First, I don’t see this as biology versus sociology. Things could be part-biology and part-sociology. The “sociology” part could be part parenting, part broad society, part the domain- or discipline-specific sociology. I am convinced by the current evidence that there are biological factors as well as social factors that affect individuals’ abilities and choices, and that many of these factors have different gender profiles. The question is largely about the details.

One possibility is that there is a biologically determined equilibrium range (my guess would be females between 30% and 45% of high-end STEM jobs — and about 40-60% for the non-high-end jobs) and in a reasonably equal society, the proportion would fall within that range. The fact that some societies have a proportion significantly below that range indicates that other factors are depressing female performance in relative terms — factors that are probably most likely sociological in nature. This is the possibility that I currently subscribe to. I see no reason why that equilibrium range should naturally center at 50% — I expect it to be skewed to one side in some cases and to the other side in other cases.

Second, I think your concern with STEM fields (setting aside the gender issue) is a little misdirected, because these fields are already pretty heavily populated. I do think that a knowledge and understanding of mathematics is very important for people, and that a better number sense is very useful, but I don’t think that a lot more people should *become* mathematicians or engineers or technologists. I especially don’t think that standards should be lowered or dumbed down to try to attract more people (whether male or female) into majoring in these subjects.

It’s true that people at the high end of innovation often need a lot of specific knowledge of mathematics-intensive subjects, but these form a very small fraction of the population — and cognitive abilities as well as character traits such as conscientiousness and perseverance, which are largely determined by genes and early childhood environment, already cut off a large fraction of the population from even attempting this kind of high end innovation. For most other people, it may be a good idea to encourage them to learn their high school math more carefully, but that is very different from trying to push them into mathematics.

Third, do efforts to push women into STEM fields bear fruit? Probably to some extent. But the women who are being pushed into these fields are, for the most part, not women who would have gone uneducated in the absence of such a push. Most of them would be talented, academically or commercially inclined women who would probably have gone into business, medicine, law, or other parts of academia (such as political science). This may be a good thing if the “advertising” of science to the women who change their minds is done honestly — but it could be a bad thing if false ideas of science are implanted in the women’s minds to try to attract them to it. In any case, from a societal point of view, I see no reason to believe that we need fewer doctors and more engineers.

Fourth, the stereotype threat theory is a fascinating one. But to the best of my knowledge, most of the evidence in favor of it shows how stereotype threats can make performance gaps wider than the baseline level, not how performance gaps can be narrowed relative to their baseline levels. More importantly, though, the stereotype threat story doesn’t fit my own personal experience with seeing women in mathematics. In the freshman calculus classes I have taught, my female students who start finding their college mathematics much harder than their school mathematics don’t say, “I knew it, women can’t do math.” They say something like, “This can’t be happening” or “the instructor is terrible” or “the instructor is making things too hard” or “I am having a bad time” — just like my male students. The main reason why equally talented female students do less mathematics courses, at least in the groups of non-math majors that I’ve interacted with, is that females are much more likely to have their sights set on medical school where grades matter a lot more for admissions, so hard mathematics courses are a luxury they think they cannot afford. Of course, my samples aren’t representative, but this is just food for thought.

I don’t see why you claim that women “need to” do something as a category. If you’re claiming that technophobic individuals need to overcome their technophobia, that’s a different claim. With a few exceptions (such as Jessica here) most women, like most men, are more concerned about their individual selves than with trying to improve the collective status of their gender group. And I think that’s as it should be. I’m more than a tad unhappy if a woman who goes into mathematics (or engineering, for that matter) in order to “prove” to the world that women can do mathematics — particularly if she isn’t that talented or interested in the area.

I think you’ve made an incredibly important point here about masculine activities defining what’s important to society. For the record, yes, I think that the teaching profession and the poli sci programs and the humanities graduate schools would all benefit from an influx of men and their particular ways of looking at the world. I think the same thing is true about any form diversity — racial, cultural, sexual identity, etc.

But to answer your question about why focus on the STEM professions explicitly, for me, it’s partly personal in that I love math and science and want as many other people as possible to feel the same way, and it’s also partly driven by my feeling that it’s extra important for the STEM fields to be as fair and objective as possible. It’s probably a bias on my part that I think that science can be, and generally is, a powerful driver of social progress. And, in order for science to be at its best, it needs to continuously move toward fulfilling its own ideals of objectivity.

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, another of my comments is in the moderation queue right now, Abhilash will have to approve it because it contains hyperlinks. I will just repeat the gist here: a large number of academic professions in in the US have female domination at least till the grad school level. I am hard pressed to attribute this to discrimination against males. The more likely explanation seems to be profile differences in both abilitis and interests. Both biology and society affect these differences

I will get back to you after a more careful study Hyde et al

Thanks for your contributions.

If you’ll take a look at ‘Gender, culture, and mathematics performance’ by Hyde and Mertz, you’ll see that they engage with this idea that biological factors are the major determinants of the gender gap in mathematics. They take representative numbers for variations in the means and spreads of male and female ability distribution curves and calculate what that would look like for the proportion of male to female mathematicians. They find that even assuming that there does exist greater male variance (an assumption they don’t actually believe based on cross-cultural analyses) then they still cannot explain the lack of women. For biological variation to explain the current male:female ratio, these professionals would all have to have been four standard deviations above the mean.

I don’t think that anywhere close to the vast majority of scientists come from that part of the Bell curve.

Thus I stand by my assertion that biology does not explain the gender gap nearly as well as sociology does.

If my surmise is correct, then the issue is almost entirely one of personal choices: (i) the decision of women (and men) to marry, (ii) the decision to have (or, in rare cases, adopt) children, and (iii) the negotiation process between marriage/domestic partners (one woman and one man in case of a monogamous heterosexual couple) on the sharing of household and earning responsibilities.

Of course, social conditions constraint personal choices to quite an extent, but these aren’t discipline-specific or academia-specific social conditions, as far as I can see.

Note that even if you find the variance differences unconvincing, profile differences tend to explain a lot of the difference between disciplines. (The leaky pipeline is a different issue). Those disciplines that rely more heavily on visuo-spatial skills are also the ones with lower female representation. The social sciences and humanities, which are more “verbal”, are also the ones where women are seen a lot more.

More importantly, though, why is it a problem at all? If you (I don’t mean you specifically here — generic you) don’t think it is a problem that males are “under-represented” in political science graduate programs, why do you think it is a problem that women are under-represented in particle physics research programs?

One argument I’ve heard is that different genders bring different perspectives to the table, and domination by a single gender leads to a biased or narrow perspective in the subject. But then why focus attention so much on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)? Is the argument that the bias or lack of gender balance is significantly more harmful in STEM fields than in other fields? Or is it that, as Robin Hanson said:

“I notice that women are said to look good in male-style clothes (e.g., suits), far more than men are said to look good in female-style clothes (e.g., dresses). Women also earn more respect succeeding at male-dominated professions than men earn by succeeding at female-dominated professions.

The general pattern in all three cases is that we seem to respect women doing well at what mostly men do far more than we respect men doing well at what mostly women do. For better or worse, male abilities seem to more define which abilities count most for high status. Doesn’t seem fair to women, but there it is.”

You say: “While biologists have been unable to explain the gender gap in the sciences, sociologists have been much more successful at this goal.” I could say, “While scientists have been unable to convincingly explain the origins of life, religious theories have been much more successful at this goal.” While it’s perhaps a bit unfair to compare sociology with religion, the point remains: the standard of “proof” needed for sociological theories is considerably less than the standard of proof generally needed for biological, genetic explanations. To say that sociologists have come up with theories is very different from saying that they have demonstrated successfully that their theories account for a significant fraction of existing gender disparities.

Now, here is my understanding of the biological evidence so far. (Numbers are from the United States). First, both cognitive abilities and character traits are known to be substantially heritable, with heritability higher for cognitive traits (narrow and broad heritabilities about 50% and 75% respectively). See, for instance, Bouchard et al’s Minnesotta twins reared apart study. Moreover, the non-heritable component of cognitive traits is largely considered “within family”, i.e., when you control for genes, being raised in a family has very little impact on cognitive abilities as measured by IQ tests — though it has more of an impact on life outcomes. This non-heritable component is termed “nonshared environment” or “unique environment” and I don’t think anybody really know what nonshared environment comprises or how t manipulate it to increase cognitive traits.

Now, coming to the subject of gender differences. Recent IQ studies have shown that (in the US and UK) males on average have a slightly higher mean IQ than females but that this difference starts manifesting itself only after the age of fifteen. (The difference would be between 0.1 and 0.3 standard deviation, so pretty useless for the purpose of judging individuals). If these studies are correct (and there are question marks because earlier studies showed no IQ differences) then IQ would, like height, be something where the male “advantage” really starts manifesting itself only in late teenage years.

Less controversially, though, IQ test have shown that females have a stronger verbal performance than males and males are stronger on visuo-spatial skills — i.e., there are different “profiles.” This may be due to biological or sociological factors or a combination, though to the best of my knowledge, there are no popular stereotypes of strong male visuo-spatial skills or strong female verbal skills. There is, however, some evidence that biology explains at least part of the difference: female verbal skills vary with the menstrual cycle and have been correlated with hormone levels.

I’ll continue in the next comment, since this one is getting too long.

The ‘stereotype threat’ is definitely there, and it needs to be actively combated.

Given my experience in science, I have observed that because of a large number of reasons, women tend to under perform, and the lack of role models worsens the situation, making survival and motivation difficult for women in their careers.

On another note, I have observed a tech-phobia among many women I have worked with. This is slightly troubling, but this phobia definitely exists and is quite sharp in many cases, where women are either unwilling or unable to do sophisticated technical work, deal with machinery and arrive at working models. There are less women in science, but even lesser women in engineering and technology, so women need to themselves make sure that they gain in crucial technology skills and fight this tech phobia.