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The freedom to say ‘no’

Math-precocious men were much more likely to go into engineering or physical sciences than women. Math-precocious women, by contrast, were more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Both sexes scored high on the math SAT, and the data showed the women weren’t discouraged from certain career paths.

The survey data showed a notable disparity on one point: That men, relative to women, prefer to work with inorganic materials; women, in general, prefer to work with organic or living things. This gender disparity was apparent very early in life, and it continued to hold steady over the course of the participants’ careers.

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.

The passage in bold gives some general credence to the old stereotype that men would rather work with things and women with people. While studies like this might go against some preconceived notions about how things should be an important point still holds true, that women should have the same opportunities and choices as men. The most counter intuitive finding was that women in countries where there is not as many options for their career paths, i.e. less economic opportunity in less stable economies in countries like Russia and Thailand women in professional level physics runs as high as 35%, while in countries like the U.S. and Norway women make up around 5% of professional physicists.

postcard from u know where

Another look at our faulty design, The human brain is a less-than-perfect device. A new book explains how our minds work … and sometimes don’t.

According to Marcus, while we once we used our brains simply to stay alive and procreate, the modern world and its technological advances have forced evolution to keep up by adapting ancient skills for modern uses–in effect simply placing our relatively new frontal lobes (the home of memory, language, speech and error recognition) on top of our more ancient hindbrain (in charge of survival, breathing, instinct and emotion.) It is Marcus’s hypothesis that evolution has resulted in a series of “good enough” but not ideal adaptations that allow us to be smart enough to invent quantum physics but not clever enough to remember where we put our wallet from one day to the next or to change our minds in the face of overwhelming evidence that our beliefs are wrong. “Evolution is conservative and stingy,” Marcus tells NEWSWEEK. “It uses what it has. It doesn’t start over–as a statistical matter, something is much more likely to evolve if it involves tinkering.”

A kluge (rhymes with “huge”) is defined as a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. Marcus’s finest example is the contraption used by the Apollo 13 astronauts to get home after their CO2 filters began to fail–using a plastic bag, cardboard box, some duct tape and a sock, they were able to cobble together a new filter and get home safely. Despite the fact that it worked, NASA has never been tempted to incorporate that design into its space projects.

In his attempt to define the “klugey-ness” of the human mind, Marcus would have us look no further than our memories, which he describes as “the mother of all kluges.” Unlike computers, we cannot readily recollect all that we’ve remembered. Turns out, our memory is driven by cues. We need hints and context to remember where we put our purse (”Retrace your steps”).

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