Joanne;
For boys, the Ed. system & it’s management contains toxic. What radical feminist institution actually cares for or care to understand boys? Their goal is to oppress them-dumb down.
Your article is misleading. It belongs with MSM.
You should know better.

When I asked why, she said, “They [the female students] realized they could get a perfectly good degree without doing that much work.” “Then why are you still there?” I asked. “Because I really like biochemistry,” said she.

Title IX, hogwash. Female parity on math tests represents dumbed-down curricula, which most will abandon post-haste. Group identity has no bearing in such stringent disciplines: You do the work for love, or not at all. The premise that creative work is an equal-opportunity affair is a ludicrous misapprehension. Just ask my beloved daughter.

Don’t know about the socially incompetent jibe, but them being more interested… is not an explanation, it is identical to the statement of the issue, they are interested in the field and you are not.

I have friends and relatives who are mathematicians and computer scientists, most of them academics. Most, if not all, are pretty laid back. Mathematicians seem to do a lot of traveling and conferencing and communicating with other mathematicians. I may be naive, but my impression is that math research is a friendly and social pursuit, partly perhaps because mathematicians share a language others don’t understand.

My middle daughter is a discrete mathematician and she has become accustomed to being a minority, often of one, in her classes. She’s an attractive young woman and she hasn’t suffered. She’s had two papers published in respectable math journals as an undergraduate and she’s too busy with her research to bother about gender statistics best left to journalists and professionals in the soft sciences to ponder.

To assume that the negative effect of past inequalities means women will always be intellectually incapable of success in those fields, is illogical, imo. The fact that any women were able to excel in those fields, in spite of the roadblocks, proves that there are superior women up to the challenges of hard sciences and math.

Whether they decide to continue on with math and science as a career is another issue. As many other people have said, it’s about choices. Many women apparently do not find high level math interesting. Nothing wrong with that, as long as women admit it and stop crying sexism when they are under represented.

On the other hand, there will always be some small number of women who, despite prevailing stereotypes, enjoy math and can compete equally with men. I hope we all agree that they should not be judged by the performance of other women, but on their own merits and faults. And again I emphasize that I don’t approve of lowering standards. That ultimately helps no one.

BTW I agree Suzee Q- We should appreciate and respect our differences. Men and women as groups and as individuals, are all different in how we think, our motivations, drive and desires. And I think the differences are for the betterment of society. Consider testosterone w/o compromise, and vice/versa. I don’t see either as a recipe for an optimum society (or an optimum person, for that matter). Sparta or the bee-hive. Shudder!

The word “computer” after all once referred to young female mathematicians doing donkey work. If the “gap” among teenagers is disappearing it’s probably a mix of massive encouragement for young women, better test preparation available for those motivated to take advantage, and the feminization of schooling that further alienates and de-motivates young men.

But as No Name touches on above, the real sex difference is that (so far) men have been the ones most interested when it gets hard, and emphatically masters of the abstract boundaries of math and physics. One can hardly stress the historical dominance here — 100% male among leading edge intellects is scarcely an exaggeration. That far exceeds the male dominance seen in fields that are male-dominant merely by social convention — rulers, soldiers, pilots, etc. History has its Elizabeths and Joans of Arc and Amelia Earhearts and female pirates, but ALMOST zero great female mathematicians and physicists (count em on one hand. A hand with two or three fingers missing.)

Hence the next group of Fields Medal winners will all be men. The next winners of the Nobel prizes in Physic and Economics will be men. Not 95% men. 100% men. Now maybe when that begins to change, we’ll know women are making some intellectual progress and closing a real gap that’s not just a current social habit.

Finally, I’m not sure what mere majority of numbers even really means. Young men are attracted to a wide range of outdoor, physical, hazardous, and mechanical jobs that pay a high school grad better than many of your women PhDs. Men are virtually the only ones to do these necessary jobs, leaving a vacancy among the social scientists and marketing professionals of the world that someone has to fill. If not women, who else does these jobs? Robots?

Blah blah blah. Boring. I say Viva la difference!