Do SAT Math Scores Show Societal Bias Hinders Female Scientists Career Objectives?

Mark Perry on Carpe Diem posted a blog, "800 SAT Math Scores: Male-Female Ratio is 2.22:1" that shows that on the Math portion of the SAT, males outnumber females by over 2 to 1 at the 800 level. The male excess ratio tapers off until the 580 score level where females begin to outnumber males. Mark believes this shows why females are under-represented in the sciences.

Mark says:

If we are trying to explain the over-representation of males in science, math and engineering departments at MIT and Harvard, especially if that group represents those who score 800 on the SAT math test, the explanation seems pretty clear, convincing and straightforward: males are over-represented by a factor of more 2:1 for SAT math test scores of 800 points.

I posted a comment on the Carpe Diem blog in response with the belief that the SAT scores do not show, as Mark Perry indicates, that there is not a societal and cultural bias that is causing the under-representation of females in the sciences.

My comment:

If there is a societal and cultural bias such that females feel less feminine or attractive if they show high math or science ability or interest, some of the females most aware that they possess above average math and science abilities will attempt to hide these traits to increase their attractiveness and femininity. Similar results will occur if the females believe it is unfeminine to score higher than their desired boyfriends score.

Potentially high SAT math and science female scorers will most likely know based on past school test scores that they have the capability to score high on math and science tests.

One would expect these previously high math and science scoring females to underperform intentionally (not necessarily consciously), with the greatest underperformance occurring at the highest score levels. It is the highest female math and science score achievers who would have felt the biggest negative effect of the cultural and societal bias against female success in math and science. As female test takers approach the average, they will have had felt fewer negative effects from their previous math and science scores. The high female scorers will have the most motivation to limit their effort and underperform based on their abilities.

The SAT score results are therefore consistent with the assumption that there exist cultural and societal factors limiting female achievement in the math and sciences. It is the societal bias that will cause the appearance of an excess of males at the highest test score results and the tampering off as the scores approach the middle.

Sphere: Related Content

Does Excessive Drinking Cause Accidents Or Are They Both Symptoms Of Risk Taking Behavior?

My comment I posted on Jeffrey Miron's Blog "Libertarianism, from A to Z" in response to Miron's discussion of New York State legislature's attempt to pass a tougher DUI law and make it a felony to drive while intoxicated with a child in the vehicle. Additionally, the proposed law would require first-time convicted drunken drivers to buy a device that prevents them from driving their cars if they have been drinking.

My comment:

Your [Jeffrey Miron] paper, "Does the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Save Lives?" showed that MLDA laws have a minimal impact on teenage drinking. Do DUI laws decrease the incidence of drunk driving? Or drunk driving accidents? Are alternatives such as the designated driver campaigns more important in changing behavior?

As you mention, police will and are currently letting some offenders off with a warning, offenses are bargained down and offenders continue to drive.

Additionally, there is a cause and effect issue. Do people who have aggressive, asocial, risky behaviors, such as tailing, speeding, ignoring stop signs and red lights, turning without signaling, etc. get into accidents and they also drink because it is a risky behavior or is it the drinking that causes the accidents? While I am in no way approving drinking and driving, I think it is more often a concurrent behavior and not a cause.

The law is probably more punitive than preventive. It is also a law that provides more comfort to the general population by the public's perception that the government is doing something than by the law actually achieving any reduction in the aberrant behavior.

Some people regularly take more risks in their daily lives and engage in more anti-social behavior than others and have more negative impacts on themselves and society than the average person. Of course, it would be very nice to avoid or at least minimize the negative societal outcomes.

Often, some risky behaviors are looked at as the causes of the harm, when in fact the risky behaviors are really manifestations of the same underlying psychology that caused the harm and are not the causes. These behaviors occur concurrently and are often seen as causes because they are associated with the harm, but prohibition of these actions will not stop negative effects because they are concurrent manifestations and not causes.

Excessive drinking and risky, accident-prone driving are probably caused by the same psychological characteristics and one probably does not cause the other. Sphere: Related Content

Did Contract Rigidities And Law Function As 'Social Suicide Pacts' During The Financial Crisis?

Modification-proof contracts boost commitment and can help overcome information problems. But when such rigid contracts are ubiquitous, they can function as social suicide pacts, compelling enforcement despite significant externalities. At the heart of the current financial crisis is a contract designed to be hyper-rigid: the pooling and servicing agreement (PSA), which governs residential mortgage securitization. The PSA combines formal, structural and functional barriers to its own modification with restrictions on the modification of underlying mortgage loans. Such layered rigidities fuel foreclosures, with spillover effects for homeowners, communities, financial institutions, financial markets, and the macroeconomy.

This Article situates PSAs in the context of theoretical and policy debates about contract rigidity, bond contract modification, and contractual bankruptcy.

From a recent article, "Rewriting Frankenstein Contracts: The Workout Prohibition in Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities" by Anna Gelpern, American University Washington College of Law, and Adam J. Levitin, Georgetown University - Law Center. [Free Download].

The paper suggests a few strategies:

These strategies include narrowly tailored legislation that renders the problem terms unenforceable on public policy grounds, administrative restructuring mandates, and special bankruptcy regimes.

(HT: The Conglomerate Blog) Sphere: Related Content

Academia Vs Business: XKCD

The marvelous wonders and insights of XKCD. Sphere: Related Content

Harvard Medical School Dean Says Congressional Health Reform Gets An 'F' Grade

Jeffrey Flier, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, gives the Congressional health reform proposals a failing grade in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.
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Flier writes:

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system.

From "Health 'Reform' Gets a Failing Grade" by Jeffrey S. Flier, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, in Wednesday, November 18, 2009, Wall St. Journal. Sphere: Related Content

Health Plans Have Cost Overruns

cost projections are notoriously unreliable, and history is filled with examples of federal programs - especially in health care - that cost far more than originally predicted.

Read "U.S. health plans have history of cost overruns" by David M. Dickson in the Washington Times. Sphere: Related Content

College Early Decision Option Decreases Student Diversity: Negatively Impacts Asians And Hispanics

A recent research paper, "The Early Decision Option in College Admission and its Impact on Student Diversity" by Heather Antecol, Claremont McKenna College and Janet Kiholm Smith, Claremont McKenna College, (free download) finds that the early decision application process for college admission favor the wealthy and whites and negatively impacts the diversity of the college student body, particularly Asian and Hispanic enrollment.

From the paper's abstract:

Many schools rely on early decision (ED) as an admission practice. Schools that adopt ED are able to generate additional resources by attracting wealthier students who, upon admission, make binding commitments to attend and to forego shopping for competing aid offers. An unanswered question is whether the resources generated from this price discrimination practice are used by schools during the regular admission process to attract more diverse students. We document the admission practices for private national universities and liberal arts colleges and analyze how the choice to use ED, and how varying levels of reliance on it for enrollment, affect racial and geographic diversity. While, in theory, it is possible for ED to enable greater diversity over some range of early enrollment percentages, we find that the overall heterogeneity of the students falls monotonically as schools enroll larger percentages of their students through ED. Higher ED enrollment percentages appear to strongly and negatively affect Asian American and Hispanic students and positively affect white students. [Emphasis added].

How can colleges justify the continued existence of using early decision application processes when the resulting student body negatively affects two major ethnic groups, Hispanics and Asian Americans? Sphere: Related Content

Excellent Peter Bernstein Video On Risk

The international management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, has posted an excellent video of the famed author and expert Peter Bernstein discussing risk in a January 2008 edition of McKinsey Quarterly.

The 12 minute video is available on the McKinsey website here. It is worth watching.

After seeing this video, you will understand much more about risk and our current crisis and all explained in simple non-mathematical language.

It is clear that if people of Bernstein's caliber and knowledge were running our financial institution regulatory and oversight agencies, we would not have had the banking and securities industry crisis we had.

I thank McKinsey & Company for producing and making available this terrific video. Sphere: Related Content

Average And Poor Families Are Economically Better Off Today Than A 100 Years Ago

Recently, the press, bloggers and some economists have put too much emphasis on income equality. They focused on measures that indicate how much richer the rich are than the average person or the poor, instead of the quality of life of the average or poor person in the US.

Most people, on a day to day basis, do not care if someone in another part of the country can own a yacht or airplane. Most people just care about their own and their family's daily lives. It is satisfying the needs of their families and themselves that is their major concern.

With that frame of mind, Mark Perry's post on Carpe Diem is very relevant, "The "Good Old Days" Are Now and It Gets Better All the Time, Thanks to Free-Market Capitalism."

The basic thrust is that living standards for the average person are much better today than they were in 1901. A much smaller share of personal income is spent on food and other essentials and a much larger share is available for discretionary spending today than in the past. Sphere: Related Content