Posted on 22nd January 2018
I blogged previously about statistical programming in Python. Here I want to say something about the data I used, which is from the paper:
Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian, Meredith Meyer, Edward Freeland "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines" Science 347 (2015) 262--265. DOI: 10.1126/science.1261375
The abstract explains the results of the survey and data analysis the author perform:
The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women’s underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.’s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans’ underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.
I came across this paper from an excellent AMS blog post especially section 4.
This lead to some meditating on the current state of universities. You can't help but notice that here I've linked to The Guardian and The Times Higher, two publications which spend a lot of time collating and publicising university rankings. The modern university seems to have fixation on ranking and measuring, often in a deeply impersonal way. We spend a lot of time worrying about prizes: who won the Nobel? Who won a Fields? I wonder what effect an obsession with performance, "are you good enough?", has on the participation of minorities, given the above research findings.
Mathematics, my past and future academic pursuit, is a field which sometimes feels uniquely obsession with questions of achievement. It of course comes off "worst" in the analysis (has the highest belief in a "culture of brilliance", although is beaten here by Philosophy, and has a higher female PhD participation rate than Engineering, or Physics, or Computer Science). We spend much time talking about the Fields medal; my professional society journal is always after nominations for prizes. Why don't we celebrate more quotidian contributions, and our (presumed) collective love of the subject more?
I resolve to try to use words like "genius" and "brilliant" less, especially in front of students. I will try to stop saying things like "this result is too hard to prove". It is better to say that we don't have the time, or the machinery, to give a proof. Better, still, to give some indication why a result is true, or interesting.
I have come late to this essay: The Lesson of Grace in Teaching. I found the following a shocking idea:
Your accomplishments are NOT what make you a worthy human being.
And then I find it shocking that I am shocked by this. But this is, sometimes, what academia does to you. For more about Prof Francis Su, see an interview with Quanta.