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[Reelyanoob]

All engineering faculties have had goals to boost female participation since about the 1970's at least in North America. They've never been able to crack the 15% mark, despite favourtism to women students and cash bonuses offered to them too.

Virex, you say they "waste no chances" to tell Women they cannot be an engineer.

Can you give examples of this?

http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/other/4_Apr/aprmt3.htm

The young women who get top scores on the SAT-M and participate in the summer programs at Johns Hopkins and other universities are hardly the victims of cultural stereotyping or of parents who have failed to recognize and develop their daughters’ talents. Their families paid over $2000 in 1999 to send their daughters to a summer program lasting only three weeks (quite a family investment) or had sufficient savvy to know about the program and take advantage of scholarships.
But few of these mathematically talented young women end up entering careers in mathematics and science. A follow-up study of one group of these students (conducted as part of "The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth") showed startling differences in career choices:

Less than 1% of females in the top 1% of mathematical ability are pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering or physical sciences. Eight times as many similarly gifted males are doing so.

These young women are well aware that they have the talent.

[...]

These mathematically gifted young women are getting advanced degrees. But most are choosing other fields: their first choice was medicine, followed by law, the humanities and biology.

So, the top 1% of female maths scorers are only 1/8th as likely to choose a maths major as the top 1% of male maths scorers. These top scoring females are hardly likely to believe they "can't do maths", especially as the study group was sent away to a special "maths genius" summer camp, which was paid for by the families, also implying that their families were supportive of them studying maths.

So you have to ask why highly maths-skilled girls, who are acknowledged as such by the education system are still not interested in studying maths, engineering, computer science or science as their male counterparts.

[Kay12]

http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/other/4_Apr/aprmt3.htm

The young women who get top scores on the SAT-M and participate in the summer programs at Johns Hopkins and other universities are hardly the victims of cultural stereotyping or of parents who have failed to recognize and develop their daughters’ talents. Their families paid over $2000 in 1999 to send their daughters to a summer program lasting only three weeks (quite a family investment) or had sufficient savvy to know about the program and take advantage of scholarships.
But few of these mathematically talented young women end up entering careers in mathematics and science. A follow-up study of one group of these students (conducted as part of "The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth") showed startling differences in career choices:

Less than 1% of females in the top 1% of mathematical ability are pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering or physical sciences. Eight times as many similarly gifted males are doing so.

These young women are well aware that they have the talent.

So, the top 1% of female maths scorers are only 1/8 th as likely to choose a maths major as the top 1% of male maths scorers. These top scoring females are hardly likely to believe they "can't do maths"

Look at the majors they are choosing instead - law, medicine etc

So you have to ask why highly maths-skilled girls, who are acknowledged as such by the education system still are still not interested in studying maths, engineering, computer science, science as their male counterparts.

We do have fairly many women in the CS department of the university. Compared to the distribution we had in Business College, anyway. In any case, interesting results, thanks for providing that.

As for the women we had in Business College... one didn't want to be an IT professional anyway, but a vet. She did do well in school though... but she wanted to be a vet. It's not about people telling her she couldn't do stuff, because she was at the top of our class and she knew it. Most other women were pretty similar to some men we had - not really interested, and dropped out during the first year along with the others.

[olemars]

When I studied master's level engineering/physics the gender split for my programme that year was about 50/50. The girls were generally brighter and studied harder than us guys, but a lot of them struggled with some hefty self-confidence issues about their own abilities. Some would be so stressed out before exams they would be almost crying, and hurt their results because of it.

Don't know where, but somewhere along the line, girls are "told" by society they're not supposed to be good at this kind of studies. They're also likely to choose studies based on certain preconceptions. In my study programme, after three years you could choose to diverge into either technical/applied physics or biophysics. Biophysics was considered more "girly" somehow, so a lot of girls went for it. Unfortunately, biophysics is far less career-friendly. Another programme was for many years named "elkraft-teknikk" (roughly translated "electrical power production technology") and was almost exclusively male. Then they changed the name to "energy and environment" - 40% girls the next year.

[ChairmanPoo]

Medical school is highly female-populated, though. Back in the faculty they were a majority already, and now in this post grad course (It's a training course for the MIR exam) they surpass us in a 4:1 proportion.

[Virex]

All engineering faculties have had goals to boost female participation since about the 1970's at least in North America. They've never been able to crack the 15% mark, despite favourtism to women students and cash bonuses offered to them too.

Virex, you say they "waste no chances" to tell Women they cannot be an engineer.

Can you give examples of this?

This site lists plenty of examples and general trends occurring during education, which incidentally also discredits or at least challenges the idea that women really have a free choice and are just genetically programmed not to do some things.

[Reelyanoob]

@olemars: Well susan pinker discusses all of that in the books she's written, what you wrote fits with her "biological" views as well as it does with societal pressure ideas. The interview I linked before has her discussing some of the stuff from the book.

Of course girls would be more likely to select a course with "environment" in it, or biophysics. It's the girls who decide what course to take, nobody else, and they tend to think more holistically than the males, and take more interest in living things.

Girls are far more cautious too, whereas boys are more risk taking. This explains the "self-doubt" you're talking about. Boys can be confident to the point of being insanely over-confident.

Susan Pinker discusses the concept of "vanilla gender assumption" where the male average is taken as the norm, and the females are expected to match that norm. Perhaps it's the females who are the norm and male over-confidence which is the exception? After all males are about 9 times more likely to kill themselves in an accident than females.

---

@Virex: AAUW is a lobby group which specializes in saying females are dis-advatanged by the education system. They are disputed even by other feminist professors. I wouldn't take them seriously, they are a union which relies on publishing to get new members to pay dues. They are known for dubious research.

[Virex]

Hmm, I was not aware of that. Still, they provide copious links and examples, combined with what at least seems like credible explanations, so unless someone can give me research that points the other way I'm going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[MonkeyHead]

Could the gender/subject issue be a left brain/right brain correlation, with feedback loops to reinforce?

[Kay12]

At least here, women have just as free choice as men. And, as I said, they even get bonus points for applying for traditionally male fields.

However, to be honest, I don't personally consider men OR women to have any more freedom of choice than any other hunk of molecules in space.

Hmm, I was not aware of that. Still, they provide copious links and examples, combined with what at least seems like credible explanations, so unless someone can give me research that points the other way I'm going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Reelyanoob posted that Massachutes News story, is that not good enough?

Also, assuming society coaxes women away from technical fields, how would you fix that? By forcing women to study them?

[Reelyanoob]

Which teacher publically labelled 12 year old female students "real bitches"? I find that unbelievable for a start.

Also, this may be the same group who holds seminars and claim that DNA does not exist? (According to Richard Dawkins)

I linked this interview before and don't really like the title (it was probably attention grabbing) but it discusses some of the research. For a start boys are more disruptive in class and have to be told "shut up" more by teachers. This is part of the research saying boys get more attention from teachers. I'm sure you people can relate to what I mean.

 http://www.menweb.org/paglsomm.htm

Some excerpts:

MS. SOMMERS: Well, for example, a few years ago feminist activists held a news conference and announced that on Super Bowl Sunday battery against women increases 40 percent. And, in fact, NBC was moved to use a public service announcement to, you know, encourage men "remain calm during the game." Well --

MR. WATTENBERG: How can you remain calm during the Super Bowl! (Laughter.)

MS. SOMMERS: Well, they might explode like mad linemen and attack their wives and so forth. The New York Times began to refer to it as the "day of dread." One reporter, Ken Ringle at the Washington Post, did something very unusual in this roiling sea of media credulity. He checked the facts -- and within a few hours discovered that it was a hoax. No such research, no -- there's no data about a 40-percent increase. And this is just one of so many myths. You'll hear --

MR. WATTENBERG: Give me some others.

MS. SOMMERS: According to the March of Dimes, battery is the number -- the leading cause of birth defects. Patricia Ireland repeats this. It was in Time magazine. It was in newspapers across the country. I called the March of Dimes and they said, "We've never seen this research before." This is preposterous. There's no such research. And yet this is being taught to young women in the colleges. They're basically learning that they live in a kind of violent -- almost a Bosnian rape camp.
[...]
MS. SOMMERS: I interviewed a young women at the University of Pennsylvania who came in in a short skirt and she was in the Women's Center, and I think she thought I was one of the sisterhood. And she said, "Oh, I just suffered a mini-rape." And I said, "What happened?" And she said, "A boy walked by me and said, `Nice legs'." You know? And that -- and this young woman considers this a form of rape!
[...]
MR. WATTENBERG: What about this argument that came up recently that girls in elementary and high school are neglected by their teachers? Is that -- have either of you --

MS. PAGLIA: A bunch of crap.

MS. SOMMERS: It's a hoax.

MS. PAGLIA: A bunch of crap.

MS. SOMMERS: I mean, it's all -- it's really an incredible case of just junk science. The American Association of University Women hastily threw together a survey of 3,000 children and asked them about their sense of well-being and their self-esteem, and they never published it. It'a not -- it hasn't been replicated by scholars. Adolescents don't see significant differences -- the majority don't see significant differences -- between levels of self-esteem between young men and young women. Yet the AAUW said it was true. It's an advocacy group. Their membership was drying up. They were losing, you know, several thousand members a year. They needed an issue. They brought in a new group and they got on the gender-bias bandwagon and basically struck gold. They now -- you can call an 800 number. They have short-changing girls mugs and t-shirts. (Laughter.) And they were so positively reviewed in the media that they can use --

MS. PAGLIA: Oh, the media was utterly credulous. I couldn't believe it when MacNeil/Lehrer totally -- they fell for it like suckers that night.

MS. SOMMERS: Well, they would ask young men, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And boys would say things like rock star or sports star. And girls would say lawyer and doctor. So they declared a glamor gap and said that there's a glamor gap, that girls don't dream their dreams. Well, most children don't have the talent to be rock stars. The sensible ones know this. So the way I would interpret those findings is that girls mature earlier and boys suffer a reality gap.
[...]
MS. PAGLIA: And the question of attention in the classroom, too. As experienced teachers, okay, this idea that you measure, okay, how much attention the teacher is paying to the boys and girls to determine how much that the student is valued, and it was discovered that the teacher was making more remarks to the boys. You're keeping them in line! Okay? The boys you have to say, "Shut up, be quiet! Do this thing. Are you doing your homework?" Like this. The girls, all right, they do their homework. They're very mature. And girls at that age are rather sensitive, and I as a teacher am very aware -- as a teacher of freshmen, all right -- that the girls are sitting there pleading with you with their eyes, "Don't embarrass me in front of the entire class." Okay? I'm very aware that I seem to be talking often to the boys. Tut that is just because they're so -- their egos are completely -- I mean, they're so unconflicted. Okay? They love attention. They're like yapping puppies. You know what I mean? They don't care about making fools of themselves once they start.
[...]
MS. SOMMERS: The AAUW would ask children: "I'm good at a lot of things." And you could say, all the time, some of the time, usually, but you know -- and a lot of little boys, the 11 to -- would say, "All the time, I'm good at everything all the time." And girls, being a little more reflective, will give a more nuanced answer. The AAUW counted everything except "always true" meaning that they were suffering from a dangerous lack of self-esteem. They declared an American tragedy. American girls don't believe in themselves.
[...]
MS. SOMMERS: Well, the average American women, first of all, is rather fond of men. Okay? She has a husband or a father or a brother or -- you know? So the male-bashing is out of control right now. I mean -- and if you look at a lot of the statistics that I deconstruct in my book. You know, that men are responsible for birth defects, that men -- Naomi Wolff has a factoid she has since corrected, but she says 150,000 girls die every year starving themselves to death from anorexia. This was in Gloria Steinem's book. It got into Ann Lander's column. It's in women's studies textbooks. The correct figure, according to the Center for Disease Control, is closer to 100 deaths a year, not 150,000.

[Kay12]

I don't doubt the existence of misogynist teachers. There are misandrist teachers as well. But I don't believe the society as whole is doing its best to keep women away from engineering careers.

[Siquo]

Another programme was for many years named "elkraft-teknikk" (roughly translated "electrical power production technology") and was almost exclusively male. Then they changed the name to "energy and environment" - 40% girls the next year.

Easy. Beta-men-archetypes are less susceptible to "pretty names". And lo and behold, men in beta studies have an abnormal high amount of beta-men-archetypes.

[olemars]

The hell is a beta-man?

[Siquo]

Ah, sorry, alpha/beta/gamma must be a dutch thing, I didn't know that.
Alpha studies: Languages, history, literature, philosophy, theology.
Beta studies: Physics, chemistry, biology, math, astronomy.
Gamma studies: Psychology, sociology, economy, geography, anthropology.

Edit: yes, I just learned it's a dutch thing. Sorry for the confusion.

[Kay12]

Oh, forgot to add:

Some would be so stressed out before exams they would be almost crying, and hurt their results because of it.

Stressing excessively hurts performance for men and women alike - however, I think this has to do with social pressure to succeed and gender differences in stress handling, more so than being "not meant" to study something.

Ah, sorry, alpha/beta/gamma must be a dutch thing, I didn't know that.
Alpha studies: Languages, history, literature.
Beta studies: Physics, chemistry, biology, math.
Gamma studies: Psychology, sociology, economy.

Thank you for sparing me from humiliating myself by ranting about alpha and beta males and how these stereotypes don't belong in the academic world!