Nobel (Woe)Man
[quote=Wikipedia]As of 2019, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 866 men, 53 women (Marie Curie won it twice), and 24 unique organizations[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia]Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields[/quote]
[quote=Google]
If receiving a Nobel prize is the highest recognition for a scientist, being awarded twice by the Swedish Academy of Sciences is an extraordinary fact of which, until now, only four people can boast: Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and [b]Marie Curie.[/quote]
A. Women account for 53/(866 + 53) = 6% of ALL Nobel Laureates.
B. Women (Marie Curie) form 1/4 = 25% of two-time Nobel Prize winners
C. Women (Marie Curie) make up 100% of Nobels won in two different fields. In other words no man has bagged a Nobel in more than one discipline.
It appears that
D. In general, men are smarter than women
E. Women are more versatile
Questions:
1. Is there a theory of intelligence that explains these statistics?
2. Are the statistics a reflection of systemic bias against women?
[quote=Wikipedia]Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields[/quote]
[quote=Google]
If receiving a Nobel prize is the highest recognition for a scientist, being awarded twice by the Swedish Academy of Sciences is an extraordinary fact of which, until now, only four people can boast: Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and [b]Marie Curie.[/quote]
A. Women account for 53/(866 + 53) = 6% of ALL Nobel Laureates.
B. Women (Marie Curie) form 1/4 = 25% of two-time Nobel Prize winners
C. Women (Marie Curie) make up 100% of Nobels won in two different fields. In other words no man has bagged a Nobel in more than one discipline.
It appears that
D. In general, men are smarter than women
E. Women are more versatile
Questions:
1. Is there a theory of intelligence that explains these statistics?
2. Are the statistics a reflection of systemic bias against women?
Comments (48)
What do you mean it appears? D and E don't follow from A, B and C.
The common explanation is that there's more variability among men than there is among women. In other words, that the smartest and dumbest are more likely to be found among men. The evolutionary basis for that would be the asymmetrical biology of reproduction which made risk-taking a more favorable strategy for men than women.
Do the stats beg an explanation or not?
Supposing there was no bias against women, shouldn't the proportion of women remain the same in both one-time Nobel winners and two-time winners?
Please explain; to my knowledge 50% of genetic material is sourced from both homo sapien parents.
Men can have a practically unlimited amount of children, women can carry at best one child per year. Plus, after birth, only the woman is physically needed to care for the child (breastfeeding). Therefore for men it's a more viable strategy to simply have more children, whereas for women it's more important to ensure their offspring actually survive and to be more selective regarding their mating partners as well.
Do you mean to imply that risk-taking and intelligence are linked to each other? Whatever happene to discretion is the better part of valor?
Is there a literary work done by an evolutionary biologist you can source?
Because reproduction is free for a male, and costly and dangerous (and in the worst case, fatal) for a female? From the point of view of spreading their genes, a male has no reason not to reproduce with every female they possibly can. A female can't do that, because pregnancy is taxing, dangerous and you can't do it as often, so you have to give more consideration to who you actually reproduce with; whether they have good genes, whether they're a good parent, and so on.
Quoting Key
Not that I can name any, but I'm sure a lot of the stuff referenced for example here.
You seem to be approaching this from an organism-centric model of evolution which has been outdated since at least the mid-70s when Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene" and established gene-centric evolution as the dominant hypothesis.
Due to the pressures of natural selection, genes that enable their "gene machines" to reproduce with fated partners do not propagate through the gene pool.
Well, I don't see how what I've said would be mutually exclusive with gene-centric evolution.
I'm quite certain that is inaccurate.
I'm afraid I can't tell what that means, but I'll wager a guess: genes that increase promiscuity in men don't actually end up propagating through the gene pool if too many of their partners are evolutionary dead-ends?
It’s not that genes that allow for some doomed offspring get eliminated, it’s that genes that don’t allow for some non-doomed offspring get eliminated. Males can just make lots of offspring at no cost and let some of them be doomed so long as some others survive. Females can’t make lots of offspring at no cost, so have to be careful that their few offspring do survive.
This is quite dumb, actually. But very typical for today.
The answer is of course not.
How about the issue that the prizes have been started to be given out since 1901? How many women were at STEM-fields in 1901? How many women could even vote at that time? I think for the first seventy or nearly eighty years a minority of women worked outside the house in the US. So you could start with these kind of statistics before going in Nobel-prizes:
How many are there even now in the STEM-fields? They are a minority, yet are women really going to study physics or economics far more than men?
How have things changed? Well, Hence looking from 1975 onwards:
And Marie Curie? Thank God for her, because statistically it was really rare to have women in her position. Of course, once you gotten a Nobel-prize, you have a huge probability more to get another one. Let's remember that we are talking about a very small group of people, but people will eagerly use the statistics for Nobel-prize winners to answer general questions about science and gender, race or nationality.
What's shameful looking at that is that no woman has won the Nobel prize for physics solo, which means that even when women are doing great research, they're not doing their own great research. It's unlikely to change because science is ever more collaborative and still male-dominated.
On which...
Quoting TheMadFool
No, it appears far more men are in science than women, which is already known. I taught physics at a department that had one of the highest percentages of female undergraduates in the UK. At that level, there's no obvious difference in intelligence.
That said:
Quoting TheMadFool
Not theory, but experiment. Helen Fisher studied extremes of intelligence and found that there were more male geniuses. And more male idiots.
Actually solo Nobel-prizes have become more rare. What usually happens is that some specific field gets a Nobel and there simply isn't a Newton or an Einstein that hasn't got the peers that "on whose shoulders they stood". So very likely it's more than one. Besides, seldom people publish scientific breakthrough articles just by their name, but have others that have participated in it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I would argue that even larger issue is simply what fields men and women choose to study.
And yes, there can be the occasional misogynist still somewhere in the academia, but they are very rare. More likely the head of the university or the research institute will sigh happily if they get a talented woman or minority member to their team.
Yeah that's what I meant by it bei
No.
You have to account for social factors. Only in affluent societies do women have the means to peruse science etc. Women don't go into scientific areas as much as men, even when they have the means to. Men who are breadwinners will sometimes have jobs that could lead them a nobel prize. Women often choose types of work, like medical care, that won't lead to a nobel prize. There are dozens of reasons why.
Under the assumption that an increasing population produces no cost to the surviving genes, yes. But because there is cost, even if the cost is significantly less for males than females, it will stimulate the same selection pressure. The existence of a pressure is more significant than its actual degree (given enough time).
In other words, while a harsher pressure will likely produce population change exponentially quicker than a milder one, in theory over enough time the outcomes should look quite similar.
Aye, but this phone is really crap. I can hit the edit button a hundred times and nothing happening.
Population growth is limited by females one way or another. Males reproducing more doesn’t make population grow faster, it just makes more of the resulting population carry their genes.
I don't have a time machine, but I suspect sexual activity hasn't always been the free-for-all it currently seems to be.
For one, humans have lived in social groups for a long time. We were hunter-gatherers in a sparsely populated world for... hundreds of thousands of years--much of our homo sapiens history. It is not a huge stretch to suppose that there were social limitations on what both men and women might do. We evolved in social groups, not as lone operators. There weren't hundred, thousands, of potential partners in the hunter-gatherer bands. They just weren't that large.
Survival was precarious. Survival was not a sure thing. In hunter-gatherer groups, reproduction was perhaps not free for any of the adults, "not free" in the sense that too many children would be hard for the adults (male and female) to feed.
The whole animal kingdom isn't loaded with males running around mating promiscuously. In some species, yes; in other species, no. One of the limitations on male promiscuity is female mating-willingness. Because in many species, females are choosy about mating the male would be very lucky to achieve promiscuity. Another factor is population density: there just aren't enough animals of a particular species in one area to allow for male promiscuity. (Probably more true for larger fauna than smaller,)
When and where we have achieved high population density (cities, complex urban societies) my guess is that male-promiscuity opportunities are higher than in the distant past. Maybe we are projecting present conditions into the Stone Age.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I believe the actual number of men and women in science doesn't matter. What's important is the percentage of men and women who win Nobel prizes.
If the percentage of men who get Nobels is greater than the percentage of women Nobel winners then gender plays a role in intelligence.
Ergo, just because the percentage of men Nobel awardees is greater than their women counterparts, we can't draw conclusions about gender and Nobels until and unless we know what fraction of men and what fraction of women have won Nobels.
Consider the following:
Noble winners (20) + Non-winners (80) = 100
Men (75) + Women (25) = 100
Men Nobel awardees = 15
Men who didn't win Nobel = 60
Women Nobel awardees = 5
Women who didn't win Nobel = 20
Percentage of men who won Nobels (M) = 15/75 = 20%
Percentage of women who won Nobels (W) = 5/25 = 20%
Percentage of all (men and women) who won Nobels (T) = 20/100 = 20%
Since M = W = T, gender is not associated with winning Nobels i.e. being a man/a woman doesn't affect your chances of winning the Nobel prize.
However, given that someone has won a Nobel, it's more likely that that someone is a man (15/20 = 75%) than a woman (5/20 = 25%).
So, to say that because men constitute 94% [866/(866 + 53] and women 6% [53/(866 + 53)] of Nobel awardees, gender affects the chances of winning a Noble is incorrect.
However being a member of the fairer sex does increase your chances of winning Nobels in two different fields. A male has 0% chance of winning Nobels in two different fields but Marie Curie's two Nobels makes it possible (non-zero chance) for women to achieve this unique feat.
Wow! So if there were no female scientists, the fact that none could win Nobel prizes would make men more intelligent?
The percentage probabilities don't make men intelligent as such but only shows which gender has more brains.
So you're actually agreeing that if there had never been a female scientist, their lack of Nobel prizes would show they were less intelligent?
The population to consider is all females and if the fraction of them who won Nobel prizes is less than the fraction of men who bagged a Nobel then, it seems I'm forced to conclude men as more intelligent with the caveat that winning Nobels is a good measure of intelligence.
Oh, for sure. I think it wasn't long ago that some study did, if not outright prove, but at least strongly suggest that in prehistoric times only very few men produced offspring (whereas most women did). Whether that means most men died violently before even having a chance to procreate, or that only men with high enough status got access to women in those societies, or if there was some other factor in play, I don't have a clue.
Still, my understanding is that human civilization has allowed progressively more and more men to actually procreate, although there has always been a small amount of men with large amounts of offspring (Genghis Khan being the most common example).
So, I'm not saying that it's been commonplace that human males have mated with many different females, but rather that typically it would have been a good strategy even if very few have had the chance to actually do it.
So being a genius female lawyer would not increase the average IQ of women because there's no Nobel prize for it? Dude, seriously! You've anchored yourself to an extremely silly point and you're going to drown out of sheer stubbornness. Of COURSE the number of female scientists impacts the number of female Nobel laureates.
Quoting TheMadFool
Umm.... now it really seems that you are living up to your PF name.
Because how can you say that the actual number of men and women in science doesn't matter?
Really?
If there's 99 men and 1 woman working in "Biogradable physics" before the 1970's or whatever, then it's a bit strange to say that men are better in "Biogradable physics" because more men have gotten Nobel prizes in "Biogradable physics" than women! Even the assumption that more Nobel prizes received by gender (or race/ethnicity/nationality) tells ANYTHING about the intelligence of gender (race/ethnicity/nationality) is quite dubious in to me.
I did mention a caveat...
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting ssu
Well, the actual numbers can be misleading that's what makes proportion important. For instance, a town X of a 1000 people may have a total number of murders = 200 in one year but a city Y with a population of 10,000 may have a total number of murders = 1,000 in the same year. If you look at the actual number of murders in both settlements, city Y is worse (with 1000 murders) than town X (with only 200 murders) but if you look at the murder rate we see that, in fact, town X with a murder rate = 200/1000 = 20% is worse than city Y with a murder rate = 1000/10,000 = 10%. You're safer in city Y than in town X.
Are you moving my thread to the lounge?
Yes. And?
Your example really doesn't even question the argument that I gave.
If now for 119 years Nobel prizes have been given out and roughly for 70 years of those 119 years women weren't participating in the workforce as men were and even still women don't go to work as much on the STEM-fields as men do, why on Earth you would draw any conclusions from the fact that more men have gotten Nobel prizes as women?
It is genuinely as stupid as to notice that EUROPEANS and NORTH AMERICANS have gotten more Nobel prizes than Asians without noticing that there was this thing called colonization etc until the 1960's or so. Or how about drawing the line with those who came from rich or middle class backgrounds or poor backgrounds. Again I would dare to say that there are less Nobel prize winners from dirt poor backgrounds than from middle class ones. OMG! What does that say!
But no, let's go directly to saying something about the intelligence of various people or gender or whatever. :shade:
Yes, stuff like this:
Quoting TheMadFool
is mind-bogglingly bad reasoning bordering on parody.
Sorry if it seemed as though I didn't consider other relevant factors in the equation. I fully agree with you that winning a Nobel doesn't cut it as a good metric to judge gender differences in intelligence. Indeed, women were MIA insofar as STEM is concerned and that explains why only a handful of them won Nobels.
My last post was in response to your claim that actual numbers should be considered in evaluating gender differences vis-a-vis winning Nobel prizes.
Numbers don't lie.
Quoting TheMadFool
No, but people who find information in them that isn't there in order to back up a desired conclusion do. This thread is so far from being reasonable and yet so clearly ends-oriented that it's difficult to buy that it's just the rational incompetence of a sexist old fool rather than bona fide and barely disguised misogyny.
I'm not claiming women are actually less intelligent than men and I made it a point to qualify the conclusion with a statement that a lot rides on whether Nobel Prizes are a good metric for intelligence.