complaining and lodging guilt trips to gain favor

except, umm, childbearing.

but you can bet if men could bear children, they would exceed women at this as well.

We disagree about the history of science. I believe historians have oversold a myth of great men. You don't. Whatever. Continue to worship your idols. I probably worship a few that you think are false, too.

Of course, the GI Bill had a profound affect on society. And so did the ideal that women should stay home and take care of their men. The cause of the trend that I noted was clearly societal and not any innate difference in the sexes. That's exactly my point.

Regarding the efforts to recruit women to science, I believe they have "failed" because they have not addressed the realities of modern life. The model for research as conducted today was basically formulated in the post-war years we were just discussing and depends greatly upon a society wherein men trot off to 12 hour work days and women stay home. Neither of the sexes should put up with this crap in modern times.

Finally, what an utter crock to claim that women dominate the humanities. The number of women receiving PhDs in the humanities for 1995-1990 was 48.5 percent. And that's an all-time high. You would do well to stop clinging to myths and start looking at reality.

I can't find the book right now, but I read that when IQ tests were developed, women scored higher.

The male scientists 'knew' that men were smarter and figured the test questions had to be at fault, thus they changed them until men scored higher on average.

Their attitude unfortunately continues to this day as so many 'just know' that men are smarter than women. It's sort of like how Christians 'just know' that Jesus is waiting for them in heaven.

RE Female Math Nerds: Didn't Hypatia develop the golden mean theory way way back in the day?

interestingly, that data also indicates that the percentage of women receiving PhDs in mathematics and computer science dropped from 19.3% in the 1920-24 period to 4.9% in the 1955-1959 period. Not quite linearly, but somewhat steadily. (This is an excellent reminder that we must be ever vigilant in providing opportunity to all groups in our society.) Would the "innate difference" believers take this data to mean that women got dumber during that period and smarter during the ensuing years? What explanation other than environment can account for such large variations over a single century?

I am not sure if you heard of this event that happened between 1924 and 1955 called World War 2. Well one of the benefits given to vets was a thing called the GI Bill which allowed a class of people to attend college for the first time in history. What I am getting at is if there is a gender difference it is no surprise that the number of women in math fell as now men that are better at math are now allowed into schools that where once only available to the upper class so women that where once competing in a small pool lost out in a large pool.

This set of numbers does not prove anything other than middle class and working class males where as good or better than upper class women in math.

The more interesting question to me is why after spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to recruit women in to math, engineering and science. Where they will make more and advance faster than there male counterparts for the same job in the engineering field are women still 5 to 20 percent in these fields? Yet go over to the overfilled English or sociology departments where getting a job infield is next to impossible and you see 70 plus percent women.

In fact, one excellent example of my point, is that both Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus nearly simultaneously. They worked within a sphere that was pushing mathematics toward calculus all along. No doubt they were both geniuses, but not isolated ones.

This does not prove your point. There is no evidence at all that either was aware of the others work in this area and they both came to their conclusions independently. What Newton did for human knowledge was a singular act of genius that less than a dozen people in written history has possessed with Darwin being another in his very rare class.

If the point you are trying to make is that these geniuses build and use others work well you will find no argument from anyone. But, that does not change that these individuals where the ones to discover this information and sometimes decades and centuries before it would be expected to be discovered such as special relativity. Darwin had natural selection 30 years before anyone else. Or hell take Copernicus who all but started modern science and no one for over a thousand years proposed anything close to his ideas.

While Darwin and Newton were not members of "teams", they did not work in a vacuum. They exchanged ideas and criticism via letters, publications, and meetings. They expanded upon and refined ideas put forward by others.

Newtons work in Optics is pretty much the start of the study of optics with little work in the subject before him. Darwin's idea of natural selection again was wholly his own that was partly based on past work by others but mostly what he saw on his trip. Never mind Darwin's other work in the natural sciences that is still the accepted theories today such as coral formation.

If we stop promoting the idea that isolation is the necessary environment for scientific breakthrough, who knows what discoveries we might foster by recruiting new geniuses (and teams of geniuses) to the fold?

So teaching the actual history of science as it really happened is less important than making a political point? Just a FYI almost all research today is team based and has been since around world war two and it would be next to impossible to be a lone wolf today. We have come to the point where one person cannot form an overriding theory that covers more than a very small slice.