Women and science

Post Reply New Topic

its mainly genes. Of course society does its part.

As aspies you should know that genes are very strong. Women and men are very different from the out side, same thing with the pluming. We are different, a whole X chromosome.

That's actually very difficult to say for certain. The way we are socialized has a very strong effect on what sort of people we become. I don't know if there's been a study that has tried to figure out which one is the case here.

1.There where studies of twins that where separated at birth.

2.Where do you think aspines commes from? No, its not a disease. This is why we say neurodiversity. A lot of stuff are just programmed in our heads. Its really strange to hold that we are blank slates at birth, and that we are not deseased. I have my opinion for other reason too, but i'll keep this short.

Thank you for putting that second part in there, I can recreate the Sistine Chapel but math feels like a clogged sink nowadays. I laugh about it but I kinda feel like I caught the stupids. At one point it was fun but once they started adding triangles my brain checked out lol.

I am female and shock horror i'm an astro physics masters student, dunn dunn dunnn and shock horror even more, i know at least 8 other girls on my same course. Its about a 60:40 ratio of male to females so I do believe that the old fashioned thinking of females in science is changing. Infact my main astro lecturer is a female and this was the case at my old uni as well. Yay no need for bra burning in my uni.

Science is a field for a thinking person who has the logic and intuition to either make original contributions or to do useful applications. I do not see any gender-ness in this.

ruveyn

That's good to hear! Strangely, the Intro to Astrophysics Class I'm taking is almost entirely male. Maybe things are better in Europe than in Canada?

Lisa Randall is a leading world class astrophysicist. Make her your hero.

ruveyn

Although sometimes I wish my bra can just burn... torture devices!

I don't get the question... If you enjoy something pursue it who gives a flying excrement what others tell you you should do they can only see what you can do if you do it. I for one love math and while I am male it made for very boring/depressing lectures to note that there were very few women in my classes and I had no opportunities to discuss something I actually cared about with women as the few women in the math department were looking to go into teaching high school and had no real interest in mathematics (I DID try talking to them about it). So I say please for the sake of men like me everywhere we need more women in the sciences. And of course math and all other technical fields. I want a date and I do not have the capability of being interested in someone that has no passion for the sciences (philosophers might be an exception).

I apologize for my yelling but it is necessary in order to get my point across

Despite amazingly high marks in math in high school (I was doing calculus problems in my head), no one ever approached me to talk about applied mathematics, nor did it ever occur to me to ask. When it came time to pick a college major, I didn't want to pick math, because I thought the only thing you could do with a math degree was become a teacher. I tell a joke (which isn't actually a joke, because it is the truth) that before looking at the list of possible majors I decided ahead of time that I would pick something math-related, but not math, and the first thing on the list was accounting, so I picked it. I never looked past it on the list, nor did I ever talk with a guidance counselor or anyone else that should have steered me FAR FAR away from something as horribly boring and non-technical as accounting.

I enjoyed learning about how accounting systems worked (I always enjoy learning about systems, even accounting systems), but I didn't like any of my classmates and once I understood the processes for debit/credits, JEs, GLs, and cost accounting, I became horribly despondent. It took a few more years, but I finally made my way out of the accounting field and into technical grounds. Unfortunately, my work history and present job is still office/accounting based - it's like a black hole that I can't seem to escape.

My chosen major out of high school was Computer Science. After 3 years of incredibly boring classes in CS and incredibly interesting classes in Mathematics when it came time to transfer (I didn't talk to guidance counselors either) I transferred as a PURE Math major. The pure math major is actually what got me hired at my last two jobs in software development (which from the sounds of it you would LOVE) I get to have a degree that was amazing amounts of fun to attain and still work in the industry I desired. I get to study different systems all day long because that is what programming and computer science is all about. I would suggest to you to pick up a programming language or two (I can get by in 3-4 easily and could work in 5-6 more in debugging) then once you know whatever system you go on to another project because the computer does the rest of the work for you.

So much win here...

Makes me think of how last night I was tempted to comment on someone's Facebook status with "Like^(8^T)" (that is, "Like to the power of infinity"), but I wasn't sure if anyone would get it.

While being an accounting major, I decided to take physics as my science class, and I begged for the physics for science majors class, because the only difference was having knowledge of calculus. It was while watching the student tutor during one of the after-class tutoring sessions (I only went because I was curious what they did in there) when I finally became aware of exactly how jaded I was with my accounting courses. His excitement about solving physics problems brought back the same feeling I had back in high school calculus class. From that day on, I was convinced I had to get away from accounting and into something I really enjoyed. I like physics as a hobby, so I changed to that as my major, and I probably would have kept going with that and been fine.

The second turning point was when I was in the computer science building heading to class, and I noticed while waiting for the elevator the list of which floors housed which departments. I saw robotics. While I like understanding actuators and all, it didn't sound very challenging, and I was really looking forward to getting into my quantum physics and electrical engineering classes. However, the robotics idea stuck. I've always been fascinated with robots and robotic behavior, and how our brains work and process things, and, of all things, child development. I had never put all of those interests into a cohesive group before. That led me thinking about A.I. I talked with a computer science adviser who was more than happy regarding my ideas, and said the department really needed people like me, but he felt that the computer science department wasn't right for me. He sent me to talk with a professor in the psychology department, which sounded a bit weird to me. Come to find out, this second professor received his mathematics degree at MIT and was now lecturing on neural networks. He also agreed that my interest was fascinating, but also felt that the psychology degree was also too limiting. Luckily, my university has an interdisciplinary studies degree, which the psychology professor suggested I go and find out about.

Sure enough, I now have a BS in A.I. research and development, with emphases in cognitive psychology, neural networks, a minor in math (specifically matrices, game theory, and multi-variate statistics), a minor in business/accounting (as those hours were able to carry over), and a year and half of intern experience in the cognitive psychology lab running various experiments and helping other experiments set up data gathering databases, etc. The more I think about it, I would have excelled amazingly well with math, but I think I ultimately would have still preferred where I ended up. Understanding how the brain does what it does utilizes a large portion of my spatial reasoning in a way that really works for me. Even calculus was starting to get boring, and I recalled asking my teacher in high school if it was ever going to get more complicated. (What kid asks their teacher if calculus is ever going to get more complicated?!?)

I did take a year of Pascal programming back in high school, and I have books for C++ and Java, and a few other books for basic game programming and Unreal programming. I just haven't gotten around to focusing on them yet. There's just not enough hours in the day! (There would be if I wasn't having to work my day job. *grumbles*)

Now that sounds like fun.