AWE + SUM is another summer science program for girls, at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, described in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The program, sponsored by the American Association of University Women and the Mathematical Association of America, is called AWE + SUM: Attend
It seems they had fun. And we need to encourage girls/women into math and science.
It has been my experience that people will recruit themselves if the lower schools do their job of outlining career options.
Calculus seems unlikely as a method for figuring out frequencies. But it would depend on exactly what they were doing.
“Summers didn’t come anywhere close to saying “women may lack the innate ability to succeed in science.””
he said we should look into it. To a room full of accomplished, women scientists, as their boss and administrator in charge of hiring. nice guy.
Yes, but the “it” that he said should be investigated was NOT that “women may lack the innate ability to succeed in science.” He noted, for example, social constraints that may inhibit their success, and on the “innate” front he merely pointed to the evidence that the distribution of certain abilities related to math etc. was not equal between men and women, that there were disproportionate numbers of men at both the bottom and top of the curve.
“on the “innate” front he merely pointed to the evidence that the distribution of certain abilities related to math etc. was not equal between men and women, that there were disproportionate numbers of men at both the bottom and top of the curve.”
In other words, he pointed to innate differences in ability.
Why is it alright in some cases to assume that statistical attributes apply to all members of a group (skin pigmentation) and not alright to do the same in others (gender)?
Frankly, one is a valid as the other, which is to say only as valid as the sampling and measurement. Not all blacks are criminals; not all men are good with maps; not all women are poor with math.
Making assumptions about an individual based on statistical averages of a group is sloppy logic, as well as what is know as ‘discrimination’.
Why do liberals not value the individual, but only value the herd (group)? I, for one, reject the idea that my only value lies in what I can contribute statistically to the group.
I suspect that, if the truth were known, many liberals are afraid to be alone in a room, for fear that there will be no one there.
What Summers said can be supported by any amount of data. He even gave the caveat that social pressures must be factored into the data.
As John pointed out, Summers said there are more men than women at the bottom and top of the curve, so if anything he said that men lack the ability to succeed in science, and women lack the ability to be overachievers in science.
Nothing even mildly controversial in that, and Robin Wilson was way off the mark.
Dom
“Nothing even mildly controversial in that”
i’d say its pretty idiotic to say in front of a bunch of women overachievers.
Actus,
from your comments above it appears you don’t object to what Summers said, just to whom he said it.
The statement “women may lack the innate ability to succeed in science” is a lot more categorical than what Summers said.
I suspect Actus is saying Summers’s statement was “idiotic” because the counter-evidence was right in front of him — he said “no woman can do high-level science” while looking at a crowd of high-level female scientists.
Except that he didn’t say “no woman can do high-level science”. What he said was closer to “the reasons behind the disparity between the number of women doing high-level science and the number of men doing high-level science may be, in part, biological.” A much less categorical assertion.
Steven has this exactly right, and, as Scott says, even actus seems to agree — except that he appears to think that unappealing evidence shouldn’t be mentioned in public.
In any event, to say that the explanation of why women are not proportionally represented at the very highest levels of math and science may contain a biological component is not all the same thing as saying, as Robin Wilson claimed, that “women may lack the innate ability to succeed in science.”
“What he said was closer to “the reasons behind the disparity between the number of women doing high-level science and the number of men doing high-level science may be, in part, biological.” A much less categorical assertion.”
And he said this as an administrator of an university where overachieving women feel he has not done enough to close the gap. And people are surprised that this started a row.
But then she seems to remember something that someone — a teacher, a counselor, her parents — has told her. “The boys make our self-esteem go down.”
I wish those lesbian recruiters would shut up.
From the article:
“Many girls see these fields as not girl-friendly, or something for computer nerds who don’t have any friends and aren’t popular,” says Suzanne G. Nissen, an AAUW volunteer and Westminster alumnae who helped coordinate the program. “We want to make sure girls see these fields as a viable option.”
Whereas everyone knows that all the math-and-science-whiz boys are enormously popular, yes? There’s no surer route to being a popular dude than chairing the high school math team.
(Aside: I do hope that the Chronicle of Higher Education didn’t actually call Ms. Nissen a Westminster “alumnae.” But maybe I should just shut up now: if there’s anyone less popular than a computer nerd, it’s probably a grammar nerd. Unless he’s a boy, of course.)
I’m with K on the improbability of using calculus to determine vibration frequencies for wind chimes, incidentally. It’s unclear exactly what the students were doing, but if they were using material for which the tuned pitch was a function of the length of an open tube, there’d be no calculus involved, any more than there is in determining what pitch you get when a given violin string at a set tension is stopped at various fractions of its length.
Maybe “calculus” is just Chronicle-speak for “really daunting math”? (Daunting for the writer, at least.)
I’m guessing the person saw trig functions, and figured that was calculus.
As for the “not being socially acceptable”, yes — there are plenty of guys who stay away from geekifying due to the low social status of geeks… but it’s another one of those “statistical” things. There are a lot more guys than girls willing to forgo conventional popularity. I happened to do the numbers, and realized that the best way to get guys was to go to the market with the least competition ;) (interestingly, my Ma did the same thing. She saw Clemson (in 1970) had a 7-to-1 male-to-female ratio, and that engineers did pretty well for themselves, and convinced her parents to let her go to Clemson because it had a good nursing program. Yep, she left with her BA and her MRS with an EE)
Anyway, I don’t see what’s so bad about geeks. They were the most fun people around — you got to blow up stuff and try weird experiments, as opposed to talking about makeup and cute teen boys.