As a female, am I inherently bad at "top tier" maths/physics?

[mpresic]

I had Dr. Dorothy Maharam Stone teach me a course in Differential Equations given by the Mathematics Department. She is a prominent American Mathematician. (You can look her up) She was as good or better than any other teacher I had for Mathematics.

 

[meldraft]

I'm not sure why you quoted me? Your experience does not align with the research I linked to.

I wasn't quoting the links, just that sentence; my personal experience of women in science is that they are sometimes biased against women, including themselves :)

 

[jack476]

I can guarantee to you that I am (unfortunately) NOT trolling.I am genuinely curious about the supposed differences(I hear of them very frequently) regarding the male and female brain, especially when concerning scientific/mathematical skills. I also do not struggle in my maths/physics classes, at all. I do not feel inferior to any of my male classmates intellectually, I took my AS levels last year, receiving A*s in Maths,Further Maths and Physics,also a B in biology,which definitely interests me less. Regardless of this, I fear that if I decide to study mathematics/physics at university/higher levels, these supposed differences that make the female brain inferior, may hold me back intellectually.

Think of it this way. Any difference between the male and female brain would be a product of evolution, right?

It is true that there were slight differences in role between males and females as a result of sexual dimorphism. Men were taller and stronger and therefore more inclined to hunt, women were capable of nursing children and so spent more time watching after them. These were of course results of evolutionary pressure and sexual selection. So, what evolutionary pressures or sexual selection forces in prehistoric humans would have resulted in men being better at math? How would being able to write proofs improve a man's ability to club mammoths over the head? Where on Earth has anyone ever heard of programming and computer skills making a man more sexually appealing?

The fact is that there is no appreciable difference in natural ability in STEM-related disciplines between men and women because math, science, computing, etc are not natural activities and therefore would not have been a source of evolutionary pressure.

There are some specific cognitive differences, but they don't generalize. For instance, men consistently outperform women at spatial, visualization, and sound recognition tasks (which begs the question of why there are more women getting degrees in music and visual arts than men, if things are supposed to be solely down to biology), and women consistently have denser grey matter in the Brocca's areas (related to language processing). When you present different pictures and videos to male and female infants, boys are more likely to have their eyes drawn towards straight lines, geometric shapes, and "mechanical" motion, whereas girls are more likely to be drawn to look at disorganized "organic" movement and rounder, less well-defined shapes.

But in practice, those differences are very narrow and attempting to use them to make broad statements about social trends is ad hoc reasoning and begging the question. Any conclusive differences in mathematical ability, or with STEM skills in general, between men and women are insignificant because math is an activity that involves a huge range of cognitive processes that are based in areas throughout the entire brain, so any advantages in specific cognitive skills would not generalize to overall mathematical skill. It becomes even more of a moot point after you factor in the effect of neuroplasticity, the ways in which the brain changes with experience and training, because that makes it impossible to distinguish whether brain differences are due to differing experiences in education (which would be a social factor) or innate predisposition, and it also means that training could easily undo whatever innate differences may exist.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

Where on Earth has anyone ever heard of programming and computer skills making a man more sexually appealing?

Maybe that's where I went wrong. Someone should have told me sooner!

 

[radium]

You shouldn't base your decision to pursue physics on your gender as there are a ton of women today and in the past who are truly extraordinary physicists at the top of their field. For example, Lisa Randall is one of, if not the most cited theoretical physicists in the world. Vera Rubin was one of the first people to find convincing evidence of dark matter. Deborah Jin was one of the Reuters citation laureates this year predicting the winner of the Nobel prize.

One of the reasons you don't hear more about women in physics these days is they don't have the same political connections as men. This is likely the reason there hasn't been a female Nobel prize winner in over fifty years, even though there are many women who have done Nobel prize worthy work.

The academic environment in physics has really become a lot more supportive of women in the past fifteen years or so. There are both men and women who are really passionate about improving the situation. My department once had a reputation for being a very hostile environment for women, but I find it to be the exact opposite.