things left unsaid

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/the_freedom_to_say_no/?page=full

Perhaps one day people of ordinary potential who try to understand large social differences will understand that there are ordinary differences between the social groups being compared. I'm fairly confident there are residuals that impose some levels of gaps (be this from race, gender, whatever), but that these residuals are less important than self-imposed choices made by the groups themselves. This grand study for example shows that women (as a whole) are more likely to go into medicine or biochemistry than physics or engineering. Long may this be blamed on various stereotypical assumption of male chauvinism, it seems more in accordance with the general behavior or disposition of women to begin with. Namely, that women in a social psychology sense end up in fields that are more interpersonal or more help/community orientated than those that aren't because they choose to.

The meat of this article came around here: "Joshua Rosenbloom, an economist at the University of Kansas, became intrigued by a new campaign by the National Science Foundation to root out what it saw as pervasive gender discrimination in science and engineering. The agency was spending $19 million a year to encourage mentoring programs, gender-bias workshops, and cooperative work environments. ... as he saw it, the federal government was spending all that money without any idea what would work, because there was no solid data on what caused the disparity between men and women in scientific fields." Something constantly left out by the political intentions, often as good as intentions may be, is that there are real causes to the situations that politicians are injecting themselves into that must be understood in order to actually cause real results. Education is a perfect example: our society has lived on a fiction that simply throwing more money at the problem will cause results rather than more smartly investing the money already at hand in more effective teaching methods and community involvement, for example. Here again, politicians can swoop up votes for the latest supposed income disparities (be they caused, supposedly, by race or gender) without having an actual solution to the problem, but by calling people out with their supposedly pure intentions.

I personally see no reason why women who are eminently qualified wouldn't succeed at chemistry. But I'm also not a women choosing between chemistry and medicine. If I were a politician, I might have wanted to ask women first whether they wanted to be engineers instead of doctors before I started complaining that women are 'under-represented' in engineering. It looks like there are some external barriers put in by the mostly male dominated fields, but if there are internal barriers as well, no reasonable amount of public funding and discourse is going to override these gaps, certainly not in a short amount of time.

Another interesting point emerges here: "Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts." While this doesn't really apply to me personally, I'm very familiar with the relative drop off in some of my compatriots in the male classification who did not demonstrate verbal abilities in equal measure. It does tend to limit where one can go or in a way forges a career path rather than creating options. As a result, women will have much greater flexibility and not choose to work in a field they don't want to work in.

It is interesting to note that this supposed gap increases with the relative economic freedom of a developed country, which implies that it is actually an active choice to avoid these fields as the freedom to choose to do so emerges.

Probably the most essential question this posits is this: Why do people like the things they do?

Why would women prefer organic, humanizing professions over working with tools and numbers, if it comes down mostly to what they themselves prefer? And then we can speak on the measures of 'glass ceilings', as a function of whatever is left unexplained by the actual variations between men and women and their collective skills and interests.