Women in Science and Tech

Here's yet another article on the topic, but it's perhaps a bit more interesting than most.

I thought that the findings from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth brought a somewhat new angle to the discussion.

The article reports:

"Benbow and Lubinski also found something else intriguing: 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. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can."

So, among the population of the mathematically gifted (MG), a higher percentage of women who are MG are also verbally gifted, and thus women are more likely to choose non-scientific careers. They almost make this sound like MG women have a huge array of career choices and are even better off than MG men, who are stuck in the math and tech fields because they aren't good at anything else.

But really, doesn't how we think about this finding in the context of career opportunity depend on how the overall population of MG people breaks down between men and women? I think we are interested in the number of women who are in this privileged Super Brainiac, High Career Choice "MG and VG" category compared to men, not just the relative percentages.

Please see the (rather pathetic) figure below, in which the size of each box represents the size of the population and the total box represents the overall population of the MG:

If the population of the MG is relatively equally balanced between men and women, as shown in the first figure, then MG women are in a good place, with more women than men having the MG and VG chops to choose between a variety of lucrative careers.

But what if the world is actually more like the second figure, in which MG men outnumber MG women? Other research suggests that there is unequal representation of the sexes in the population of the MG, so I take this as a more likely scenario. In this case, even if a higher percentage of women are MG and VG compared to men, the actual number of women in the category may be the same, or even lower.

So it is quite possible that the world has a similar number of men and women who are MG/VG and have wide career choice, plus a small number of MG-only women and a large number of MG-only men. I'm not sure that this is compatible with the statement that "the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts" when you are looking at women and men as groups, and I think that's the level where this discussion occurs.