> There is very strong agreement about the stereotypes of fields' degree of scientificness and politics of professors (r's > .90). Interestingly, Democrat and Republic voters both agreed that the fields with the most centrist or apolitical professors are the most scientific (e.g. physics).
It looks like your politics-related charts all concern perception of politics in the field and not actual politics in the field?
I was surprised by this summary; I would have guessed that the field with the most centrist professors was something more along the lines of economics. It has a pronounced rightward slant... for academia. That makes it likely to be relatively close to the political center. I expect math professors to be overwhelmingly leftist, because that's what the campus environment is like and, studying math, they have no particular reason to develop independent beliefs. The math is the same either way.
Nursing faculty are 53% liberal / 47% conservative, or by affiliation 32% Democrat / 26% Republican, matching well with the perception reported in the graphs.
Mathematics faculty are 69% liberal and 17% conservative - overwhelmingly leftist, as expected - or by affiliation, 43% Democrat and 15% Republican.
Computer Science faculty, perceived as less extreme than the math guys, are in fact 74% liberal / 26% conservative, or 43% Democrat / 21% Republican.
Economics faculty are 55% liberal / 39% conservative, or 36% Democrat / 17% Republican, a bit more liberal and markedly less conservative than the nurses. But decently close to the center, as expected.
(Engineering faculty are a bit less liberal than the economists, but much less conservative. The actual winner of "most centered", among the fields in the table, is Business if you go by % liberal (closer to 50 is better), with % conservative breaking the tie with Engineering, and Nursing if you go by % liberal minus % conservative (closer to 0 is better).)
I can only conclude that the perceptions of professorial politics you're working with are wildly out of touch with reality. What gives? Is there a point in trying to draw conclusions from them?
(It's also interesting, to me, that the Nursing and CS faculty liberal/conservative self-IDs add up to 100%, a trait these faculties appear to share only with Performing Arts.)
> It seems ordinary people consider centrism or apoliticalness a hallmark of good science.
Based on the actual political valence of academic fields, I would have to say that while this might be true, people are inventing political centrism to attribute to fields that they perceive as scientific. They certainly aren't judging fields as scientific based on the political centrism of those fields, and they certainly aren't judging the political centrism of those fields based on the politics of those fields.
Who in the world thinks that Anthropology professors are more than 30% Republicans?
To engage in the more cognitively demanding fields requires the ability to focus attention on something requiring mental effort to hold in one's thoughts, and to do this for extended periods of time. To be, as they say, in the zone.
I suspect this ability strongly correlates with being productive in technical fields.
I also suspect this trait is more or less a male characteristic
Seb Jensen found in a study that the overrepresentation of men in the most demanding fields cannot be explained by the difference in mean IQ and standard deviation.
Charles Murray explains it in Human Diversity as "women who are strong in math are also strong in other areas, whereas men who are strong in math tend to have that as their only strength". (Talking about results from the SMPY, the study of mathematically precocious youth.)
Therefore math-strong women have other options and can choose them. Math-strong men, not so much. So men are over-represented in fields requiring strength in math.
But also, there are fewer women with the required math skill.
(I should read books sequentially, not concurrently.)
"As such, the rather obvious explanation for the correlation between field level "perceptions of brilliance" and female representation is that women are somewhat worse at math, don't like math as much, and tend to avoid math heavy fields. A boring but accurate explanation."
Doesn't this statement conflict with your above comment?
"Women generally don't like math as much as men, even if their talents are not so far below men's."
Generally, those that are good at math...like math.
I don't think math aptitude is the thing. It is only a marker which correlates with the thing.
The thing is a sort of curiosity for how things work, and finding satisfaction understanding how things work and in making things work.
This is a generally male characteristic.
I have known a lot of female engineers. None of them had this intrinsic motivation. Most of them were only good at the social aspects of engineering - project, team, and supplier management.
Over the years I have made the same assertion(s), almost verbatim. I studied engineering at Duke in the early 80s and noted at the the time some of the (few) female students had math skills vastly superior to my own, yet were strikingly incurious about technical things in general and often exhibited limited intuition for simple tasks like audio system hook-up, or automobile troubleshooting.
True enough. Best example is my oldest daughter. She was taking a physics class and had the following problem: a conductive sphere has one point tied to ground. What is the voltage at each point on the sphere?
The double integral in spherical coordinates was not a problem, but she wasn't sure of the answer.
(It is a conductive sphere with a static charge).
She thought she wanted to be an engineer but ended up doing front end software development.
"Seb Jensen found in a study that the overrepresentation of men in the most demanding fields cannot be explained by the difference in mean IQ and standard deviation."
It is possible that IQ tests are loaded more toward general intelligence than toward 'STEM' intelligence.
As I understand it, in order to get the required result - that both males and females have an average score that is the same - IQ tests do not properly include spatial reasoning, even though it is a key aspect of general intelligence. They do this because males score much higher than females in that area.
Can't remember my source for that but it does seem to parallel experience.
> There is very strong agreement about the stereotypes of fields' degree of scientificness and politics of professors (r's > .90). Interestingly, Democrat and Republic voters both agreed that the fields with the most centrist or apolitical professors are the most scientific (e.g. physics).
It looks like your politics-related charts all concern perception of politics in the field and not actual politics in the field?
I was surprised by this summary; I would have guessed that the field with the most centrist professors was something more along the lines of economics. It has a pronounced rightward slant... for academia. That makes it likely to be relatively close to the political center. I expect math professors to be overwhelmingly leftist, because that's what the campus environment is like and, studying math, they have no particular reason to develop independent beliefs. The math is the same either way.
And indeed I see in this table ( https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Political-identification-of-college-professors-by-field_tbl1_40823273 ) that...
Nursing faculty are 53% liberal / 47% conservative, or by affiliation 32% Democrat / 26% Republican, matching well with the perception reported in the graphs.
Mathematics faculty are 69% liberal and 17% conservative - overwhelmingly leftist, as expected - or by affiliation, 43% Democrat and 15% Republican.
Computer Science faculty, perceived as less extreme than the math guys, are in fact 74% liberal / 26% conservative, or 43% Democrat / 21% Republican.
Economics faculty are 55% liberal / 39% conservative, or 36% Democrat / 17% Republican, a bit more liberal and markedly less conservative than the nurses. But decently close to the center, as expected.
(Engineering faculty are a bit less liberal than the economists, but much less conservative. The actual winner of "most centered", among the fields in the table, is Business if you go by % liberal (closer to 50 is better), with % conservative breaking the tie with Engineering, and Nursing if you go by % liberal minus % conservative (closer to 0 is better).)
I can only conclude that the perceptions of professorial politics you're working with are wildly out of touch with reality. What gives? Is there a point in trying to draw conclusions from them?
(It's also interesting, to me, that the Nursing and CS faculty liberal/conservative self-IDs add up to 100%, a trait these faculties appear to share only with Performing Arts.)
> It seems ordinary people consider centrism or apoliticalness a hallmark of good science.
Based on the actual political valence of academic fields, I would have to say that while this might be true, people are inventing political centrism to attribute to fields that they perceive as scientific. They certainly aren't judging fields as scientific based on the political centrism of those fields, and they certainly aren't judging the political centrism of those fields based on the politics of those fields.
Who in the world thinks that Anthropology professors are more than 30% Republicans?
One other thing.
To engage in the more cognitively demanding fields requires the ability to focus attention on something requiring mental effort to hold in one's thoughts, and to do this for extended periods of time. To be, as they say, in the zone.
I suspect this ability strongly correlates with being productive in technical fields.
I also suspect this trait is more or less a male characteristic
Seb Jensen found in a study that the overrepresentation of men in the most demanding fields cannot be explained by the difference in mean IQ and standard deviation.
Source :
https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/women-and-low-iq-majors-why-do-they?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Yes, other factors are more important. Women generally don't like math as much as men, even if their talents are not so far below men's. This is a constant source of bitterness for feminists. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027718302634 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-12585-001
Charles Murray explains it in Human Diversity as "women who are strong in math are also strong in other areas, whereas men who are strong in math tend to have that as their only strength". (Talking about results from the SMPY, the study of mathematically precocious youth.)
Therefore math-strong women have other options and can choose them. Math-strong men, not so much. So men are over-represented in fields requiring strength in math.
But also, there are fewer women with the required math skill.
(I should read books sequentially, not concurrently.)
"As such, the rather obvious explanation for the correlation between field level "perceptions of brilliance" and female representation is that women are somewhat worse at math, don't like math as much, and tend to avoid math heavy fields. A boring but accurate explanation."
Doesn't this statement conflict with your above comment?
"Women generally don't like math as much as men, even if their talents are not so far below men's."
Generally, those that are good at math...like math.
I don't think math aptitude is the thing. It is only a marker which correlates with the thing.
The thing is a sort of curiosity for how things work, and finding satisfaction understanding how things work and in making things work.
This is a generally male characteristic.
I have known a lot of female engineers. None of them had this intrinsic motivation. Most of them were only good at the social aspects of engineering - project, team, and supplier management.
I can only think of one I would hire.
Over the years I have made the same assertion(s), almost verbatim. I studied engineering at Duke in the early 80s and noted at the the time some of the (few) female students had math skills vastly superior to my own, yet were strikingly incurious about technical things in general and often exhibited limited intuition for simple tasks like audio system hook-up, or automobile troubleshooting.
True enough. Best example is my oldest daughter. She was taking a physics class and had the following problem: a conductive sphere has one point tied to ground. What is the voltage at each point on the sphere?
The double integral in spherical coordinates was not a problem, but she wasn't sure of the answer.
(It is a conductive sphere with a static charge).
She thought she wanted to be an engineer but ended up doing front end software development.
"The thing is a sort of curiosity for how things work, and finding satisfaction understanding how things work and in making things work."
You make a good point.
"Seb Jensen found in a study that the overrepresentation of men in the most demanding fields cannot be explained by the difference in mean IQ and standard deviation."
It is possible that IQ tests are loaded more toward general intelligence than toward 'STEM' intelligence.
As I understand it, in order to get the required result - that both males and females have an average score that is the same - IQ tests do not properly include spatial reasoning, even though it is a key aspect of general intelligence. They do this because males score much higher than females in that area.
Can't remember my source for that but it does seem to parallel experience.