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March 12, 2008

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

Christina Hoff Sommers in The American:

Featuredimage_2Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:47 AM | Permalink

Comments

I'd prefer men to be more like women in all respects --- reproductive aspects excluded!

Posted by: Felix E. F. Larocca MD | Mar 12, 2008 6:55:25 AM

The headline and blurb are interesting, but the article itself is poorly written and the arguments the author posits against "Title IX for Science" are weak. I specifically am thinking of her vague "refutations" of academic works showing existence of a gender bias. Not an article I would expect to be linked to from this blog.

Posted by: Omar | Mar 12, 2008 10:28:39 AM

This may explain the biases in the article - "Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute."

Posted by: Omar | Mar 12, 2008 10:32:22 AM

Mabye for the same reason 45% are Jewish even though Jewish people are less than 5% of the population, or that Asian student are 17% even though they are about 1% of the population...uh...uh..uh..

Posted by: doug l | Mar 13, 2008 1:24:01 PM

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