Posted on 01/17/2005 5:02:08 PM PST by CDB
Daughter graduated college in '99.
Wish things were different out there but while it gets her goat now and then, she persists and succeeds.
"I think people are fooling yourselves if they think that if all alleged gender bias were removed from society, then all fields would be a perfect proportional representation of society at large."
Careful as you go. No one's saying that. We're saying be very careful not to crush a young girl's warranted dreams based on group-think.
I'm not claiming it's all due to environment. I am claiming that here's a role to make sure Old Friend's daugter's environment is as unpolluted as can be -- and that conservatives make better feminists because they really do care about individuality and meritocracy and that's all feminism should be.
Hence, in particular, because I am a good conservative feminist, I think it's WORTH talking about sexism in math. Although a rarely do because where CAN YOU? How can one help? I suppose I could talk all day with liberals about it. But they just whine. They just engage in group think themselves and just want to beat up on white men -- another form of sexism, and racism to boot!
So Aetius, instead I talk to you and I encourage you to over-generalize on this. Ceding there could be biological differences is not the same thing as ceding that there needs to be great care taken to ensure fairness -- not a better deal -- but fairness to women. Your daughters, your grand-daughters, our future. I wouldn't be trying to persuade you if I thought liberals had the answer. Half of their feminists just hate men -- that point I'll concede!
P.S. Love ya!
Tell her you just have to be strong.
And of course it *really* helps not to get paranoid. Even when it was pretty clearly sexism, I tried to excuse certain behavior away on any other theory just so that it wouldn't ruin my love for math. Never to forget the love of math or science or whatever she does: that's a great life raft.
I had the advantage of growing up in New England in a good Puritan home, where all women are raised strong!
"some would bemoan having women as cops since women aren't as strong or as aggressive or as intuitive in bad situations, but at the same time deny that women are perhaps stronger in other areas, with more patience, and gentlness and motherly intuition, for such pursuits as raising young children..."
Um, surely you don't mean all women in any of those clauses above. That's groupthink. Let's leave it for the liberals.
And I mean it.
Poor kid, she grew up with a Jewish mother and an Italian father.
Following is Rush's transcipt with female chemistry prof.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_011805/content/feminist_update_2.guest.html
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Frances, who's a former chemistry professor, she's calling from us Palm Beach, Florida, and you just regaled us with a common sense experiment that you gave some years ago when you were teaching chemistry?
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Yeah, and it involved water levels when you changed the shape of containers, and the boys that scored the lowest in your class got it much quicker than the girls who were the brightest in your class.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: So you're concluding that Lawrence Summers at Harvard has a point here about innate differences between men and women when it comes to math and science, is that the upshot?
CALLER: It really is, and it's been reinforced through the years. I taught college chemistry at Washington University, I think you might be familiar with that school.
RUSH: Yes, yes, St. Louis.
CALLER: And when my children were young it was more difficult, if you weren't tenured, you know, you had a lab class one day and, you know, a lecture another day, so I taught at private high school because my background wasn't in education, it was in chemistry and physics.
RUSH: How do you explain yourself, then, Frances?
CALLER: Well, because, you know, there's The Bell Curve, which was a book that the left really attacked.
RUSH: Oh, ho-ho-ho. I was gonna say--
CALLER: You have the large number of people in the group under the bell, and then you have those to the left that, you know, don't quite come up, and those to the right that are few and far between, but also are still part of the general population. And it's just, you know, it's a genetic grab bag, it's what you got put together. I was a good student overall, but I really had to struggle to make grades in language. And my mother used to occasionally study with me, you know, when I was younger, before going to college, and she would learn the vocabulary before I did. It took me a longer time to do that, but if you gave me a math puzzle or the professor gave you something to originate, you know, come up with a different theorem, that was fun. I did math puzzles. So what I'm saying is that there are fewer women that are really good in some of these fields but those that are good may be better than most of the men in the field. You can't do it statistically. This is why I personally am so against affirmative action which is based on numbers in the population. It's not fair to anyone.
RUSH: No, and that's oriented towards sameness. They claim it's oriented toward equality, but it's oriented toward sameness, actually.
CALLER: Correct. Correct. You'll have some girls graduate from universities with degrees in engineering being super, and if you try and get in a company that hires, you know, a certain number of engineers, if you try and get half male and half female, well --
RUSH: You're going to have to lower the standards.
CALLER: Correct. But I mean in some cases in the early days there was discrimination against women and you may have had some women with real talent. But I do believe that if you really have the real talent and you can get in even the front door and start up, you will be promoted, and if a company is truly interested in excelling, may take a little longer, and you just have to work with it. But there are advantages that women have that men do not, again, statistically. Women can get up and socialize better. You have the stereotype of a male scientist and mathematician being the loner. Well, I found it. I managed an engineering office for a large utility on the west coast, and I could not get most of the men to present at any of the conferences that we attended. And part of my success now, I'm retired, but I still consult and I travel round the world giving training, and part of that is because I can combine the science and math field with the ability to communicate. So you'll have men that are very brilliant, but if you based your opinion on their brilliance, on how well they expressed themselves, you'd be far off base.
RUSH: So the bottom line is that there are genetic differences, that it's not discriminatory or bigoted to note --
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: -- and that there are exceptions to every rule.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Now, I checked the e-mail during the break at the top of the hour as I always do during a provocative call such as yours, and I got a lot of people who wanted me to ask you -- it's not the same type question, but I'm going to synthesize these questions this way -- because I got a lot of e-mail from people who say, "Hey, they had female math and science professors and they were wizards, they were brilliant, and many of them were Asian." And it is true, I remember when I lived in California and shortly even thereafter in the early nineties, the University of California system was starting to discriminate against Asians because they were outrunning everybody on entrance tests, and the population of the UC system was becoming outbalanced with Asians. And of course people chalked it up to their upbringing. They were not born here, they emigrated here, and they just worked harder and they applied themselves more. They were raised differently by their families over there. Is there a -- and I'm shooting off the wall here so if you don't know, I'm not trying to put you on the spot -- but is there anything to this, that even when you get to Asian women that there is a greater proficiency at math and science?
CALLER: I think if you read The Bell Curve you'd find that was found to be somewhat the case, yes, and there is also added to that the way they teach, so they emphasize it. In other words, all of the students that are interested in school there get the kind of training that we used to get 50 years ago in school. We don't do what we did in the past.
RUSH: In other words, they're not taught what a great president Bill Clinton was and only a paragraph given on Abraham Lincoln. They're taught math and science?
CALLER: Correct, and they've done a lot of drill by rote, they learn a lot of things. And this is not all that bad. If you commit to memory automatic those things that are mundane you have a much freer mind to think about, you know, greater problem solving.
RUSH: I totally understand that.
CALLER: There's an innate difference but it's also emphasized by their training.
RUSH: I totally understand that. The more you can memorize that is factual mathematically and scientifically the freer you are to learn things.
CALLER: Right. And I had a problem just memorizing. I had to understand it, and because I used to find little tricks for myself to understand things and then to recall them, I found that I could pass them on to students.
RUSH: Well, you know, one of the things I'm hearing you say is that you just worked hard, you worked hard --
CALLER: I had some natural ability. I worked for -- in a capacity on the west coast for a company where I rose through the ranks. I came in a technical entry-level position, and it ended up being the manager of the engineering--
RUSH: Yeah, but you had an interest in this, didn't you? Isn't that what propelled you?
CALLER: Yeah, I really wanted to be a doctor, Rush, that's why I started in science, and then I worked at Sloan-Kettering for one summer and decided that crying every day wasn't my strong suit. I could not deal with children with leukemia and knowing that there wasn't anything that I could be guaranteed to do to save lives. But I found that I really liked the sciences, especially chemistry.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: And so that's where I went on. But, you know, I started in that way because I came -- my parents were born in Europe, and the tendency there, girls were to be good wives. The men had to go out and work. It was an uphill battle to go to college and graduate school.
RUSH: Frances, let me ask you one more question before I have to go here, with your experience in the classroom, and let's stick with the girls in your class.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Forget the average, the brighter girls did the least well on your common sense problem, did you find that whether they be boys or girls, the people in your class who really loved it were really, really interested in it had an easier time getting it than those who were just taking the course because it was mandatory or they thought they were interested in it? I guess the question is, desire is a great engine, is it not?
CALLER: It really is, and the desire often goes along with the talent, but not necessarily. There are people who can make up for an innate talent, you know, just a moderate ability and make up for it with hard work. Yeah. The kids who really liked it and were really into it actually did better more easily. It's not just grades, it's how you do better.
RUSH: Well, Frances, I appreciate the call, I'll grateful that you got through here.
CALLER: I am grateful too, Rush. I want to say one more thing. I've been listening to you for a lot of years. I started out as a New York liberal. I've lived all over the country, and part of the reason that I spent three hours waiting to see Dick Cheney and Bush when they came to Palm Beach was because I've been listening to you, and you have more common sense than most of the Ph.D. people that I've worked with. And common sense is not something that you can buy. I've heard you say things from, you know, just not worrying about what other people think about you, do the right thing, and if you've made a mistake and you can't correct it, just go on from there. You give great common sense things, and that's something as I said that you can't be taught. It's one of those innate things and you really have it to a great degree and I want to tell you how much I appreciate listening to you.
RUSH: Thanks, Frances, you made my day. I appreciate that so much. All the best to you. Thanks for the call.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: We'll be back and continue here, folks, in just a moment. I love these conversations among equals.
END TRANSCRIPT
Todays FR thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1323397/posts?page=1
I agree completely.
However, men and women do think differently. Sorry if that is considered sexist, but IMHO, it is a phenomenon born from evolution.
Note: I said different, not better or worse.
Thanks, CedarDave!
Great discussion!
You are certainly right that my comments related to summary statistics and there will be many individual exceptions. We could start with Marie Curie.
My own daughter is a math whiz, much more adept at it than I, even though she wants to be a (secret-agent freeper) history teacher.
Best wishes in your studies!
Cheers
"It's not so much a matter of raw intelligence as it is the ability to think in a particular way."
That is how I understand the data... The question is how much is a sex-linked trait and how much is culturally conditioned. We know from long study that the cognitive faculty known as "spatial visualization" is predominantly a male trait, (Why you tell a man to "turn West at the intersection," but tell a woman to "turn left at the Chevron Station."
In the traditional western education/culture, the engineering percentage seems to have held, but it may turn out not be universal. An empirical question. We'll see.
I'm not a whit offended -- I agree with all that.
But -- mind you being MOST relieved to be discussing this with a scientist -- would you agree with me that given that they don't even know the biological mechanism for the difference, it's a hard pill to swallow that all current differentials in performance are explained by biology?
"Poor kid, she grew up with a Jewish mother and an Italian father."
Now, that's a great combination. Not poor at all. (well, providing someone converts her according to Luther's Bondage of the Will, but that's another thread, huh?)
When my kids were young, six year old boy and three year old girl, we were visiting a place that had a huge supply of building blocks.
They each had access to this huge pile of blocks of every shape imaginable.
They were busy building while we adults were talking.
When we looked down at them playing on the floor we saw both had built intricate buildings.........hers were all rounded and his were all straight lines and sharp angles.
All of us just looked in amazement as they both were brought up with all the traditional toys.......blocks, cars, trucks, dolls, etc. that they both played with.
There are differences but we don't know what they signify. Both have tremendous problem solving skills and logic is their strong point.
"There are differences but we don't know what they signify."
Precisely.
(Oh, and where I work, someone has repeatedly attended meetings with Larry and says he's a total pig. I mean he really is -- he's obnoxious, so incredibly self-certain, not open to new ideas. He was raised to believe he was a precious intellectual by his Nobel-prize-winning dad, and he just oozes noblesse oblige. I've never been in a meeting with him, but that's what my work friend says.)
I find it most disconcerting that without even knowledge of the biological mechanism, everyone kinda assumes that it shifts the entire bell curve.
We don't even know that. For all we know, it's a gene difference that strikes only 60 percent of women. We really just don't know.
And yet people here -- people who are supposed to be for individualism and meritocracy -- and declaring it a known fact that all differentials now seen in performance are attributable to nature.
As I told my sweetheart last night, I was rather disconcerted that conservatives took this approach. That should be a leftist approach. Particularly disappointed in Michelle Maulkin jumping on the bandwagon.
That reminds me of another study that was done involving boys, girls, and blocks. They put a big pile of blocks in a room and had the children come in, one at a time with none of the other children watching, and told them to build anything they wanted with the blocks.
The girls used the blocks to build enclosures, kind of like little forts.
All the boys, except one, used the blocks to build towers. (The one boy who didn't built an enclosure like the girls.)
I was told that the researcher who did the study had some pretty important information to tell the parents of that one boy. ;-)
I'm a perfect example of the difference: a graduate student in math, quietly pursuing my MS while genetically possessing zero talent in the area (I also used to be a secondary math teacher). I willed myself through and still do so.
Female math students (in general) approach things like they approach everything else, down the beaten path. They do the homework, they follow the examples, and they pursue it like they're doing their checkbooks.
This makes them good in lower math; gradeschool, high school, and even early college.
Males are all over the map. At the higher level, they want to (in general) derive everything themselves, to get inside proof and devour everything. Or, they're on the other end and don't give a sh!t.
My male students either didn't care at all or they were nutso about deriving and proving everything themselves going way beyond the girls, while on average the girls weren't on either extreme.
All we have to do is look historically at what sex discovered/invented almost everything from Calculus (Newton/Leibnitz) to relativity (good old albert), and in every other scientific field as well. Women certainly don't account for 50% of all historical scientific discoveries--although, if this keeps going, they'll rewrite history and write men out of it.
Women just keep with the same excuses: we were pushed down and disallowed from study. Numbers and theory didn't run from them. Gravity didn't refuse to be observed for them; they could have figured out Gravity's laws in the classical form all by themselves, but they didn't. Newton and Galileo and Kepler did.
Wake up. Women do not have what it takes. Even now, they need 'special help' and 'special encouragement' = don't hurt my little feelers; and when they fail, they blame someone. Men haven't, don't and will never need special help. The more you tell men they can't do it, the more they pursue it. This is the difference.
Women, even Phd's in biology snivel and cry just like my girlfriend when I don't get her a valentine gift. It's a joke. These women are emotional basketcases, and they're supposedly paving the way for all of us. It's frightening. As someone above said, their emotions cause them to disregard the scientific method completely, get emotional, and break down like children whose wagons fell over. And notice, everyone disregards the data that led him to make these assertions. Pathetic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.