Here are all the things I meant to blog about in the past couple of weeks but didn’t have time to mention:
The makers of Joe Millionare are unveiling a new reality series, “When Women Rule The World.” There’s this island, see, and on it women are in charge. Unfortunately, it’s not Paradise Island and the women won’t be Amazons. Instead, they’ll be typical reality contestants. The men have to obey the women, and/or they’ll get eliminated. Will this lead to a Utopian society, the Fox network press release wonders? Because of course we all look to reality television for our world-shattering thought experiments.
Yet another study finds a correlation between gender stereotypes and math ability in women. This time, instead of having the women read essays before doing math problems, the researchers just surveyed their attitudes:
Researchers discovered that women who possessed strong implicit gender stereotypes, (for example, automatically associating “male” more than “female” with math ability and math professions) and were likely to identify themselves as feminine performed worse relative to their female counterparts who did not possess such stereotypes and who were less likely to identify with traditionally female characteristics. The same underperforming females were also the least inclined to pursue a math-based career.
To be fair, though, they didn’t seem to establish which was cause and which was effect.
Two new books look at lives of women who made major contributions to physics:
During the past 40 years, study after study has addressed why more women do not become scientists. The question is most apt for physics… The flip side of the question is: Why and how did those few prominent female physicists succeed? Historian Judith P. Zinsser’s La Dame d’Esprit and the profiles of women physicists in Out of the Shadows unveil the scintillating lives of women who overcame discrimination and made major contributions that went largely unacknowledged.
Marquise du Chatelet was Voltaire’s lover and shielded him from critics, but she also helped to synthesize prevailing notions of the physical world in her time. And her book Institutions of Physics helped to propagate the scientfic method. Meanwhile, Mary L. Cartwright, a pure mathematician, helped to found chaos theory.
Although the salary gap between men and women remains weighted in men’s favor in most instances, women are actually making more money than men in some IT related jobs, PC Magazine reports. Female help desk professionals and tech writers make more than men in the same jobs. But also female CEOs and other execs in the IT industry make 1.4 percent more than male ones. Overall, women in IT make 9.7 percent less than men, an improvement over the 10.9 percent gap a year ago.
The Boston Globe recently had 