"Men talking about mathematical proofs, about a South Park episode on evolution, about their latest mountain-climbing adventures.
"The lab is like visiting a fraternity,""
This is seriously disgusting. Imagine an article when a male journalist writes upon visiting some research faculty that "it is like visiting a sorority".
I imagine there would be a serious torrent of anger from the defenders of whatever rights. That journalist will be immediately labeled as a biased chauvinist.
However, when a woman visits a lab and tells us that it is like visiting a fraternity, it's somehow okay. Obviously there is something discrediting in climbing or watching the (award winning) South Park.
To clarify: I (as many and many Hacker News readers) am male and happen to work in mostly male environment, but it does not feel like a fraternity. In fact, it feels like a place where grown-up intelligent people do creative work. And yes, we occassionally do discuss climbing and TV series. And no, there is nothing wrong about that.
What's odd is the implication that if you went to a sorority (or some other all, or mostly, women enclave) women would not be taking about mathematical proofs, or a South Park episode on evolution, or about their latest mountain-climbing adventures.
It sounded like pretty engaging conversation. I had a lower opinion of fraternities, but if those are the topics of discussion, well then, society will get somewhere.
In seriousness, I think it is right to poke fun at this statement because - the way events are portrayed in the article - this is simple sexism. The person in question seems to be annoyed by the lab simply because there are male members in it.
I read it less like she was correlating those conversations to a frat as much as she was making an (albeit poorly described) observation about who was in the lab. I'm not sure if she was trying to be humorous, but it would be silly to assume a sorority or female-heavy research facility would be doing anything different.
One explanation of why women might publish less than men do is, as you might expect, completely ignored by the article: discrimination.
Consider a simple model in which, to become a professor, you must have at least 10 pts - you get 1 pt from a first-author publication and half a point from a second-author publication. Suppose further that the process is biased and women get 2 points simply for being a woman.
In such a model, you'd expect women to have about 2 fewer first-author or 4 fewer second-author (or some linear combination) publications than men.
I.e., women might have fewer publications because discrimination in their favor allows them to publish less to achieve the same position.
This is the straightforward economics explanation, although of course academic employment is hardly the epitome of an efficient market.
You are correct, this could also be entirely a compositional effect. I.e., women in academia might also be be on average younger than men, and hence have fewer publications.
There are a lot of possible explanations. Ultimately we need data on the authors as well as the publications to know what's really going on.
The thing that jumps out at me as a question from this data is why some sub-topics/specialties of a subject have such a huge range? Some things make sense. Lots of women write papers on Sociology/Gender, and this doesn't shock me in the least since I think more women consider gender issues over men who have the privilege of not needing to think about it (which is part of the problem). Culturally, we push women to studying things that are family, children and fertility related as well (and push men away from them)- and these are present in the numbers.
Yet under Law, you've got only 8% of papers on Antitrust by women, but 34.6% on legal oversight and regulation. It clear isn't that there are no women in law, but something has influenced them to study different things in the larger subject of law.
Similarly- Mycology has 57.1% of the papers on Yeast with authorship, but 7.7% on Zygospores. What makes yeast more equitable than zygospores? Again, it isn't that women aren't in mycology, but for some reason are studying different things it seems.
And for mathematics; 24.3% for Lie Algebras, and 4.5% for Oscillation Criteria. I honestly don't know what either of those are, but they don't appear to be particularly gendered sub-topics/specialities in math. I understand that culturally we push young women away from some subjects, but I've never heard someone intone that a woman shouldn't do oscillation criteria or automorphic forms in math, or encourage algebraic groups instead?
(Numbers above looking at first author)
Clearly, there is a gap. This is a problem. I'd just like to know more about the causation on more of the stranger gaps.
Powerful tangent, stolen from
Dan Knoepfle posting at Quora:
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What's in a Surname? The Effects of Surname Initials on Academic Success, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(1), Winter 2006, 175-188
(available here: http://www.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/JEP2006.pdf)
In short, they find that it's better to have a name starting with a letter early in the alphabet, and that authors with names starting with letters late in the alphabet are less likely to collaborate with more than one other person (and end up in the et alia part of the citation).
==============
When I was a kid, I new a friend's dad who spoke of the important of marrying well: into a higher position in the alphabet. Miss Z~~~~~ would have no trouble improving her lot in life.
"The lab is like visiting a fraternity,""
This is seriously disgusting. Imagine an article when a male journalist writes upon visiting some research faculty that "it is like visiting a sorority". I imagine there would be a serious torrent of anger from the defenders of whatever rights. That journalist will be immediately labeled as a biased chauvinist.
However, when a woman visits a lab and tells us that it is like visiting a fraternity, it's somehow okay. Obviously there is something discrediting in climbing or watching the (award winning) South Park.
To clarify: I (as many and many Hacker News readers) am male and happen to work in mostly male environment, but it does not feel like a fraternity. In fact, it feels like a place where grown-up intelligent people do creative work. And yes, we occassionally do discuss climbing and TV series. And no, there is nothing wrong about that.