunately, as with doctors, the system is so deeply ingrained that abolishing it would likely lead right back to its recreation. How can we force the academics/doctors/etc. to change?
That’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it? Off the top of my head, here are some suggestions:
1. In the current system there is little “halfway” option between taking a tenure-track job and being an adjunct lecturer. If you become a lecturer, the hours still suck, the pay and job security sucks worse, you don’t have time or support for research, and — most importantly — the chances of being able to get a solid, research-heavy tenure-track job afterward are very low. If there were jobs available, say 20-30hrs/wk, that paid less than tenure-track jobs but allowed for some research and some teaching, and that you could conceivably move on from into a tenure-track job (if you wanted), I’d be all over that. Not to mention that people in these jobs might actually take over some teaching that the tenure-track profs don’t really have time to do as well as they would like. (I think some European/non-US systems may have something like this, but I don’t really know).
2. Relatedly, if there wasn’t a perception that taking a few years off (or slow) after grad school meant that you weren’t serious, or were incapable of serious work, then probably many people would be less deterred. Not that I think one should reasonably expect to be hired to a tenure-track position after a few years of SAHM (or a few years of vastly reduced output), but if there was a halfway point below tenure-track/insane that one could step into first, that would help a great deal.
3. This may be too un-American to fly, but how about imposing some limitations on the number of hours an employer can expect of an employee, even if (especially if?) that employee is salaried? Even if it were 50 hrs/wk that would be significant (and would probably not hurt productivity much – several studies indicate that efficiency really goes down by the time you’re up at 60/70/80hrs/wk). This would help women and men in many fields besides academia as well.
4. How about daycare / child support in the university, offered by the department? I’d feel a lot better about the prospect of having kids if I could hop in between meetings to breastfeed or my spouse and I could frequently visit with the child: 60 hrs/wk is less insane if it doesn’t mean 60hrs/wk of never seeing your kid. Not to mention that even making the gesture would indicate that the department doesn’t expect that having children will cripple your career.
Now, I don’t know if these will work, but I think it’s a mistake to decide in advance that it’s not worth trying. Quite apart from the obvious point that saner working expectations will benefit men as well as women, I think it’s a question of what selective pressures we want to build into the system. The current system puts heavy pressure on factors like “ability to work insane hours” and “ability to go on little sleep” as well as things like, e.g., “ability to think deeply and creatively about a hard scientific problem” and “conceive and rigorously test novel theories that advance science.” A result is that many people who are quite strong on the latter two factors (some or many of whom might be even stronger on those factors than the ones who remain) nevertheless get selected out. This seems like a problem to me, even from the wholly self-interested PoV of universities with limited budgets.
I think that in addition to not allowing women time to be pregnant, we should also not install elevators or wheelchair ramps in academic buildings. I mean, we don’t want to be handicapping the system. People should deal with their biology and just accept that since they can’t walk up all those stairs to the roof they probably don’t deserve a career in astronomy.
Steve LaBonne – thanks for the link to that Chronice of Higher Education article… it’s very good indeed. :)
The purpose is to better understand the world.
But that’s the question. To what better understanding are you referring? What have we come to understand better based on faulty, unsupported conclusions about a putative diminished female capacity for math and science?
While I only have anecdotal evidence I believe that in general women are fully capable of higher education. I worked with a group of actuaries and about half of them were women. To become an actuary you have to pass a series of difficult exams. (on average it takes 7 years to pass all the exams for those that pass.) The vetting process has nothing to do with sex; the examiners only know the people taking the exams by exam number and no other identifying information. The vetting process is purely objective. Those women I worked with were highly capable and darn smart.
I grant you that my experience is anecdotal, but I think it rings true. That doesn’t mean there isn’t bigotry or barriers; I am sure there are. I think we have improved in the last 20 years and we have more gains to make.
I do think it is true that women who want to have children and a high powered career are in a tough position. I think once they have a child they have a tendency to put focus on the child. (I’m not trying to be sexist here but I do think mothers will go to great lengths to protect, nurture, and care for their child. Certainly in the animal kingdom you see it. ) This focusing on the child puts them at a disadvantage to someone who doesn’t.
I think we should look up to those women who choose to have a child and take a hiatis. We should look for someway to accomadate them. Having a child didn’t reduce their mental acuity. Our culture has an advantage over some other cultures in that we are trying to put women on a more equal footing. It is to our credit and our benefit. Lets keep moving in that direction.
Grok: is there a reason you can’t adopt a child instead of going through the process of creating a new one?
I am not aware that being wheelchair-bound in any way causes a person to be less capable of science or less competitive in academia. A disabled person whose health problems require them to spend so much time dealing with them that their academic competitiveness suffers shouldn’t expect the standards to be relaxed to accomodate them — and should probably consider a different career path.
You mean like someone with ALS, who’s permanently confined to a motorized wheelchair and can only speak – slowly – through a synthesizer?
Yeah, someone with that kind of handicap couldn’t possibly make it in academia.
Not a chance.
Chris: One outlier does not make a trend. Stephen Hawking is a brilliant guy who has succeeded despite great difficulties. I would guess he’d admit that he’d be even more productive if he did not have ALS and would welcome a cure. For most people, fortunate enough to be reasonably healthy, even assuming they’re reasonably intelligent, there are all kinds of obstacles to succeeding in science (e.g. just getting out of bed in the morning, limiting TV, and laying off the sauce). Some people with handicaps are going to do better than some people without, but for the most part, a physically disability will reduce, rather than enhance the likelihood of success in any given field.
Caledonian: According to a physiological psychologist I spoke to, there is a lot of varibility in how much people need to return to optimum functioning. The “eight hours” is an average; there are people who can make due with as little as one or require as much as thirteen.
Grok: About your third point – many progressives have argued for a long time that in order to improve employment situations for other reasons the amount of work required per employee be dropped. There’s a book called “the end of work” or something like that which argues that we realistically could have near (i.e. within the margin of people changing because they want to, the severely retarded, etc.) full employment if we wanted, with the additional benefit of lots more leisure. Your suggestion points out there is yet another benefit.
PaulC et al: Hawking is also an anomaly in his lifespan. He’s vastly outlived the lifespan of others with his condition; I wonder if the two are connected somehow.
Having something to keep living for might account for his longevity. In his position, but without his accomplishments, I think I’d long for death.
It’s likely not prejudice, but an evolved inherent tendency on the part of caregivers. And it’s not all culture: even when people try to raise their children in artificial cultures where traditional gender roles don’t exist, male children still tend to play with mock violence than female.
Perfect example of the incoherent thinking that people indulge in when it comes to this topic. There’s no reason to assume caregiving people tend to lack mathematical/scientific ability. Neither is there a reason to assume aggressive/violent people have high mathematical/scientific ability. I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain there’s no study suggesting that maximum-security inmates are better at math than the rest of us.
As for the “artificial cultures,” it’s fairly obvious that most of the people who try to create them have been exposed to the “real” culture, and therefore have most likely absorbed much of its prejudices.
I should also note that absolutely no one here has refuted, or even seriously engaged with, Jake Young’s excellent points.
I didn’t mean to imply that it made a trend, only that it broke an absolute rule. Hawking is certainly a “disabled person whose health problems require [him] to spend so much time dealing with them that [his] academic competitiveness suffers”, yet because of his extraordinary talent, he succeeds anyway.
This suggests a pattern: general rules have individual exceptions.
If Hawking can succeed in doing great physics with ALS, it’s hard to believe that someone else can’t do great physics while pregnant; but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attempt to accommodate pregnancy or ALS or any other condition that can make it more difficult to work, because [b]some of those people would make valuable contributions if we allowed them to do so.[/b]