The Freedom to Say No
Elaine McArdle reports that gender disparity in science and technology may be a result of gender preferences—that is, two different studies show that men and women seek different things (big surprise, huh?). Of course, anyone who actually dealt with men and women would know this, but I guess it has taken science time to move from thinking of women as defective men, to thinking of them as the same as men, and finally to thinking of them as something different from but no less important than men. This is progress.
The details of the studies are interesting: one found that men preferred working with tools and women preferred dealing with people; another found that math-precocious men preferred to work with inorganic stuff while math-precocious women preferred working with living stuff. This led to more men in engineering and more women in medicine and biology.
