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I agree that we want talented individuals regardless of sex, and that an arbitrarily chosen threshold is unlikely to produce that result.nikkkom said:Why "more women in physics" is declared to be the improvement? What is the "now we have enough women" threshold? 30%? 50%? 80%?
My answer is: neither percentage is valid.
We need more _talented individuals_ in physics. I couldn't care less what sex are they.
However, that doesn't preclude a non-arbitrary threshold. Instead, we can gather some data. First, what is the fraction of women in the relevant population? Second, how is the relevant talent distributed between the two sexes? Given this data, it's easy to determine what the percentage would be if selection were based completely on innate talent without regard to sex; and if the percentage of women in physics is less than that we are losing some talented individuals.
Although there are some methodological challenges in acquiring and evaluating the necessary data, the balance of the available evidence supports the conclusion that women are in fact underrepresented and therefore that there is a loss of talented individuals.
Of course what to do about it is a different question. It is quite possible that little can be done at the university admissions level because so much talent loss has already happened, at the elementary and junior high school level. An anecdote: My first-year algebra class when I was 14 had a 1:1 ratio of boys and girls, reflecting the overall composition of the student body. Three years later, precalculus had one girl, and next year's AP calculus offering had none - and remember, we're following the same cohort through five years at a moderately elite private high school.