This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.My first instinct on reading this was to wonder whether the high-risk male psyche with its drive for status was related, and Greenspun suggests exactly that:
...
Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business, and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric. Rather than being fired at age 44, this is about the time that she will be handed ever-larger divisions to operate, with ever-larger bonuses and stock options.
A top lawyer at age 44 is probably a $500,000 per year partner in a big firm, a judge, or a professor at a law school supplementing her $200,000 per year salary with some private work.
...
What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility.
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:This explanation is kind of ironic because of how it dovetails with the IQ difference explanation. There are more higher IQ men because men have a higher variance in IQ, because men are risk-seekers, because of evolutionary biology. But that same high-variance that makes there be more really really stupid and really really smart men than women *also* makes men prone to stupid status-seeking like the academic track Greenspun describes. So its not just that there are more men than women intellectually capable of being a science professor, there are also more of them stupid enough to try. So the end result is to skew the ratio even more.
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
Now lets consider happiness research, and its criticism of our obsession with material wealth - a more pronouncedly male obsession. We can now apply the same argument to the general corporate world. Yes, there are more male CEOs pulling down the big bucks - but that doesn't mean that its a rational choice for a man to try to become a CEO, or that men are getting more from life than women. Happiness research shows that family and relationships - the very things women more often put ahead of careers - are what make people the happiest.
So men may "win" more in the business world, but perhaps its just a Pyrrhic victory. Maybe women make less and don't ascend as high on the ladder, because more of them are are smart enough to focus on what actually makes them happy. Maybe feminists should be proud that women are sensible, rather than angry that they aren't winning a fight that might not be worth fighting. And maybe men should take step back every now and then, and ask the question "Is this company worth impressing?"
[This was an off-the-cuff thing, so I'm sure y'all will point out if I'm totally on crack]
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Doctors (with their comically painful ordeal of medical school) are still more highly male, but the slightly-lower status professions like pharmacy are much more female.
Is the yeild of tenure-track position actually that low? (I don't really know; maybe it is.)
and:
Sure, the GE division head makes more, but plenty of people just aren't interested in business management, which seems to be where most of the high-paying corporate tracks end up regardless of what field you started in. (Of course, academia can have similar pitfalls ala getting sucked away from research and onto committees.)
Of course, both of these are just nit-picking his assertion that academia is a terrible career, and don't say anything to detract from your later conclusions. (Not that I'm currently on an academia track myself, but this has more to do with lack of inspiration for a thesis than a rational long-term cost/benefit analysis...)
And perhaps I'm gender neutral because I'm aiming to teach at a college, and colleges have pretty high tenure yields. :)
As far as why more women aren't in high-visibility science in general, I'd say that it has a lot to do with societal expectations and lack of support. I'll use myself as an example. Although I had some help from my live-in boyfriend with bills while I was doing research, the fact that he often resented the time I spent away from him was a major drain on my energy and time. I wanted to spend all my time in the lab; he wanted to spend time with me. I wanted to go work out why my assays were tanking; he thought I was cheating on him. The end result was that I couldn't get anything done without a fight, and instead of finishing up my senior year on the DOD project I'd started two years before, I quit the lab out of sheer exhaustion. Was that a victory for a more wholesome lifestyle? Maybe, but I was happy in the lab.
This all goes back to my infamous link to the Hirshfeld article and the argument that real equality begins at home. You want more women in science? Encourage men to take up the slack at home with the house and the kids. Stop convincing women that they're abnormal if they choose to spend time on research. It makes a real difference.
So in skimmed form, I think there is face validity. :)
The opportunity to be a college professor, CEO, or other dedicated career person doesn't really appeal (although I think it's nice that women have the right to pursue such things if they really want them, and there was a time when "college professor" was my goal); statistical equality with men in terms of who fills such positions is a nonsensical goal; shaping policy to try to obtain such equality is an unwelcome bit of social engineering; shaping law to try to force such equality is an infringement on the freedom of both men and women to each pursue what they consider important.
Trying to force such equality by taking more money out of my husband's paycheck to expand public school hours and subsidize daycare in order to "make career options available to more women," which has been suggested several times in various ways, is sheer idiocy -- it may force more women into the workforce, by decreasing the man's take-home pay, but I doubt that those who are forced into the workforce this way are going to suddenly become dedicated enough to their careers to acquire tenure or CEO status. All such policies will do is force more women into the lower level, "I put in my 40 hours and then I'm out of here" sorts of jobs, thus adding to the status disparity that already exists and offends the most vocal feminists so much. And those who really want the high-status jobs are probably already pursuing them, with or without taxpayer assistance.
But, of course, you probably don't become a high-profile, politically-active, policy-affecting feminist without being goal- and status-oriented. Combine that with the common assumption that everyone is pretty much like yourself unless proven otherwise, and it makes sense that feminist leaders would be out of touch with people like me and fighting for things that I either don't care about or find downright offensive.
Newt
politically-active, policy-affecting feminist without being goal- and
status-oriented. Combine that with the common assumption that everyone is
pretty much like yourself unless proven otherwise, and it makes sense
that feminist leaders would be out of touch with people like me and
fighting for things that I either don't care about or find downright
offensive.
I agree with this, and similar principles apply in many places. It's always the extremists who represent a movement, because the people with the most energy and passion tend to be the most extreme. So, for example, animal rights activists are represented by the sickoes at PETA, when most probably have more reasonable views. Same with environmentalists and Earth First.
I doubt that those who are forced into the workforce this way are going to suddenly become dedicated enough to their careers to acquire tenure or CEO status.
this is very true; however, women who are looking to aquire tenure or ceo status generally aren't needing to be forced into the workforce; if anything, they're usually trying to force their way into the boy's clubs that these 'upper ranks' usually are. if you see raising taxes in this way as a way to force the woman into the workforce, that's really sad; it's an effort to help people who are already in the workforce or who want to be. people who would prefer to be stay-at-home mothers (or fathers, for that matter) like yourself are probably more likely to decline the subsidized daycare. each individual tax is not going to benefit every individual paying it. i walk nearly everywhere and when i'm taking public transportation i usually take the light rail; i have no children and no intent to have any. however, i'm paying taxes that, among other things, maintain the roads and support public schools. for me to say that the government is trying to force me to drive and have kids would be ridiculous.
there's a bit of information here and a whooole lot more biased conclusion.
the biggest issue i'm seeing here is the assumption that all women want children and family and relationships, and are willing to put those desires above the desire for a certain job/career. this rationalisation and the others in this post and the included article disregard the fact that it is a societal expectation for women to do just that. apparently neither writer happened to notice all those feminists that got a bit ticked off when they were told by men in higher positions of employment that 'you don't want this job (or to spend your life teaching), you want to take care of your huband and children.' not to mention that the question of 'is this company worth impressing?' totally disregards that generally a woman has to do significantly more than a man to be considered as impressive and not just 'pretty good for a woman'.
as for the iq factor, iq has repeatedly been proven to only test the knowledge of some basic concepts in ways considered important to those that create iq tests---they are extremely biased based on race, class, and gender, and are really only suitable for testing select portions of the intelligence of people brought up similarly to the test's designers. as far as whether teaching is the 'smart' thing to do---professors get some great pay and get to spend their lives in academia. plenty of women want that, but not so many are able to access that because learning has historically in western societies been a priviledge for men, while women ---you guessed it---cared for the family.
so basically---the conclusions this post comes to are reasonable, if you completely disregard anything feminists have ever said about employment and family dynamics. i'm not even talking about extremists here.
Newt
Not all. Just many. Or, more importantly for the point here, more than men. And the fact that women want children and relationships more than men, and prioritize them above career more than men, has been thoroughly substantiated by every study I've seen on the subject.
This doesn't disprove that it might come from a societal expectation, of course.
Also, you have a very mistaken impression of the current state of research on IQ. For example, you claim that they are biased by race/class/similarity. Yet Chinese do better than Americans on american-made IQ tests, which argues against the tests being biased towards the home culture.
As for the gender bias of IQ tests, that is totally wrong. The most commonly used IQ tests were constructed so as to be gender equal. That is, they tried lots of questions and sections, and they *threw out* those sections which men and women got different scores on! Hence there is scant data about any difference between male and female IQ. Such a difference may exist, but it is tiny - the data I've seen suggests 0-2 points in favor of men. Much smaller than racial differences or individual variation.
But the argument that I was making does not hinge on difference in mean, but difference in variation. Tell me where the bias is in the observation that that men & women have different variances of IQ test scores?
I agree that IQ tests only test something very basic, although I would argue that it is a combination of short-term memory and "speed of thought". But basic doesn't mean useless. IQ correlates with income, and national IQ correlates with gdp growth rate, at a pretty significant level - so whatever this "basic" thing is being tested, it turns out to really matter in the real world.
Which is not to say other things don't matter - Goleman argues that emotional IQ is an even stronger predictor of success, and he may well be right. But the claim that IQ doesn't matter is just not substantiated by the evidence.
There's no money in science, and no chicks either (at least in the science I do), and if impressing crusty old professors in tweed jackets turns your dials... good on you.
However some of us, as radical as this sounds, actually really love doing science. It's just so... interesting.
Would I want to be a judge and listen to lawyers all day long, for $500k a year. Hell no.
Many feminists do say exactly that. But some of them also say that a high-status, high-crap career path is a poorly designed one, and argue that those more "life-affirming" "women's" values might be a better basis/model for many work environments, including the high-status, high-risk, high-crap world of academia.
I'm reminded of "North Country," which I just saw last night. Everyone involved should have been angry about that work environment, and proud that someone sensible tried to change it.
Newt
This really stuck with me, though:
* young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
* men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
This ties into the popularity of MMORPGs as well as career ladders. If you want to see a ferocious example of this, the politicking around any MMO end game would be a good place to start.
* I'm more excited about doing than learning, I love school but only in small doses. (I've been doing an MBA slowly over the past few years)
* For the same reason, I'm not so excited about academia.
* I love my current job
* If I was doing something other than my current job, it would be starting a business building seasteads. Which I think would do a lot more good for the world than adding yet another economist.
Some of these differences are probably due to different distributions of aptitude between males and females among various disciplines, but I'm skeptical that explains all of the difference. This is a nice hypothesis (I've been thinking about it myself lately), but I'm not sure it's real.
When one asks any high school kid what career he or she wants to have, most of the time it’s in the entertainment business. The movie industry is churning out hopefuls by the minute and the entertainment factory is alive and well.
Or else how do you explain the popularity of American Idol, Star Search and even Dancing With The Stars for Pete’s sake? Science and technology as a career choice may only be entertained by the nerds and with those out to prove something to their peers.
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