Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions...
Category: STEM
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions can be politically explosive.
And the topic is close to home for me and probably many other readers of this site who turned away from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers in favor of journalism.
The study, published in Psychological Science, involved nearly 1500 college bound seniors who were first surveyed in high school and later at the age of 33. The researchers reportedly looked at SAT scores and surveyed their subjects about beliefs, values and occupations.
The conclusion: People of both sexes who...
20Aug 2012
Andrew Hacker's New York Times Op-Ed--Is Algebra Necessary?--ran more than three weeks ago, but it is still generating blog posts and comments in a wave that...
Andrew Hacker's New York Times Op-Ed--Is Algebra Necessary?--ran more than three weeks ago, but it is still generating blog posts and comments in a wave that could probably be described with some algebraic equation, but not by me.
I thought the wave had crested, but when Jennifer Ouellette posted on Scientific American a few days ago, I decided to say something about this. "Today we are defending algebra," she writes. "Again."
Hacker started this discussion by suggesting that algebra was too hard for most students and was a chief reason why many dropped out of high school. Further, it's unclear whether algebra helps many of us at work. In...
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