women in math and science

3 related things I've been thinking about lately (i.e. they're showing up all over the blogs I read):
1. Why are women underrepresented in science and math? (is there an IQ distribution issue?)
2. Why are black people underrepresented basically everywhere where high academic achievement is important? (again, is there an IQ issue?)
3. Why are republicans underrepresented in academia? (okay, no one's seriously brought up the IQ issue here, but maybe it's because the people bringing up IQ in the other 2 cases are republicans, and they can't be the dumb ones, can they?)

There's way too much here for 1 blog post, so I'm going to focus on females in math and science (obviously the one that relates most to my own life) and maybe, hopefully get back to the other two in later posts.

The IQ issue everyone raises with females in math/science is that IQ testing shows slightly different bell curves for males and females, with slightly more males on the tail ends (in the "genius" and "retarded" categories, basically) and slightly more females clustered around the middle (in the "normal" category). And maybe, since you have to be really really smart to become a math or science professor, and there are just more really really smart males than females, that explains the disparity.

This explanation really makes me uncomfortable. I guess people should be allowed to bring it up as a possible explanation,because it would be pretty closed minded to summarily dismiss an entire avenue of inquiry. On the other hand, it strikes me as too pat, and I deeply suspect that most people championing it are latching on to convenient, plausible "just so" story about why men are superior to women, and that's just the natural order of things, feminists be damned. (On another note, I think this is part of an overall resurgence in the popularity of social darwinism, at least among the republicans who believe still in evolution, to levels that haven't been seen since the late 19th/early 20th century. I think someone could do really well writing a book or an article about this trend.)

Part of it is that I am a smart female seriously considering going into academia in science or math. Even though I went to a women's college, I have in fact, been pre-judged as not quite as smart because I'm female. (Not at Smith, obviously, but at one godawful summer internship at an Ivy League school, for example.) So it really irks me that a theory that basically amounts to, "Hey, maybe we have all these stereotypes about men being smarter than women because men really are smarter!" gets taken seriously. It's not true in my case, so I'm naturally disinclined to think it'd be true in the general case.

Beyond that, it just seems to be the least verifiable theory. Essentially, I think it's what you're left with after you've ruled out all the other possible explanations. And there are a ton of explanations you have to rule out first. An incomplete list:

What does IQ even measure anyway? Arguably, no one really knows. We think it's good at measuring intelligence, but we're not quite sure what intelligence is, and we're also not sure if we're introducing subtle biases into the testing.

What factors other than intelligence affect IQ scores? There's a really interesting blog post explaining a recent paper on the stereotype threat, which we know does affect test scores here. But we also know things like prior education affect IQ scores. So do things like nutrition. And nobody's satisfactorily explained the Flynn effect which is that everyone's IQ scores the world over seem to get higher over time for no apparent reason.

What about other factors that keep women out of academia? That stereotype effect blog post talks about one of them, the self perpetuating stereotype effect that makes women feel less welcome and less capable simly because there are fewer of them. But what about asshole professors and grad students like the one I encountered at my internship? Or what about subtle messages from teachers in the lower grades who encouraged boys more than girls in math class? There are a lot of other things that could be going on.

And the thing is, even if you think IQ is actually good at measuring intelligence, and even if you think it's good at measuring the type of intelligence you need to succeed in science and math, and even if it is true that there are more genius males than females, you still haven't shown that there should necessarily be more men than women in the math/science fields. What if there are diminishing marginal returns for additional intelligence? Maybe having an IQ over 135 is absolutely vital to being able to understand the science you need to succeed, but beyond that, having an IQ of 142 doesn't help you much, while having something like creativity, or enough social skills to collaborate with your peers really would help?

It's hard to know what the real explanations are. I just really hope the IQ determinists are wrong. Luckily, that seems likely.