ImaginativePRO Blog

GIRLS ARE SMARTER THAN BOYS WHEN THEY ARE YOUNGER. BUT WHY DON'T THEY PURSUE MORE CAREERS IN MATH AND SCIENCE?

IF GIRLS HAVE SLIGHTLY HIGHER IQS AND GET BETTER GRADES, WHY ARE THEIR NUMBERS DISPROPORTIONATELY LOW IN MATH AND SCIENCE CAREERS?

I still remember learning in grade school that men were better at math and science, and women were better at English and art. The teacher (who was a woman), presented the information as a general fact--noting that these were just loose guidelines that could differ from person to person--and I didn’t question it for a second. You know, until I grew up a bit and realized the very premise was preposterous.

But as this infographic (which is really a narrative of sorts) shows us, it’s not enough to right the wrongs of gender perception when people grow older, the damage has already been done.

Click Image To Enlarge

A lot of these facts are likely nuggets you’ve heard before, like girls performing worse on tests when they are required to mark their gender. But seeing each factoid lined up in pseudo-chronological order, from a grade schooler to a professional, it seems inevitable that women don’t stake their place in industries already dominated by men.

The picture is incomplete, of course. We don’t see how the comparative self-esteem of men evolves over the same time. But it’s safe to say that, when only 16% of students in engineering classes are women, we’re doing something wrong--especially when we can all benefit from some fresh perspective.

Twenty years or so after that day in grade school, I’m a writer and my wife is a scientist. I guess that, given these gender-professional norms, you could make a joke about who wears the pants in my family. But it could never offend either of us. No matter what we do, she’ll still be smarter than me anyway.

COMMENTARY:    These are alarming statistics.  Makes you wonder what is the underlying cause of the loss of self-esteem among females.  Perhaps it could be that women simply do not care to pursue careers requiring too much math and science.  There are fewer of those type of jobs, and many of them are in academia or technology centers like Silicon Valley, and they very often do not pay very much, than jobs in the private sector.   Whatever the reason, it makes you wonder if the math and science "gap" that economists talk about and reasons why American universities are producing fewer engineers than China, Europe and India per capita is because of that gender gap in math and science.  

In a blog post dated September 29, 2011, the U.S. is producing more science and engineer graduates (undergrad and graduate) in 2008 than they did in 1998.  However, the state of science and engineering in the U.S. is still strong, yet the nation's lead is shrinking, according to the latest report from the National Science Board.  Based on a wide range of data - from R&D spending to higher-education trends in science and engineering fields - the group's Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 report suggests that U.S. dominance of world science and engineering has deteriorated significantly in recent years, due in large part to rapidly increasing capabilities in China and other Asian economies.

However, U.S. high-technology employers have given our educational system a bad rap, claiming that we don't produce sufficient science and engineering students to fill their employment requirements.  They always seem to bitch about the limitation on H1B visas.  We have already outsourced nearly 20 million jobs overseas, and employers are trying to do the same thing by importing more science and engineers at lower wages.  I remember a "60 Minutes" documentary about why they hire foreign engineers.  They claim they are smarter.  I think that's bullshit.  The real reason is economic--they are cheaper.  U.S. employers are using the H1B visa as a gimick to reduce overall science and engineering wages.   I say, hire American, keep those jobs here, and provide incentives for U.S. students to pursue science and math courses. 

It appears that the shortage of females in careers requiring science and math is not strictly a U.S. problem.   A similar problem exists in India, a bastian of math and science graduates, and important source of software engineers for Silicon Valley.   In fact,  the percentage of females studying science, engineering/technology and medicine are in the low teens when compared to their Indian male counterparts.   Only 15.8% and 16.5% of India's graduate and doctoral candidates are female respectively.   It would not surprise me that similar numbers exist in Japan, a very male dominated society, but I don't have the data.    If anybody does, post it in the blog.   

Courtesy of an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design

EX-APPLE DESIGNER CREATES TEACHING USER INTERFACE THAT "KILLS MATH" USING DATA VISUALIZATION INSTEAD OF MATH SYMBOLS

Designer Bret Victor hopes so: his prototype user interface or UI turns gnarly differential equations into something normal humans can understand.

We hear a lot of design manifestos around here. But Bret Victor's stuck out: He wants to kill math. He's no Luddite, though -- he thinks mathematics is one of the most powerful, transcendent ways humans have for understanding and changing the world. What he wants to kill is math's interface: opaque, abstract, unfamiliar, hard.  He writes.

"The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols."

Now he's created a prototype iPad interface that turns differential equations into something that doesn't feel math-ey at all:  visual, intuitive, and touchable.

Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

Victor's key insight is that what we think of as "math" -- equations, numerals, operators, variables, those squiggly symbols filling up millions of blackboards and textbooks -- isn't math at all: it's merely the interface. And it sucks. He tells Co.Design.

 "I hate symbolic abstraction, [because] I think it's a barrier to creativity.  So I don't hate math per se; I hate its current representations. Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? It’s incredibly, ridiculously difficult. That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication -- the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface."

It may not surprise you, after reading that, to hear that Victor used to be an interface designer at Apple -- a company whose founding mission could be restated as "kill computers." Of course Jobs and Co. didn't hate computers -- they just hated the technical, limiting abstractions involved in using them. But Victor left Apple because he has "zero interest in helping people look through photos and listen to music," he says.

As an interface designer, he wanted to hunt (and "kill") bigger game -- the kinds of problems that artists and scientists deal with.  He says.  

"I saw Ali Mazalek's 'Pathways' project, which was an attempt to design a 'tangible interface' for visualizing and exploring biochemical pathways.  Their design was very problematic, and the biology researcher 'clients' were not very enthusiastic about it.  But seeing the problem gave me some ideas, and I whipped up a little prototype basically as a way of teaching them how to think about this sort of UI design."

Click Images To Enlarge

That prototype eventually grew into the interface shown in the video clip at the top of this article. Although it can run on an iPad, Victor isn't planning on releasing "anything resembling the design shown" as an app.

"The prototype was intended to teach and inspire tool designers, so that's the meta-audience."

It's a variation on the old saw: give a man a fish, and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. If Victor is going to "kill math," a single specific app won't do it -- but a set of inspiring examples just might, if they inspire others to think about how they can "kill math" themselves.

Victor explains.  

"The dirty little secret is that the greatest mathematicians don't actually think in symbols." 

Einstein himself said that he "did his thing" with "sensations of a kinesthetic or muscular type." Sure, e=mc² is an equation -- a gloriously elegant and simple one. But the point is that the equation isn't the math; it's not the insight, the creativity, that actually happened inside Einstein's head. What if Einstein didn't have to resort to symbol-manipulation to express and communicate the idea that "matter is equivalent to energy in this exact way"? What if the next Einstein doesn't have to do that? If fact, what if "not having to do that" is how we get the next Einstein?

That's the headshot Victor wants to take in his "kill math" project.  He says.  

"When a technology gains an interface that transforms it from a 'technical' subject to an artistic medium, that's when creative magic happens.  The pocket calculator and the spreadsheet both made huge contributions in allowing people to do mathematical explorations without dealing with the crap. I'm hoping to take the next step."

COMMENTARY:   I would love to see a mathematical visualization of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity from which Albert Einstein developed that cute little equation:  e=mc².  This cute little equation says that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.   But, first let's watch Einstein's Big Idea, shall we?

 

 

Now, let's conduct a computerized visualization of the formula e=mc² to see what it actually looks like as energy is released.

  

The above visualization starts with a small circle around each particle and add up all the directions pointing away from each center. Then I add the vectors together and calculate a new coordinate. In the case of self-repelling, I add the contributions, but for self-absorbing I subtract the contribution. When one particle circulate around the others, the center of self-absorbed energy translates from particle to particle, but at slower velocity. Every point in space have a path, if you add Cartesian points to start with it will look something like magnetic fields. By subtracting the contribution for certain particles you can illustrate electromagnetism.

Got that?

Courtesy of an artcle dated July 18, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design