Wenn man annimmt, dass ein Fach besondere Brillanz erfordert, wirkt sich das auf das Geschlechterverhältnis in diesem Fach aus

Eine interessante Studie:

Women’s participation and attitudes to talent
Some scientific disciplines have lower percentages of women in academia than others. Leslie et al. hypothesized that general attitudes about the discipline would reflect the representation of women in those fields (see the Perspective by Penner). Surveys revealed that some fields are believed to require attributes such as brilliance and genius, whereas other fields are believed to require more empathy or hard work. In fields where people thought that raw talent was required, academic departments had lower percentages of women.

Abstract
The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women’s underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.’s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans’ underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.

Quelle: Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines

Also die Idee, dass Fächer, die ein besonderes Talent erfodern, Frauen quasi abschrecken und diese deswegen in geringerer Zahl in ihnen vertreten sind.

Aus der Studie:

Angeborenes Talent und Frauenanteil

Fig. 1 Field-specific ability beliefs and the percentage of female 2011 U.S. Ph.D.’s in(A) STEM and (B) Social Science and Humanities.

Philosophy erfodert mehr Brillanz?

Die Frage, was mehr Brillanz erfordert wurde anscheinend wie folgt ermittelt:

To assess field-specific ability beliefs, we asked participants to rate their agreement with four statements concerning what is required for success in their field (e.g., “Being a top scholar of [discipline] requires a special aptitude that just can’t be taught”) (table S2). Respondents rated both the extent to which they personally agreed with these statements, and the extent to which they believed other people in their field would agree with the statements. Because answers to these eight questions displayed very similar patterns (α = 0.90), they were averaged to produce a field-specific ability belief score for each discipline (with higher scores indicating more emphasis on raw ability).

Also im wesentlichen eine Umfrage.

As predicted, the more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female Ph.D.’s. Field-specific ability belief scores were significantly correlated with female representation across all 30 fields [correlation coefficient r(28) = −0.60, P < 0.001], in STEM alone [r(10) = −0.64, P = 0.025], and in SocSci/Hum alone [r(16) = −0.62, P = 0.006] (Fig. 1). In a hierarchical regression with a STEM indicator variable entered in the first step and field-specific ability belief scores entered in the second (Table 1, models 1 and 2), adding the ability belief variable significantly increased the variance accounted for, ΔR2 = 0.29, P < 0.001.

Also hatten nach dieser Skala anscheinend die Fächer, die mehr Brillanz erfordern, mehr männliche Doktoranten.

Das erste, an das ich da denken musste, war dies unterschiedliche Intelligenzverteilung bei Männern und Frauen:

Intelligenzverteilung: Mehr dumme, aber auch mehr sehr intelligente Männer als Frauen

Dann auch die andere Fähigkeitsverteilung:

• Geschlechtsunterschiede beim räumliche Denken
• Räumliches Denken und mathematische Fähigkeiten
• Räumliches Denken als Voraussetzung für die Naturwissenschaften
• Mathematik, negative Einstellungen zur Mathematik und räumliches Denken
• Sexuelle Orientierung und Neurokognitive Eigenschaften
• Technisches Verständnis, Berufwahl und Testosteron

Männer haben im Schnitt das bessere räumlichere Denken, aber nur wenige Männer haben die besonderen Fähigkeiten für besondere Leistungen im höheren Anforderungsbereich, wie sie dann ein Studium in dem speziellen Bereich erfordert.

Und weil die Anforderungen eben bei wenigen vorliegen und dann eher bei Männern, ist es wenig überraschend, dass es gerade diese Bereiche sind.

Aber diesen Gedanken scheinen sie gar nicht verfolgt zu haben.