Rod Liddle in The Times - women not studying Physics because they aren't very good at it?

[SeaRabbit]

In today's Times Rod 'provocative' Liddle wrote:

...my contention that the minuscule number of women studying physics at degree level is not because of conditioning or sexism, but because a much smaller proportion of women are adept at the subject, despite 30 years of expensive programmes to redress the balance. Is that misogyny on my part? What if it’s true?

I have seen some statistics that in some countries there is a far higher proportion of women in those studying STEM subjects. It was in a book I got out of the library so I can't send him the details. Has anyone got anything I can link to? I don't know what the proportion of those studying physics as opposed to STEM in general is, so if the is anything on physics in particular it would be helpful.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stella-creasy-listen-sweetie-i-love-women-and-youve-got-it-all-wrong-about-misogyny-0tcffnc0c?shareToken=838251ba2a29b47a73917d04d99d93d0

[Copyright materiel removed by MNHQ]

Physics PhD here. Articles like this make me see red. But it's not easy.

I have been variously told over the years that girls aren't good at it, I should get a job instead of wanting to research and my Prof at uni told me and other girls that we'd never amount to much. Most of us went on to get postgrad degrees so stuff him and his attitude. I do STEM Ambassador work in schools to show it can be done and with children and a life. Please ignore the male idiots and reinforce that girls can do what they want.

I don’t know if girls’ schools really do better with STEM subjects.
Anecdotal but comparing numbers of girls doing Physics at the school I taught in (large school, mixed) and the local small girls’ grammar, there wasn’t much difference and results were about as differentiated as you would expect between selective and non selective. (It seemed that the grammar only let girls do Physics A level if they had achieved A/A* at GCSE, whereas we stipulated B/BB. We did achieve some top grades at A level.)

www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2008/12/23/why-are-there-so-few-female-chess-grandmasters/

I remember reading this a while ago. It's about chess, and the predominance of men, and the question of whether this is evidence of innate male superiority.

The answer is no.

It's a very elegant statistical analysis that demonstrates it is in fact all down to participation rates. You can prove, with mathematics, that variance is a result of sample size.

The same principles can easily be applied to STEM subjects. If you discourage a sex cohort from participation at every life stage, you will of course end up with a huge sex imbalance.

If you have an observation, Liddle, that has two competing explanations: nature/nurture, the intellectually honest thing to do is to test them robustly.

"We've spent some money on encouraging girls but it didn't work so they're obviously just not as good" doesn't meet the standard of a robust test.

Kick the tyres properly, man.

So why do all girls' schools have such great track records of girls studying STEM subjects at A level, and doing so well?

And why is the intake on STEM careers completely conditional on what country you live?

There are countries that think women can't drive without damaging themselves, I think we've all mostly disproved this. Voting was beyond women too in literally every country but we'll all managed to avoid the hysteria that comes with women voting. It's almost like our brains are fully functional like men's brains.

Anyone who spends 10 seconds using a bit of critical thinking can work it out. Maybe men aren't very good at it?

This is very close to my heart. I work in IT, most of my family are in STEM at some level and elder DD is doing maths and physics at uni. I was among the top marks for physics at school putting many boys to shame and lots of girls were up there as well.

The really rough part sets in partly at uni and extremely in work itself. Women are a minority which itself leads to the crass comments in this article. Its a SELF PERPETUAL argument that puts more girls off. Workplace 'banter', representation in higher paid roles, IT industry not as tuned into flexible work hours and so on, usual sexism and misogyny in male dominated environments and I've seen lots of women leave to be hairdressers etc. Problems are deep rooted but progress is slowly being made.

Isn't Rod a psychologist or psychiatrist? But he doesnt recognise socialisation as a driving force in behaviour?

Rod should have read the Institute of Physics report into this before spouting off ill-informed opinions.

www.iop.org/education/teacher/support/girls_physics/file_58196.pdf

He's right about hate crime and it not being possible, or desirable, to police peoples thoughts.

He raises an interesting point about women and physics, in his usual provocative way.

Maybe women's lack of take up in STEM might be partly to do with sex differences which may have some biological basis and not be entirely be socialisation. Maybe?

There being a biological basis for some differences between sexes around interests and behaviours (on average, and not descriptive of sex aka the BACP!) seems plausible to me given our different biological functions.

For example: wouldn't the huge differences in male vs female violent and sex crimes be viewed as having a biological basis as well as a socialistion?

It seems that socialisation follows a biological basis.

e.g.:

On average certain behaviours are noted to be observed in males vs females.
These behaviours then becomes associated with that sex.
Children of that sex are then expected to perform those behaviours, which is damaging to those who do not fit into this expectation and limits choices for both sexes.

All the arguments for women not progressing in STEM could have been used in Law and medicine 70 years ago: sexism, expectations, harassment etc and yet women have pursued careers in these fields, but not STEM. It seems reasonable therefore to have a conversation about that considering all viewpoints, without resorting to the only accpetable viewpoint of 'it's sexism and socialisation and that is all.'

At least that is the only thing you are allowed to say.

I think this fear that if we admit there may be biological differences in behaviour and preferences, we will be saying and therefore women can't and shouldn't do these subjects. Or if girls get to even hear the idea that they be less interested in STEM, it will put off those girls who might want to go into it so we must hide this fact and never say it out loud, even as part of a debate.

I think we need to be open in debate and explain what things do mean and don't mean, and not insist on only one explanation being acceptable.

A girl is 2.5 times more likely to study Physics A-level if she went to a girls school.

I imagine if someone said to Rod Liddle ‘boys are absolutely rubbish at GCSEs compared to girls, girls outperform them in every single subject bar maths (and this year Physics), maybe boys just aren’t that clever’ he’d wang on about the feminisation of education and how there aren’t enough male primary teachers, schools play to female strengths of sitting down quietly and nice handwriting and so on.

And he’d probably have a point. But when it’s girls, it’s just that boys are superior.

If you look at statistics without any context, you can jump to all sorts of conclusions. Far more women than men now go to uni - does that mean women are more intelligent? Far more women than men study languages and humanities - shouldn’t therefore jobs that need verbal skills, like journalism, diplomacy, politics, be dominated by women? Incidentally law and medical degrees are now dominated by women. Maybe we should leave men to their little niche of physics and engineering, otherwise they’ll be outnumbered everywhere.

Oh my gosh baby crack a book.

Speculation about nature Vs nurture is fine, but if you fail to actually read and evaluate the various studies that actually aim to test these theories then it's just empty pontification and noise.

There are answers to your question already out there. You don't need to endlessly hypothesise whilst covering your ears and shouting lalala as the evidence is presented. Go and satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Maybe start with the link I posted.

The stats in the Institute of Physics report show that numbers of girls taking physics at all girls schools shows a slight increase on co ed schools : from 1.8% to 4.3%.

What would that suggest then?

That expectations do have small impact on take up of STEM, but that would seem to also be other factors given that the take up is still tiny and hugely discrepant from that of boys, and not in line with other subjects and careers which girls previously also did not take.

It's this insistence that we must state the difference is only due to socialisation which appears reductive and simplistic when you look at the data.

It seems to me that this is another example of where some facts/ideas have been labelled under 'bigot' and 'not accpectble' by a liberal consensus.

It suggests, Baby that the presence of boys in the school can impact subject choice at A-level.

What it doesn’t suggest is that removing boys from the school is a complete cure, because obviously girls only spend a limited amount of time in school and there are still boys in the world outside.

There isn't "an insistance that we must state the difference is only due to socialisation" though.

There are facts. The discrepancy.
There are theories. nature/nurture.
And there are studies that TEST/DISPROVE these theories.

Your assumption that it can't be socialisation because of confirmation bias is lazy.

It doesn't matter what you think or what I think.

It matters what science can demonstrate, no? Your conclusions do not follow logically from the data.

If you were genuinely interested in getting to the truth you'd spend some time investigating. Not jumping to flawed conclusions.

How would you design a study to test nature Vs nurture? What do you think of those that have been designed so far? What are their flaws?

Goodness, is Rod Liddle still getting paid to write this sort of stuff? Journalistically he's on a par with Katie Hopkins.

I saw a TV advert yesterday for two children's physics/chemistry sets. One with a boy demonstrating, and one with a girl.

One was pink and it was the chemistry of cosmetics or somesuch.

It wasn't the one with the boy.

We send messages at every stage, every level of a girl's life. You can't counter a relentless stream of messaging with one singular action.
'oh, we put you in a girls school. That should do it'
'well we spent money on a stem program for girls. It didn't work'

If you don't have a decent grasp on the problem you can't possibly address it with a solution.

No need to resort to throwing insults there Barrack.

I actually have been reading on this area, which has moved my thinking on from the simplistic, everything is socialisation, mantra which I was getting on here.

This debate is about nature vs nurture, but with nurture being the only sanctioned debate on FWR.

I am vowing to myself not to spend my sunday exchanging articles on intrenet, so will link to just one which gives an overview of some sex differce research if anyone is interested
www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/sexual-personalities/201504/are-women-more-emotional-men

and highlight here one paragraph:

Indeed, the odds of men and women having evolved the exact same emotional psychology are basically zero. It would be nothing short of a Darwinian miracle for men and women to have evolved precisely identical emotional designs. The forces of selection acting on humans would have had to eliminate all previous sex differences in emotionality stemming from our lineage as mammals and primates, actively select against any and all sex-specific emotional adaptations developing during our hundreds of millennia as hunter-gatherers, and maintain a perfectly androgynous psychology of emotion in men and women post-Pleistocene epoch (Buss & Schmitt, 2011). For one to expect absolutely no sex differences in human emotion, one would have to believe in a god/godess-like creature, Androgyna, having actively intervened throughout all of human history to make sure men and women reproduce in ways that maintain precisely the same emotional psychology (and all the while mysteriously maintaining sex differences in physical traits such as strength and size, persistent patterns of hunting versus gathering and childrearing, pubertal timing and menopause, as well as, sex differences in reproductive variances and young male syndrome). As Vandermassen (2011) has noted, “that human males and females should have evolved to be psychologically identical, for example, is a theoretical impossibility, and, indeed, turns out to be untrue” (p. 733).

You're surprised to find misogynistic views being aired in The Times??

I have reported my post as I had quoted a lot of Liddle's article - but not all. Here's a link:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stella-creasy-listen-sweetie-i-love-women-and-youve-got-it-all-wrong-about-misogyny-0tcffnc0c?shareToken=838251ba2a29b47a73917d04d99d93d0

What insults were thrown baby? You are very vested in believing that socially observed differences have a biological explanation, I can see. And a reticence to investigate your own bias.

But you're on a thread with people who DO care to educate themselves on the ACTUAL science and whether it supports your ideas.

Your reasoning is flawed. That's not an insult. Noone has argued that there are NO sex differences so I didn't bother reading your refutation there, since it refutes something noone claimed.

The topic at hand is whether observed participation rates in stem are caused by nature or nurture.

I'm interested in evaluating the evidence for both positions. I'm sorry to say I'm less interested in your personal bias. But I'd suggest that you spend some time reading up on scientific method. It cuts out both your bias and mine and gets closer to the actual truth.

I don’t think women are less good at physics but I do think there’s less insanely single minded women willing to put their entire life into a single subject matter as there are men like that and there’s a lot of mythology around physics and physicists that make people feel like that is desirable and necessary in the field.

Hi ... can someone put up a share token to the full article? Really interesting stuff....

And chatted to someone last night whose daughter was the only girl in the whole year doing Physics A ... in a large London comprehensive! Truly shocking....

There were three girls in my physics a level class about of about 12. One in what I presume is a much larger cohort is pretty shocking.

Am much more WTF at the fact he said upskirting is harmless fun and what he said about women in newcastle than the physics stuff TBH.

And I have a degree in Physics.

What a total cunt he is.

Any man who thinks it should be legal (as it is currently) to take pictures up the skirts of women and girls including (as recently) a male teacher taking upskirt shots of girls in his class (no crime had been committed) is a total and utter cunt

And while cunts are of course lovely, also I like a good swear, and in this case, there's no other word in our standard laguage for him.

#He's known for this shit though isn't he? He hates women, gay people etc etc so it's hardly a shocker that he thinks women are stupid and men should be able to upskirt them whenever they feel like it.

"A girl is 2.5 times more likely to study Physics A-level if she went to a girls school."

Yes this.

IOP has detailed stats if anyone is interested (instittute of physics)