By Your Longtime Reader (aka A Longtime Reader)
wednesday, august 20, 2025 at 1:17:00 p.m. edt
Adam Eschelman’s article in the SF chronicle about women in stem fields is full of lies—suffused with the same kind of faux cheerfulness and optimism found in stories about “closing the gap” between White and black academic performance in education. The fact is that there is a significant difference between the sexes in mathematical abilities on average (an important qualification!) that has long been documented by standardized tests, most notably the venerable SAT, a test first begun in 1926.
In 1995 in response to declining SAT scores, the College Board began what was to become a series of “dumbing down” changes to the test [e.g., eliminating the analogies section], a change that was mirrored in its very name, which evolved from Scholastic Aptitude Test until 1993, to Scholastic Assessment Test (briefly), and now means literally nothing at all, since “SAT” as an acronym goes undefined. For a recent critique see, “The College Board is Dumbing Down Its SAT Test Again—Doing No One Any Favors,” the New York Post, march 7, 2024 by Wai Wah Chin (note the name).
It doesn’t matter; the “gap” between the sexes in mathematical abilities—on average--remains intractable, something apparently wired into the species. Of course colleges and other institutions can mask this fact, as with racial differences, through affirmative action. Thus MIT has been admitting female students with lower SAT scores than males, and in 2006 had an acceptance rate of girls more than double than that of boys (27% versus 12%) See https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/uhoh/.
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3 comments:
Glad I skipped it.
--GRA
For more information, see Doreen Kimura, “Sex Differences in the Brain” in Scientific American Sept. 1992 and her book Sex and Cognition (MIT Press, 1999). Kimura (1933-2013) was a professor of psychology at the U. of Western Ontario--where one of her colleagues was J. Philippe Rushton. It is not surprising, considering her research interests, that she was also the founding president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.
Yeah. And college enrollment getting feminized, now about 60% female overall, in general, well, you see where this is going. (https://educationalpolicy.org/hello-world/). If your school's got a strong Nursing program, it can get to 70%+.
So the next illogical step is "we must have 60% females on STEM faculty". Yeah, and like a Cabinet that looks like America, i.e., it looks like a mess.
Biology seems like it's a different world than math, physics, chemistry, computers, etc. I'm not sure why. It just seems not as STEMmy, at least not at the freshman level.
I only remember 1 female prof from when I was in grad school. She was excellent! An older Taiwanese woman who wrote everything she said on the chalkboard in very neat cursive. And no politics at all on her office door, very much unlike the one black prof and the one openly gay prof.
So there! I'm not sexist or racist! Not that Mr. Eschelman reads Nicholas Stix Uncensored. But if you're there, Adam, I'll add that there were several Jewish profs on the faculty and they were pretty good, too.
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