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Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

Thanks Laura for sharing the article written by Eileen Pollack. I have quoted some of the parts of the article. But, go and read all of them. Then, read it again! :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science.html

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

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That the disparity between men and women’s representation in science and math arises from culture rather than genetics seems beyond dispute. In the early 1980s, a large group of American middle-schoolers were given the SAT exam in math; among those who scored higher than 700, boys outperformed girls by 13 to 1. But scoring 700 or higher on the SATs, even in middle school, doesn’t necessarily reveal true mathematical creativity or facility with higher-level concepts. And these were all American students. The mathematical society’s study of the top achievers in international competitions went much further in examining genius by analyzing the performance of young women in other cultures. The study’s conclusion? The scarcity of women at the very highest echelons “is due, in significant part, to changeable factors that vary with time, country and ethnic group. First and foremost, some countries identify and nurture females with very high ability in mathematics at a much higher frequency than do others.” Besides, the ratio of boys to girls scoring 700 or higher on the math SAT in middle school is now only three to one. If girls were so constrained by their biology, how could their scores have risen so steadily in such a short time?
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I asked if he had noticed any differences between the ways male and female students approach math problems, whether they have different “math personalities.” No, he said. Then again, he couldn’t get inside his students’ heads. He did have two female students go on in math, and both had done fairly well.
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If even one person had said, ‘You can do this.’ ” She laughed. “Women need more positive reinforcement, and men need more negative reinforcement. Men wildly overestimate their learning abilities, their earning abilities. Women say, ‘Oh, I’m not good, I won’t earn much, whatever you want to give me is O.K.’
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For proof of the stereotypes that continue to shape American attitudes about science, and about women in science in particular, you need only watch an episode of the popular television show “The Big Bang Theory,” about a group of awkward but endearing male Caltech physicists and their neighbor, Penny, an attractive blonde who has moved to L.A. to make it as an actress. Although two of the scientists on the show are women, one, Bernadette, speaks in a voice so shrill it could shatter a test tube. When she was working her way toward a Ph.D. in microbiology, rather than working in a lab, as any real doctoral student would do, she waitressed with Penny. Mayim Bialik, the actress who plays Amy, a neurobiologist who becomes semiromantically involved with the childlike but brilliant physicist Sheldon, really does have a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is in no way the hideously dumpy woman she is presented as on the show.
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What most young women don’t realize, Urry said, is that being an academic provides a female scientist with more flexibility than most other professions. She met her husband on her first day at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “And we have a completely equal relationship,” she told me. “When he looks after the kids, he doesn’t say he’s helping me.” No one is claiming that juggling a career in physics while raising children is easy. But having a family while establishing a career as a doctor or a lawyer isn’t exactly easy either, and that doesn’t prevent women from pursuing those callings. Urry suspects that raising a family is often the excuse women use when they leave science, when in fact they have been discouraged to the point of giving up.
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In recent years, Urry has become devoted to using hard data and anecdotes from her own experience to alter her colleagues’ perceptions as to why there are so few women in the sciences. In response to the Summers controversy, she published an essay in The Washington Post describing her gradual realization that women were leaving the profession not because they weren’t gifted but because of the “slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success.”
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Another student was the only girl in her AP physics class from the start. Her classmates teased her mercilessly: “You’re a girl. Girls can’t do physics.” She expected the teacher to put an end to the teasing, but he didn’t.
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Other women chimed in to say that their teachers were the ones who teased them the most. In one physics class, the teacher announced that the boys would be graded on the “boy curve,” while the one girl would be graded on the “girl curve”; when asked why, the teacher explained that he couldn’t reasonably expect a girl to compete in physics on equal terms with boys.
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The Lake

My friend, I will tell you who you are.

You are the water. You are the water that belongs to sea and ocean.

But, time surrounded you with the lands and the mountains. The lands and the mountains were strong and enchanting to you. You needed them after thousands of the hurricanes and storms. You were tired. But, now, you are suspended to be a lake!

You miss the waves on you. You miss the violence of the hurricanes blossoming on you, the thousands of fishes and the colors in you, the salt and the odor of you, the sunset, the sunrise, and the moonlight; and the tide; and the intensity and the vastness that you had before! Now, you, the water, are craving for all of them because you know you belong to the seas and the oceans.

I wish i could say "You need to go my friend. You need to go to sea. You need to go to ocean!". But, remember, there are two flowers nearby you. One of them is so blue and so white. But, it is like the moonlight when the darkness descends on the mountains and the lake! The other one is waiting to be born and listening the mountains and the lakes!

Don't go my friend.

Children of the devil

"I don't despair. As to suffering-oh, yes, i know all about that! You are surprised that i should be unhappy when i can dance and am so sure of myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things in it that are deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sisters. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the devil?"

"Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are unhappy children. We have falled out of the nature and hang suspended in space. And that reminds me of something. In the Steppenwolf treatise that I told you about, there is something to the effect that is only a fancy of his to believe that he has one soul, or two, that he is made up of one or two personalities, Every human being, it says consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls"

"I like that very much," cried Hermine. "In your case, for example, the spiritual part is very highly developed and so you are very backward in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dance is scarcely half a day old. It is he we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is."

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

Last command

"You like me", she went on, "for the reason I said before, because I have broken through your isolation. I have caught you from the very gates of hell and wakened you to new life. But I want more from you - much more. I want to make you fall in love with me. No, don't interrupt me. Let me speak. You like me very much. I can see that. And you are grateful to me. But you are not in love with me. I mean to make you fall in love with me, and it is part of my calling. It is my living to be able to make men fall in love with me. But mind this, I don't do it because I find you exactly captivating. I am as little in love with me as you as you with me. But I need you as you do me. You need me now, for the moment, because you are desperate. You are dying just for the lack of a push to  throw you into the water and bring you to life again. You need me to teach you to dance and to laugh and to live. But I need you not today-later, for something very important and beautiful too. When you are in love with me I will give you my last command and you will obey it, and it will be the better for both of us."

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

It reminds me Johnnie Walker, one of the characters of "Kafka on the Shore".

ThouSands

ThouSands! :)

Taste of Boston

And; here i am;



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And a nice quote from "Steppenwolf";

"The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever more independent, He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek."

Re-engineering the brain

http://www.ted.com/talks/gero_miesenboeck.html

A nice talk!

Thinking, Obeying, and Seriousness

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”

"Obeying is like eating and drinking. There is nothing like it if you have been without it too long. Isn't it so, you are glad to do as i tell you?"

"Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason, i wished to be hundred years old. In eternity, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for joke."



Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

November 1st

Tonight is the night of the day that ends four years... I am tired a little bit. Maybe a lot.

Gardeners

I am glad that there are special people around me.

Pale Blue Dot

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Thanks Anas!

Sertao

Thanks Laura!

Random Access Memories

Yikim

"Yoksa, yikim, insanlarin ve inanclarin farkina varmadan degismesi anlamina mi geliyordu? Butun Istanbullular bir sabah sicak yataklarindan baska birer birey olarak kalktiklarini duslerdik; elbiselerini nasil giyeceklerini bilemiyorlar, minarelerinin neye yaradigini hatirlamiyorlardi. Belki de yikim, otekilerin ustunlugunu gorerek onlara benzemeye calismak demekti; o zaman bana Venedik'yeki hayatimdan bir parca anlattirir, sonra, buradaki tanidiklardan bazilarinin baslarinda sapkalar, ayaklarinda pantolonlarla benim anilarimi yeniden yasadiklarini duslerdik."

Beyaz Kale, Orhan Pamuk

Chekhov's Gun

"The stone itself is meaningless. This situation calls for something, and at this point in time it just happens to be this stone. Anton Chekhov put it best when he said, "If a piston appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired."
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What Chechov was getting at is this: necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meanings, Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy. Logic, morals, or meanings don't have anything do with it. It's all a question of relationality. Chechov understood dramaturgy very well."

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun

It is interesting see the statement of Chekhov's gun. A very similar issue exists in information theory, under the name of 'information criteria'. Roughly, an information criterion suggests us to remove unnecessary things as much as we can in a mathematical way.  It says that "What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist.", as in the quote. Beautiful.

Get Lucky

A good memory with Liz. Get Lucky.

Pregnant Silence

My Son, My girl, and My Angel,

I have checked; two years and four months have passed from the last letter, 'the moment'. How many letters am i far from you? Probably, you know the number.

If you ask where i am; i am still in Tampa. Sitting in a chair, listening the night. It is not raining here, now, but, somewhere around, there is storm.  The claps of lightnings, the song of tree crickets, and the rest is pregnant silence.

Thinking to tell someone leave. It is a grey area, maybe, even more complicated than it seems. It depends upon which side of it you are on. Yet, it does not change the act. We broke the bones and built walls. We are able to built the bones or break the walls. Indeed, what makes me think is that my excuse is always to make the things better. It smells selfishness? When did i start to do these things? Where did i learn it? I don't remember my son, my girl, and my angel.  Maybe, all it grows once you are at the edge of decision, once you have power, or once you start to afraid. Sound familiar?

Last year, I have met with two people. They are the moments from different worlds and different words. One of them has a very sweet daughter who likes ice creams and Ferrero Rocher. Who doesn't like? It reminds me days that i shared my chocolate with my nephew. Most delicious sin. I wish i could tell more about them. Frankly, remind me good things, but, make me vulnerable sometimes. People crosses each other's life. I remember others.

I just wanted to sleep in the couch now. By the way, the rain started and stopped, while i was writing. Wanted to let you know.

I will always love you my son, my girl, and my angel.

Impatience

I always learn something different when i go to Felicitous;

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

by Kafka

"There are two main human sins, from which all the other derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet, perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return."

The Zurau Aphorisms by Kafka.

Thanks to Andrew.

The Door(s)

2012 Gaziantep, Turkey.