Replacing capable men with less qualified women decreases innovation.

Only if, of course, the woman is truly less capable.

But, we all know that currently all kinds of business, science, and governmental positions are filled through the actions of Utopian meritocratic visionaries who are incapable of seeing things in terms of sex and race.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Who are these capable women being discriminated against? No one can say. All the discrimination is, as Rolison puts it,  "unconscious biases and beliefs, which are tied to culturally embedded gender and racial schemas." In other words, we have a crime, but no victim.

Science is certainly more meritocratic than business or government. While I oppose quotas at, say, the DMV, the effects there are at least inconsequential. Science and engineering are too important to politicize in the manner Rolison et al. are advocating, and given that there are inate cognitive differences between men and women, doing so won't produce the results they seek anyway.

There is one very major problem with the study that is driving this movement, and that is that the study was done by almost all women.  Economists have picked up on this as possibly skewing the study with bias.  And it seems that as scientists, they should have put their personal feelings aside in favor of a neutral study.

This is the freakonomics link; you can follow that to the Posner blog on this as well.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/women-in-science/?scp=1-b&sq=women+scientists&a mp;st=nyt

and there's no real question that women can and have succeeded in administrative roles.

Especially in the role of the sexy secretary.  Those cute little darlins in the typing pool sure keep the place humming.
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I know what you meant...I'm just riffing on ya.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Actually, there is one recent discovery that might be attributable specifically to the scientist being a woman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/science/01duck.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=b858fdbe9adc92 bf&ex=1179633600

Asians do have higher average IQ's, this is well established. On the SAT Asian girls score markedly higher at math than white girls, but only slightly lower than white boys.

Also Barres is a lunatic. But I digress.

Asians do have higher average IQ's, this is well established. On the SAT Asian girls score markedly higher at math than white girls, but only slightly lower than white boys.

Time traveling Lizard Men from the 5th Dimension do have higher IQs.  On the SAT, Lizard Men scored higher in math than white girls, but only slightly lower than white boys.

Zombie Einstein clones do have higher IQs.  On the SAT, the Einsteins  scored higher in math than white girls, but only slightly lower than white boys.

Philosophic Ceramicists from Alpha Centauri do have higher IQs.  On the SAT, Philosophic Ceramicists scored higher in math than white girls, but only slightly lower than white boys.

And the lesson for today?

Ain't nobody as smart as a white boy.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

I fine your anti-saurian bigotry disgusting.

I fine your anti-saurian bigotry disgusting.

I'm sorry for your disgust.  But remember...reality is biased.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

And everybody knows the SATs are an unbiased, finely tuned and completely accurate measure of intelligence...whatever the heck that is.

SAT scores reflect the differences in intelligence (the old SAT use to have a strong correlation with IQ, the newer one not as much). Given that girls can't do as well as boys on the simple math required for the SAT, it shouldn't be surprising they avoid more difficult math in college.

I had to search pretty hard to find an actual graph of the distributions of SAT scores...unfortunately, it's not of the population at large, but rather of an educated subset, those students who took general chemistry at some unnamed school.  (I found a lot of pages that said "assume that SAT scores form a normal curve" but I'd rather not be the ass.)

The interesting thing about it is that the low side forms a nice bell curve, but the high side is far from bell-shaped.  You can jump to your own conclusions there, but the one that I jump to is that high SAT scores are based to a significant degree on training rather than innate ability.  If it was a case of innate ability, we'd see a normal curve, just shifted to the high side due to selection bias.

Here's a percentile ranking table which shows that an extremely high percentage of test-takers got 800 on the math 2 test, and the whole top tier is very flat.  Once again, that's a result that is consistent with training rather than innate ability, but raw numbers would be more helpful.

The GRE math curve is remarkable in that it lifts on the high side, so that there are more people with perfect scores than with 90% scores.  That definitely indicates a training effect at the high end.  In contrast, the vocabulary curve is a classic bell shape at both ends.  It's too late to search out the data, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

SAT 2 takers are those that have taken "college-preparatory mathematics for more than three years, including two years of algebra, one year of geometry, and elementary functions (precalculus) and/or trigonometry."  As I noted above, the SAT has been changed.

From having attended two high schools, one in Texas and another in New York, as a teenager, I would say that standards in subjects vary radically throughout the nation. And within each of the schools, standards again varied depending on whether one was in a honors class or not. So even though there might be class requirements to taking the SATs, it doesn't mean that students are being taught on the same level of excellence throughout.  

For instance, my math class in Texas was taught by a coach who was filling in his required number of classes while his main interest was football (he spent most of the period reading straight out of the algebra textbook to us).  However, English in my high school in Texas was vastly better than most of my English classes in New York because New York, at that time, no longer required the teaching of grammar after 8th grade.  

Another major difference between the schools was the attitude towards college.  The Texas high school didn't place as much emphasis on college placement whereas the one in New York did. It seemed that everyone in NY started thinking about college placement from 9th grade onward, from advisors to teachers to the students.  Most of my friends in New York automatically took the Princeton prep courses...and these weren't rich kids by any means.  But there was an understood feeling by the NY students themselves that this was necessary to compete on a national level for entrance to colleges.

Asians do have higher average IQ's, this is well established.

If IQs were everything in life, I doubt that I would have been born to a country split in half and that has now spent a great deal of its national resources on propping up a border and that is dependent on a bunch of American soldiers.

Or to give another example, I can talk about IQs ad nauseum, but my employer is more interested in how well I execute certain tasks rather than my IQ score.  

On the SAT Asian girls score markedly higher at math than white girls, but only slightly lower than white boys.

By the SATs, I would assume you are talking about those tested in the U.S., which would mean that a good amount of the Asian girls are actually Asian-American, or American girls....whatever you want to call them.  But, regardless, in that case, it's not a test where scores are showing some of the variances that culture and might be accounting for in testing across different nations and the two genders.

I'd like to kick in more of my two cents on this topic.

If there is some proof that nurture is a part of how well people perform in research in the sciences and the maths, shouldn't that be considered?

There is a tendency with IQ tests where it nicely correlates to what many people want to believe in terms of race and genders. However, what IQ tests cannot do is explain why IQ might not be everything.

I have a friend who taught for a couple of years in a university in France, and he said that one of the things that many of the professors there would discuss with him is this ability they saw in Americans to innovate new ways of solving problems.  It was a trait that they saw as being very different from what the French teach their students and they asked him how this was taught in America.  He said he didn't really know but that it was a cultural attitude.  

On the flip side, I have a sibling who leans towards Pax Americana and has a slightly self-loathing relationship with herself as a Korean.  Her big thing is how Koreans are unable to be creative because they are taught to be rote robots.  (I don't think she's up to date on the recent new wave of Korean films.)

Perception can mean a great deal in how people perceive these issues.

Perception can mean a great deal in how people perceive these issues.

Sorry, tautology there.

I guess I just mean that one should consider how much perception colors one's ideas about race and gender, whether for the positive or the negative.

I don't think IQ is everything (and I agree with you re: creativity). But it, and the difference in math ability between males and females, is certainly relevant to explaining why the science and engineering fields look like they do, and is reason enough to resist the sort of drastic measures being proposed to "fix" unspecifiable "discrimination".

I once heard one of my former committee members say a lot of these Asian grad students have very good recall of facts and the ability to memorize tons of information but many have problems thinking for themselves. Of course, this is a major problem in grad school because in the "real world" memorizing your way to the top or always agreeing with the professor is not going to get you a job or make your company come out with that new invention quickly.

Yeah, this is one reason that I'm a little skeptical about things like NCLB and holding up test scores (and America's relatively low ones) as some sort of standard for how good or bad an education system is.  Let's take the GREs, for example.  I was talking with my program's grad director the other day about admissions and so on, and he made clear that GRE scores really aren't a very good indicator of how someone will do in grad school (obviously, he would know - he knows the scores of people they let in, and he keeps track of everyone's GPA because that's in part how they determine who gets special funding, etc.).  They're useful in the sense of serving as a minimum cut off point - i.e. if you can't get your score above a 1100 or a 1200 or so you probably won't be able to hack it - but there are plenty of people with high GRE scores that still do poorly, and plenty of people with relatively low GRE scores that often do quite well.  

Tests are good measures of how well you can do fast reasoning, how well you can follow directions, and how good you are at rote memorization, but they're very poor for measuring work ethic, or for measuring how a person handles completing long-term, complex tasks, and they're awful for identifying creativity (indeed, that's practically discouraged).  In today's world, when you can look practically any formula up on the Internet whenever you want, rote memorization is much less important than it used to be, and as jobs increasingly allow people to work from home and expect people to do more high productivity, self-directed work (i.e. think working at Google or W.L. Gore ("new economy") vs. being a corporate drone ("old economy")) it's much more important for people to have the kinds of skills that aren't measured by tests (work ethic, creativity) than to have the kinds of skills that are measured by the tests (although fast reasoning skills and the ability to read and follow directions certainly are still important - they're just not as important).

The standard GRE only tests for three things:

1. Vocabulary skills
   
2. Math skills
   
3. Logic

None of these things are really related to what one will be doing in grad school which in my experience involved writing reams of papers, talking obscure literary theory speak, and trying to figure out the departmental politics.

The subject GRE is supposed to be more useful, but I found it to be erratic in my topic, English, given that unversities across the nation teach different classes in their respective English departments.  For instance, I only had to study two Shakespeare plays as a college student but the English GRE had at least ten questions specifically on Shakespeare (which is what happens when one of the advisors for the subject test is a Shakespearean scholar).  Yet, it had no questions on early American lit, which is the area I planned on studying in grad school.  

But what the subject GRE really failed at identifying and what one really needs for grad school: the sheer ability to endure years of almost no money in the bank account, years of debt, and living in the library during most of one's waking hours.

It doesn't even really do logic anymore - they got rid of that section and replaced it with a writing sample (which is, I suppose, also designed to test your logic skills, but if so I found it somewhat lacking in that department).

All the writing sample tests is how many words you can put down on paper in a given time.  Scores are directly proportional to the length of the essay.

Keep that in mind if you have to take the GRE.

In what way?  I mean, do they award more points for succinctness or for wordiness?

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

I'm basing my conclusion in research done on the SATs, which I though were sold by the same company...I was wrong.  But grades on the SAT essay tests were accurately graded at from across the room by a skeptical researcher, who showed that they were graded almost purely on length rather than content.

Ok, but that doesn't answer the question.  Do you get more points for a longer essay or a shorter one?

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

Longer is better.  Pass it on.

I am not sure but I think it is a numerical and cultural difference. The population of India and China is in the billions. They may have the same percentage of "really bright people" but numerically there are more. Thus they get sent abroad and these are generally the few we see since the ones living in horrible poverty don't come to the US on tourist visas.

If it really was just pure numbers, we'd still see similar male/female ratios among those groups, wouldn't we?  For example, amongst my Chinese coworkers, the male/female ratio is maybe 7-to-3.  Amongst the Americans, it's maybe 20-to-1.

My suspicion (and I can't really confirm it with anything other than anecdotes, so I won't try) is that Asian cultures don't demote math and science as valid career choices for women as much as they do here in the US.

One co-worker was talking the other day quite casually about how their parents would wake them up every morning at 4am to study. Rote memorization and insane competition in school. All day, every day.

If that is the reason for a higher percentage of asian women in math and science, then it's being accomplished by forcing women into traditionally male learning methods -- exactly the opposite of what expanding Title IX seeks to accomplish.

I once heard one of my former committee members say a lot of these Asian grad students have very good recall of facts and the ability to memorize tons of information but many have problems thinking for themselves. Of course, this is a major problem in grad school because in the "real world" memorizing your way to the top or always agreeing with the professor is not going to get you a job or make your company come out with that new invention quickly.

Depends on which real world one is going to.  To a good degree, I think education reflects the realities of cultures.

In many Asian countries where cultures are much more hierarchical, the way to do well in a career is by respecting the status quo, conforming to the societal rules, getting along with everyone regardless (i.e. always saving the other person's face such as by agreeing with the professor no matter what), and climbing the ladder in a very conventional manner.

It's because they have left that culture that their values and the way they learn is so out of whack.

Sure, but doesn't that stunt the scientific growth of those countries? If all the grad students, researchers and post-docs just do what some professor says without question or independent thinking? Where is the innovation coming from?

Imagine what they could do if they were encouraged to developed the same critical thinking skills and be more aggressive.

I am not sure.  It's a good question.

Although I would also note that Korean scientists strike me as being very ambitious.  And furthermore, they are not limited as much in what they can research as the American scientists are in certain areas, notably cloning and stem cell research (although cloning is a bit of an embarrassment for them given the scandal over the fake clone).  

It's hard for me to answer, not working in the science field at all.  But one of the things that strike me about the sciences is how collaborative it is.  And perhaps much of the stimulus for the sciences comes as much from that as being personally aggressive.

I'd be curious to hear about the research model from someone who is a scientist and what the dynamics are like.

in the "real world" memorizing your way to the top or always agreeing with the professor is not going to get you a job

You don't have much experience in the "real world," do you?