Politically incorrect musings?
mikewashere said:
Being a total noob, I am risking any future reputation i might have here by starting a topic as my first post. So I'm ready for yall.
I stress that I do not neccessarily believe this as stated, but some cognitive scientists who worry about average sex differences would argue that human females,
on average, allegedly have poorer spatial visualization skills than human males,
on average. If you believe this, and if you also believe that spatial visualization skills are important in many subjects in engineering, this might explain your observation. Have you visited your local architecture school? That would be another subject where I would expect that, if our cognitive scientist friends are correct, you might see females under-represented.
Again, I stress that I don't neccessarily believe this as stated, but some cognitive scientists have suggested that, across species, males
as a group tend to be more diverse that females
as a group in various metrics, for fundamental reasons related to some subtleties in how natural selection operates. Indeed, they say, as group, men vary more in height, "general intelligence", whatever, than do women. In the sense of standard deviation. So that if they are right, even if the mean GRE score by males
agrees very nearly with the mean score by females, if you look at students who scored very low on the GRE, and those who scored very high, in both cases you might see females under-represented.
Just to be clear, I think it is rather obvious to anyone who has taught mathy subjects that cultural factors play an enormous role. I can recall sometimes suggesting to female students who aced calculus with no apparent difficulty that they consider double majoring in math. These students often were unwilling to consider this option seriously. I don't know whether that was because of parental or peer pressure not to go into an "unfeminine" subject, but I certainly thought I observed some peer pressure from their struggling male colleages to excell less.
Speaking of means, can you explain how it can happen that on my quiz scores (when I was a calculus TA), more than half of the students could score above the section average? Or, sometimes, more than half could score
below the section average?
mikewashere said:
Another "demographic" trend I noticed is that a large part of us are international. ... Might also depend on location (I'm in Philly which is pretty diverse)
Hooray for Philly! Penn must have told DHS to where to put their distrust of foreign students.
There are some rather obvious good reasons why so many students from overseas want to study in the U.S. (or in the UK or Canada or Australia):
1. English is the international language of science and technology, and there's no better way to attain fluency than to live in an English-speaking country,
2. The leading American universities are justly renowned as among the best in the world, as are the best universities in the UK, etc., and naturally any ambitious young scholar wants to be close to the action (where most of the Nobel Prizes seem to be won, if you like),
3. After WII, at least until 9/11, the U.S. has traditionally been far more welcoming of foreign students than many other countries are. To some extent this involved strategic political descisions at a high level; to some extent, artful lobbying by canny university presidents just after Sputnik. Some of us fear that in an ill-considered over-reaction to 9/11, the U.S. might be throwing away the priceless advantage of making so many international friends by educating them here so well, often with the result that many influential persons in other countries have studied in the U.S. Such as, well, er, come to think of it this might not be the best example, just happened to the first I thought of: Isoroku Yamamoto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto.
Well, you say--- but consider this: Yamamoto argued very strongly against going to war with the U.S. on the grounds that Japan would certainly lose. Having been overruled (by leaders who had never traveled outside Japan), he did his duty, as he saw it. (I'm sure that if we put our minds to it, we could come up with a long list of persons who did great things for to further U.S. ties with their own countries, based in part on a positive experience studying in the U.S.)
The day that T-shirt reads "SWEat" is the day I start believing it's possible (that some day, women will learn to get lids off jars). 
