Comments Re: Where are the girls?

[Jim Green <JMGreen@SISNA.COM>]

> i) Totally unsubstantiated assertion No.5: academics and school
> educators tend to interact in rather different ways. My experience, from
> working with both groups here, is that university academics tend to
> comfortable with conducting vigorous but impersonal debates about
> Physics ideas and details, but school educators are used to working more
> cooperatively where the emphasis is on getting teaching Physics programs
> up and running rather than focussing (some would say nit-picking) on
> academic detail. Female educators tend to particularly focus on the
> cooperative aspects of education (assertion No. something - I've lost
> count). The adversarial style of many phys-l debates do not fit in well
> with this emphasis.

Margaret is right of course: men and women ARE different!  I don't think
that it is so much the difference between university and grade school
faculty as it is between male and female --

Partially substantiated assertion #next:

Notice that most young boys grow up playing sports where there is a
"winner".  And most/many young girls grow up playing the likes of
dolls.  There is usually not a "winner" in playing dolls  Only cooperative
interactions. Though I said this to a woman recently and she said "Not so
when _I_ (she) play dolls."

Testosterone commonly shows itself on this list -- though not always --
many times there is a cooperative effort to sort through an issue -- but
many times there seems to be someone with a burst of testosterone who wants
to "win".

Now, if the women on the list would join in more, the conversations would
be more helpful.

I have another only partially substantiated assertion:  The exploration of
physics needs both the creative side of the brain and the logical side --
but it needs both sides to operate at the same time.  This seems to occur
in women more often than in men.  Men seem to tend to be either left
brained (better philosophers or logicians) or right brained (better artists
or cooks)  And if heavily testosteroned aggressive men would step aside,
women would be far better politicians and admirals, for example.

To the extent that this is true, on the average women should be better
physicists (and teachers) than men -- and on this physics education list we
boys ought to be more courteous and shut up and listen to them more often.

Just me over here in my little corner. (:-)

Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen