Horizon

Does this mean that Engineering departments are emptying out across the nation?

If past performance is any predictor, this thread over at 11D should be worth following.

And, just for the Alans, here's Echidne's post on the subject.

Does this mean that Engineering departments are emptying out across the nation?

They are - of American-educated students, that is. But doesn't the sex imbalance between say the humanities and applied sciences underscore the very significance (amongst a whole host of other factors, let's not forget) of gender in determining who does best at what?

And, just for the Alans, here's Echidne's post on the subject.

To quote Echidne: "The Trouble with Boys" can be summarized as stating that the author believes boys are a different species from girls, need totally different things to thrive at school, and feminism has made the American schools into a place where only girls can strive."

I assume Echidne's caricature is intended for rhetorical purposes - either that, or she didn't more than skim the article. In fact Newsweek suggests that the prime culprit, if culprit there be, is not a cabal of wicked feminazis but rather the culture of testing-testing-and-more-testing in public schools, something dear to the current administration's heart and hardly a source of consolation to the Right.

I don't wish - much - to revisit the nature-versus-nurture debate which has been thrashed out here a couple of times somewhat ineffectually, but Echidne's brittle opposition to anything which might suggest even a fractionally genetic explanation for gender difference says, I think, more about her than it does about the complex issue of sociobiology. (And these are the folks who suddenly claimed to be at the vanguard of the Enlightenment Project a few weeks back when Intelligent Design reared its casuistic head: it's been well observed that Leftwingers believe that evolution explains everything except human behavior, whereas rightwingers believe that it explains nothing except human behavior ...)

Her point about the role of income (and, to a rather lesser extent, race) is well taken and not inconsistent with a genetic argument - there's no need for crude monocausality here. Indeed, I have long felt that affirmative action would be vastly more successful both politically and practically if it was retooled on class rather than racial lines. But it would be a bit more impressive if Echidne's data wasn't ten freaking years old, which kind of ignores the fact that gender inequality in the college classroom is a very recent and ongoing development.

But doesn't the sex imbalance between say the humanities and applied sciences underscore the very significance (amongst a whole host of other factors, let's not forget) of gender in determining who does best at what?

Depends on whether you're defining gender as a social construct or some immutable doom pronounced by one's chromosomes. There's strong evidence that the latter is almost entirely accountable for the sex imbalance in technical fields, as girls do as well as boys at math and science until sometime around puberty. It's not that they discover that math is hard, rather that they decide that math is icky. This is why the sex imbalance in technical fields does not imply "who does best at what."

This inequation is one of the reasons we should be addressing it — why have some faulty cultural winnowing process disadvantage the United States by convincing able girls not to pursue careers that they're good at and would find rewarding? Why have one hand tied behind our backs in global competition? One of the reasons our productivity was so much higher than the Nazi's was their suboptimal allocation of resources in service to Kinder, Kirche, Küchen.

For additional verification, you need to look cross-culturally and see that engineering does not necessarily equate to "man's work". I don't have statistics, but did conduct around a hundred interviews last year for programming positions. Perhaps sixty were in the US, and forty in India.
In both the US and India, the women I interviewed had about the same levels of technical skills as the men — the same spread of stars and duds. The difference was that women made up more than a third of Indian applicants, while I interviewed exactly two women for American positions.

Depends on whether you're defining gender as a social construct or some immutable doom pronounced by one's chromosomes.

Surely we're not forced to choose either?

"This is why the sex imbalance in technical fields does not imply "who does best at what."

Incidentally, the introduction of 'best' was a poor choice on my part and a clumsy way of trying to say something rather different. Feel free to disregard it if you think that it hinders more than helps.

One of the reasons our productivity was so much higher than the Nazi's was their suboptimal allocation of resources in service to Kinder, Kirche, Küchen.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but I believe that recent research has modified that argument a bit. One of the reasons that women's work in wartime Germany did not expand at nearly the same rate was that the proportion of working women was higher to begin with in Germany than it was in the US and UK. Also, the Nazis did not discourage (and in fact encouraged) the continuation of household domestic service, tying up a large proportion of predominantly female (man)power in employment that was for war purposes useless. That was a prejudice at work, but more of a class prejudice than a gender one.

Feel free to disregard it if you think that it hinders more than helps.

I think I'll keep it, as it's helping my argument quite a bit. Thanks!

Surely we're not forced to choose either?

No, but there are cases in which the answer should be "neither". The technical sex-imbalance issue is a good example of a case where only the slightest causality can be assigned to either genetic difference or hiring discrimination. Either may exist — and I'm sure people can cite examples of each — but plainly they account for only a fraction of the explanation.

Katha Pollitt has another perspective.

My own additional thought is that girls in the U.S. are still more thoroughly rewarded for docility than boys, and that might have the ironic effect of helping them to succeed in strictly managed institutions.

At which point in their lives would you argue that this system of incentives applies?

Also, have you heard any of the hubub about Self-Made Man?

At which point in their lives would you argue that this system of incentives applies?

From birth, far as I can tell.

Also, have you heard any of the hubub about Self-Made Man?

Actually, no.

Observer, 2003:

The greater vulnerability of girls to academic pressure may partly result from a greater desire to please. Joanna Kennedy remembers: 'Watching other parents when Eleanor was small, docility was prized in girls whereas it wasn't in boys at all. "That's a good girl" was awarded only to obedient, docile girls, from a very, very young age.'

Abundant scientific evidence suggests that repeated experiences of this kind early in life create a markedly greater tendency among girls to want to please authority and to be compliant. They become far more law-abiding as teenagers and adults, whether it be obedience to traffic regulations or committing fewer serious crimes. Above all, this people-pleasing makes them much more vulnerable to school cultures in which academic success is highly valued.

NYT book review of Self-Made Man. The scenes on dating have gotten some praise from knee-jerk anti-feminists, and the book review itself has been heaped with scorn for using the phrase "'white trash' underclass" to describe plumbers and construction workers, but I still think I'm going to read it.

That review got off-putting beginning with the prissy quotation marks around "dyke." And, yes, people who have full-time work in skilled high-paid professions like plumbing are hardly "underclass." They're miles above it. Miles above the likes of me for that matter, diplomas irregardless. They own their own houses in nice neighborhoods, for pity's sake.

As for whether to put your time into reading the book, maybe best wait for a review by someone who's reasonably comfortable with the idea of gender ambiguity. From this NYT writer you can't tell if the book gets beyond the thrill of "passing" to achieve anything like real insight.

Further regarding impersonation for research purposes: I'm beginning to think I'm against it in general. It seems to require an alienating distinction between the people the researcher is fooling and the members of the researcher's real social circle. That's why I've never tried to enter our local homeless shelter as an inmate: I'd be only half a block from home and I'd probably meet someone I knew. In order to successfully pretend to be homeless I'd have to come from a "real" life farther from the shelter than half a block, if you see what I mean.

Along the same lines, was the writer merely pretending to be male "for research purposes," or was she experimenting with a female-to-male transgender existence under the convenient heading of "just for research"? And if the latter, was she afraid to go through with it for real?

I've looked a bit more at Norah Vincent, and see that she's written sensitively about FTM transsexuals in The Village Voice (article here, predictable letter to the editor excoriating Vincent for her pronoun use here). Listening to the Glenn and Helen podcast interview with her (about which I read a delightful screed I'll try to dig up) I gather that the experience caused a lot of trouble for her, both with her partner and within her own self-image, which makes me think this wasn't just a cover for a change on her part.

And, yes, people who have full-time work in skilled high-paid professions like plumbing are hardly "underclass."

Amusing that you picked up on the "underclass" part of "white trash underclass", while I picked up on the "white trash," which is a phrase that has a specific meaning and carries real offence to me. Both equally inaccurate in this case, of course.

Just found the screed.