Wo(men) in Math

One of the most interesting aspects of the UW campus is that it functions almost as a sort of laborotory of human biodiversity - a microcosm of the world (a high-IQ world albeit). One of my favourite past times is observing people, making generalizations about patterns of behaviour amongst groups, and formulating theories about why these patterns exist. Maybe this is why I enjoy Russell Peters' comedy so much; in effect he does the same thing but rather than speculating as to why these patterns are true as I do, he exploits them for comedy.

Anyone who isn't near-sighted and has ventured to and fro on the UW campus will note how estrogen-laden some faculties are relative to others. The Math Faculty is overwhelmingly male , while the ratio is exactly opposite in Arts. Venturing from Arts Lecture Hall to the Math Building is akin to transporting oneself from a planet of blonde women to a world of black-haired males. At some point in one's University career, one can't help but wonder and speculate as to why this is so. Of course it is taboo in today's climate to assert that that any differences in outcome is the result of *innate* genetic differences, so I will try to speculate as to why this pattern exists in a sort of PC way.

This issue is of particular interest to me as I am majoring in math, so in a sense I experience and evidence this dichotomy firsthand. Of the roughly ~3000 undergraduates in the Math Faculty ~2200 are male (rough approximation of 75%). This should of course be of no surprise. Generally, the more math-oriented in the field, the less likely one is to find the fairer sex. The trends one finds in UW are an excellent case in point. In the Science faculty, where men and women about roughly equally represented, the heavily math-oriented disciplines like Physics tend to be heavily male while "soft" sciences like Chemistry and Biology are girl-dominated. The same is true of Applied Health Sciences. In the sausage-dominated Engineering faculty, ChemEng is ~1/3 female but in ElecEng, women are next to nill. Ditto for the poor Softies.

In the Math faculty, the most heavily female major is the Teaching Option, though that should be no surprise as it is the least math-oriented discipline in math and teaching is a rather feminine profession. Also, very few students actually enter this option, so the raw number of women is low. The Math/Business option and Accounting is also "heavily" female (heavy female in Math Faculty terms = ~33%). From these observations one could speculate that the more purely theoretical the discipline, the less girls one is likely to find. I surmise that the ratio of women:men in order in decremental order in the Math Faculty, by major, is as follows: Teaching Option -> Actuarial Science -> Math/Business -> Accounting -> Applied Math/Stat -> Combinatorics -> Pure Math -> Computer Science (blech!).

Interestingly, the discipline in which one would fine the most girls is my very own - Actuarial Science - which is very near 50% female. Then again, ActSci is one of the more practical of the math majors and a very lucrative career path. Additionally, the preponderance of international students in ActSci does skewer this ratio a great deal. ActSci is likely the most "FOB" discipline at UW - perhaps even all of North America! UW Math is heavily Asian, but whereas the CBCs & Koreans tend to Math/Business, CS & Accounting, the FOBS tend to ActSci (likely because Actuarial Science requires less English than the former).

Additionally, a large % of the Math faculty at UW is comprised of international students and recent immigrants, the vast majority from southern coastal provinces of China (Guangdong). Certainly with most of these students lacking fluency in English, the desired major of choice would be Math - the discipline requiring the least verbal proficiency. So that factor, compounded with the natural Asian proclivity towards math + the negative bias of kids of immigrant parentage to any arts-related discipline - and you find that a large % of these international students somehow land in ActSci.

So why do these trends exist? One could assert that these differences have a biological foundation. Simply stated, men are just damn better at math. However, what about the social stigma attached to math? Math is seen, in Western culture atleast, as a rather geeky thing to do. There are tons of movies about lawyers because "lawyering" is seen as a sexy profession. When's the last time you saw a film starring an Electrical engineer? Or a slick accountant? The accountant is invariably a monotonous, reedy nerd. The only film I can recall with an actuary in the title role is Along Came Polly, where Ben Stiller (once again) plays a screwup - this time a "Risk Assessment Analyst" whose wife deserts him on their honeymoon. Not exactly setting a fine precedent for the Actuaries in Film movement.

So with all the "stigmas" attached to Mathematics in our culture, it is no surprise that women naturally shy away from math-oriented disciplines. In high school, nobody whose concerned with their popularity wants to be labelled as a geek - and actually *enjoying* math is akin to social suicide for wannabe-cool girls desiring admission to the "popular" high school cliques. In my high school, all the Canadian-born white girls sucked at math; the only girls in the same playing field as I was were Chinese. Now one could argue that the Chinese naturally gifted in math (I wouldn't dispute that - look who comes out on top in the International Math Olympiad every year!), but I would assert that the stigma attached towards math in East Asian/Confucian culture is nowhere near as great as in the North America, if indeed there exists a stigma at all. Ergo, the women in the Math Faculty at Waterloo are overwhelmingly Asian.

So I would assert that the best way to encourage more women to enter the math is to erase the geek stigma towards math-oriented disciplines. We can start with spiffing-up the smelly MathSoc/C&D Lounge geeks because they're certainly not helping with Math's image problems!