🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <burt.718433315@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>
>  There is another way to look at the results of programming girls out of
>math.  That is, that it is costing us a great deal.  How?
>  Let's assume that there _are_ sex-linked cognitive differences which show
>up in the statistics of large populations.  (And ignore, for the moment, the
>stupidity of trying to apply statistical data to unique individuals.)  Then
>consider the fact that because of social and cultural factors math has,
>purely historically, been developed almost entirely by men.  (Yes, I know
>there have been a number of excellent female mathematicians!)  Then it is
>reasonable to apply statistics to the large sample of all past mathematicians
>to infer that math, _as it now exists_ contains a built in bias toward those
>cognitive skills at which men tend to excel, leaving skills at which women
>tend to outperform men out, or puting them down as "not real math".  I would
>argue that this implies that current mathematics has cut itself off from
>much that might have otherwise been discovered.
 
     This is very sloppy.  The existence of 'cognitive skills at which
     men tend to excel' or alternatively 'cognitive skills at which
     women tend to outperform men' may well invalidate the contention
     that 'because of social and cultural factors math has ...
     been developed almost entirely by men'.  Your premise was that
     is was only society that kept women out, you then use a justification
     based on the loss of innate biological sex-related talents in the 
     development of math.  One could more simply posit that there
     are sex-related cognitive factors that predispose women generally
     to perform poorly in mathematics, that this is what continues to 
     keep them out of mathematics.  In this case, there would be little
     'loss'.

     However, as I have said, I suspect that if the pay and the general respect
     of society were better in the relevant areas, then more women would 
     show up in the relevant workforce.  As it is, the attainment of
     doctoral degrees in math and the physical sciences (and engineering
     for that matter) seems somewhat akin to a fetish.  'Fatal Attraction'
     notwithstanding, men seem more prone to that kind of behavior.

                               dale bass
-- 
C. R. Bass                                           crb7q@virginia.edu
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia                            (804) 924-7926