In this chapter, as for the European role in the preceding chapter, I document the reasons for concluding that the inventories fairly represent the role played by people who were not males and not white.Read more at location 6500
Why women have played so disproportionately small a role and Jews have played so disproportionately large a role in the arts and sciencesRead more at location 6505
WOMEN On the wallRead more at location 6508
Note: Le donne hanno basse prestazioni. Anche dopo l' emancipazione Ci sono molte categorie oppresse: molte, poco dopo la liberazione, coprono il gap Fonte DOSB (scienze) + altre fonti combinate tra loro. Si sceglie il criterio + favorevole La sottorappresentazione è tale che nemmeno significativi errori possono fare grande differenza Dopo il 1950: Nobel Limbarazzante cfr con gli ebrei (emancipati negli stessi anni) Non occidentali: scarsi contributi, sia come nazioni che come etnicità. Sia prima che dopo il 1950 X' così poche donne? fattori ambientali: stereotipi, valori alternativi (famiglia e figli) Omosessuali sovrarappresentati nelle arti Fattori biologici: 1. la maternità (un impegno emotivo non comparabile, segue biblio) 2. il patriarcato è inevitabile (non soffre eccezioni). La spiegazione biologica è la + semplice: l' uomo rischia di + e si posiziona agli estremi (meglio e peggio) IQ uomo donna. Cundrum: linguaggio, matematica e brain size. La media e la varianza. La donna è raccoglitrice (individua oggetti immobili). L' uomo è cacciatore (calcola traettorie). L' astrazione. Edit
Just as only two percent of the mathematics significant figures were women, two percent of all the significant figures were women—88 out of the 4,002 persons in the inventories.Read more at location 6513
The earliest woman to appear in the inventories is the Greek poet, Sappho of Lesbos, in –6C. A thousand years later comes the next woman, the natural philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria,Read more at location 6567
The first woman to qualify as a significant figure in the visual arts is Wen Shu (1595–1634) of Ming China.Read more at location 6570
The first woman to qualify in any of the scientific inventories after Hypatia is astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), sister and colleague of William Herschel.Read more at location 6570
The first and only woman in the music inventory is French composer Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983).Read more at location 6571
No woman qualified as a significant figure in any of the philosophy inventories.Read more at location 6572
The dearth of women in the inventories until 19C and 20C reflects near-total exclusion, by law and social pressure, from the possibility of participating. But the legal emancipation of women, which began in 19C at about the same time as Jewish emancipation, took even longer to complete.Read more at location 6573
During the most recent half century we are examining, 1900–1950, women still constituted only 5 percent of significant figures in the hard sciences, 3 percent in mathematics, 7 percent in medicine, and none in technology. In the combined arts inventories, women constituted 5 percentRead more at location 6580
Murasaki Shikibu, the author of Tale of Genji, with the third-highest index score in Japanese literature, is the lone womanRead more at location 6585
Marie Curie, who won Nobel Prizes in both chemistry and physics, is the only other woman who has an index score higher than 18.Read more at location 6586
In short, inventories in the arts and sciences, based on multiple sources, almost all of them written in the last few decades, producing highly reliable indexes, tell us that women constitute only a little more than 2 percent of all the significant figures, fewer than 5 percent of the significant figures in the first half of 20C, and that even the top-ranked women are, with the rarest exceptions, well back in the pack of the distributions in their fields.Read more at location 6590
Relying exclusively on the DoSB would have led to the conclusion that 0.7 percent of all the significant figures in mathematics and the hard sciences were women, instead of the 1.9 percent actually designated.[2]Read more at location 6607
If the selection rules used to augment the number of women are applied to men as well, the proportion of women will remain effectively unchanged, even drop,Read more at location 6626
One may go into any large bookstore and find an entire section devoted to women’sRead more at location 6636
If you go to such a section of a major bookstore, pick up one of the books about women in science, and start scanning the entries, here is an example of what you will find:Read more at location 6640
1. Women with significant scientific accomplishments but whose work postdates 1950.Read more at location 6642
5. Women, usually amateurs, who collected data that were used by scientistsRead more at location 6645
6. Activists in women’s rights and social reform whose profession was in medicineRead more at location 6646
8. Women with accomplishments ancillary to science though not involving scientific discoveriesRead more at location 6649
9. Women who were directly engaged in scientific professions and conducted substantial original researchRead more at location 6650
The exercises already conducted for the sciences point to a few large realities. One is that the representation of women is so small that even fairly large errors in under-representation wouldn’t make much difference.Read more at location 6664
Based on the most obvious indicator of distinguished achievement, the Nobel Prizes, little seems to have changed.Read more at location 6671
In a practical sense, legal equality for Jews first occurred in the newly formed United States, where Jews were given full rights under federal law, though full protection at the state level had to wait upon the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.7 France and the Netherlands emancipated their Jewish populations in the 1790s. Throughout the first half of 19C, the rest of Western and Central Europe evolved toward more tolerant policies without actually granting full legal equality. In England, Jews faced comparatively few legal restrictions after mid-18C, though it was not until the Promissory Oaths Act of 1871 that the last remnants of discriminatory law were revoked. The revolutions of 1848 saw civil rights granted (though not necessarily enforced) in most of Austro-Hungary and Germany. Bismarck completed the emancipation of Prussian Jews in 1869. Emancipation of Italian Jews began in the Piedmont in 1848 and ended in 1870 in Rome. Switzerland granted emancipation in 1866. In Russia, which in 19C also meant Poland, events moved the other way. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 intensified long-standing Russian anti-Semitism.Read more at location 6730
What happens? “The suddenness with which Jews began to appear…is nothing short of astounding,” writes historian Raphael Patai. “It seemed as if a huge reservoir of Jewish talent, hitherto dammed upRead more at location 6743
In every case except astronomy, Jews are disproportionately represented. The period 1870–1950Read more at location 6821
The question arises: If we focus on ethnicity instead of nationality, how does the picture change?Read more at location 6934
When we restrict the inquiry to significant figures and the cutoff date of 1950, hardly anything changes.Read more at location 6935
Explanations of the disproportionately high representation of Jews and low representation of women in the inventories can be biological or environmental.Read more at location 6982
Within a few decades, we will know a great deal about the genetic differences among groups.Read more at location 6986
Part of the answer is that the nature of the obstacles facing Jews and women differed. Winning the legal battle could not have nearly the liberating effect for women that it had for Jewish males.Read more at location 6997
A woman trying to take advantage of her newly won legal rights by entering a profession had to be prepared to make three new sacrifices.Read more at location 7000
First, she had to accept being an oddball, which, depending on her situation, could mean being the object of curiosity, ridicule, scorn,Read more at location 7000
Second, she had to confront the reality that to pursue a career would automatically reduce the likelihood of marriageRead more at location 7002
Third, even if she found herself in a good marriage, she had to confront another reality: Pursuing a career at full throttle, as first-rank accomplishment demands, is at odds with being a full-time mother.Read more at location 7004
Employers continued to prefer men over women, pay them more, and promote them higher.Read more at location 7008
Husbands continued to discourage wives from pursuing careers that would compete with their own.Read more at location 7009
anecdotal evidence indicates they were not much less prevalent in 1950 than they had been earlier. The conflict between career and motherhood had not even lessened.Read more at location 7010
In our own era, the disproportionate representation of homosexuals in the arts is taken for granted,Read more at location 7019
the significant figures claimed as homosexuals in a recent book, The Gay 100, include Socrates, St. Augustine, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Piotr Tchaikovsky, Lord Byron, and Francis Bacon, in addition to significant figures of more recent years, such as Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, whose homosexuality is indisputable.21Read more at location 7020
The difficulties in identifying homosexuality in significant figures are too great. Many of the claims now being made about homosexuals of the past, such as Shakespeare, are dubious.Read more at location 7024
The central importance of motherhood means that many women do not want to jeopardize the opportunity to become a mother.Read more at location 7032
The years crucial to realizing great achievements have been precisely those years during which women are sexually most attractive, best able to find mates, and best able to bear children.Read more at location 7034
Rather, it is argued, the emotional distractions of parenthood are far greater for most mothers than for most fathers.Read more at location 7037
However equally the physical burdens of child care are divided, the woman is likely to spend much more of the rest of her time thinking about the child’s needs than the man does.Read more at location 7038
we are not talking merely about motherhood versus career or about juggling jobs and children. When we discuss accomplishments at the level of the people in the inventories, we are commonly talking about perfectionist, monomaniacalRead more at location 7048
The most ambitious and controversial explanation for the disparity between accomplishment among men and women is based on biological differencesRead more at location 7052
empirical observation at the core of this view is that in human societies around the world, men have without exception routinely held the top positionsRead more at location 7053
In 1970, sociologist Steven Goldberg published The Inevitability of Patriarchy, in which he asserted that these characteristics were universal.Read more at location 7056
In 1993, Goldberg published a new statement of his theory entitled Why Men Rule,Read more at location 7058
Using social construction to explain why human societies have been universally constructed according to these sex differences in role and attainment requires complicated arguments. Using biology to explain them requires simple ones.Read more at location 7061
Many of these differences are argued to cluster around male-female differences in aggressiveness, broadly defined.Read more at location 7063
It is men who go to the extremes, compete ruthlessly, and, in whatever field they take up, are going to achieve the best and the worst.Read more at location 7065
Although the mean IQ of men and women is apparently the same, the variability of male IQ is higher—meaningRead more at location 7067
Women tend to do better, for example, in a variety of verbal skills; men in a variety of mathematical and visual-spatial skills. The latter may explain a conundrum: Brain size is reliably correlated with IQ; men and women have different mean brain sizes; but men and women have similar overall IQ.24 Some large portion of those extra brain cells in men may be devoted to three-dimensional processing, the largest and most consistently identified male cognitive advantage.Read more at location 7070
the male advantage corresponds to degree of abstraction involved in an artRead more at location 7074
to put it in terms of stereotypes that seem to have merit: Wives remember where the car keys are; guys read maps better than girls do.Read more at location 7081
Men did the hunting (fostered by other physical advantages of males) while women did the gathering. Their mental repertoires diverged corresponding to the skills that evolutionary pressure rewarded.Read more at location 7084
Within the sciences, the ordering from more to less abstract is not so clear cut—some tasks in astronomy, for example, are pure observation, cataloging, and description, while others call on the highest reaches of mathematical abstraction. But in scanning the roster of female significant figures in the sciences, the overwhelming majority made their reputations on achievements that were concrete rather than abstract,Read more at location 7088
existing circumstantial evidence is already strong enough to have persuaded me that disparities in accomplishment between the sexes are significantly grounded in biological differences,Read more at location 7093
I close the discussion of sex differences with the point that I made at the outset: All we need is a few decades’ patience and we won’t have to argue anymore.Read more at location 7095
What explains the extraordinary level of accomplishment among the Ashkenazi Jews who came out of Central and Eastern Europe?Read more at location 7098
Polish Jews in 1818: Almost every one of their families hires a tutor to teach its children….Read more at location 7100
their entire population studies. Girls too can read, even the girls of the poorest families.Read more at location 7102
Reports of the mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews vary, but it is likely to be at least 107 on tests that are normed to have a mean of 100.26Read more at location 7107
Jews also have much larger proportions of people with extremely high IQs.[28]Read more at location 7110
it is at least plausible that selection pressures have led to a higher Jewish IQ with some genetic basis.Read more at location 7119
One cause of genetic difference could be the Diaspora and subsequent centuries of anti-Semitism, requiring the Jews to survive in alien and often hostile cultures. Those who survived and left behind offspring were statistically likely to be more resourcefulRead more at location 7120
The young rabbi was one of the most desirable marriage partners for young women, and also, given the intellectual demands of Talmudic study, probably had a high IQ.Read more at location 7123
Jewish family units were strong through 1950, with few children growing up in broken homes and with close networks of grandparents, aunts, and unclesRead more at location 7131
The high expectations placed on Jewish children are the stuff of cultural cliché,
