In Taiwan, most registered organ donors are women

Women far more willing to donate organs, numbers show

"Taipei, Aug. 25 (CNA) Of the 620,000 people on Taiwan's organ donation list, 65 percent are women, which one expert says proves woman have bigger hearts than men.

"Wu Ying-lai, secretary general of the Republic of China Organ Procurement Association, made the remarks as her association released a report on trends in local organ donation to mark its 20th anniversary on Sunday.

"The trend is more pronounced in the largest demographic of organ donors, those aged 21-50, which features 2.2 times more women than men, Wu said, based on an analysis of the 223,250 people who have signed up for the national organ donation program in the past 10 years.

"Looking at the data more closely, the largest groups of donors are women aged 31-40, followed by women aged 41-50, women aged 21-30, men aged 31-40, and men aged 41-50, she noted."

Women soldiers in combat

The road to a top job in the American armed forces lies in the combat branches, and soldiers can be forgiven for wanting combat experience. Women soldiers (and sailors and airmen? Is there a gender neutral word for soldiers in the Air Force?) are no exception, but have been excluded from "combat" assignments. (Of course, particularly in anti-insurgent and anti-terrorist warfare, where there are no front lines, women soldiers have increasingly often been thrust into combat.)

It appears that this is another repugnance that is fading away (not without opposition): Formally Lifting a Combat Ban, Military Chiefs Stress Equal Opportunity

"WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday formally lifted the military’s ban on women in combat, saying that not every woman would become a combat soldier but that every woman deserved the chance to try.
...
"In the most vocal official opposition to the changes, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is set to become the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, warned that some in Congress may seek legislation to limit the combat jobs open to women.

“I want everyone to know that the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which I am the ranking member, will have a period to provide oversight and review,” Mr. Inhofe said in a statement. “During that time, if necessary, we will be able to introduce legislation to stop any changes we believe to be detrimental to our fighting forces and their capabilities. I suspect there will be cases where legislation becomes necessary.”

"Pentagon officials said that the different services would have until May 15 to submit their plans for carrying out the new policy, but that the military wanted to move as quickly as possible to open up combat positions to women. Military officials said that there were more than 200,000 jobs now potentially open to women in specialties like infantry, armor, artillery and elite Special Operations commando units like the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers.

"If a service determines that a specialty should not be open to women, Pentagon officials said that representatives of the service would have to make the case to the defense secretary by January 2016."

Why are there (still) fewer women professors than men?

A study of chemistry Ph.D. students in Britain reveals that academic careers start looking disproportionately unattractive to women compared to men as they progress through their studies. It appears that Ph.D. supervisors are largely to blame.


Here's a succinct summary: Why Women Leave Academia
"Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as Ph.D. candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great."


And here's the report, and its executive summary:

The chemistry PhD: the impact on women’s retention
A report prepared by Jessica Lober Newsome for the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and the Royal Society of Chemistry


Executive Summary and Key Findings
This research attempted to establish what accounts for the findings of a RSC survey of the career intentions
of chemistry PhD students (RSC, 2008). It was a qualitative study which aimed to pin point the factors that
discourage women more than men from planning a career in research, especially in academia.

81 chemists, via eight focus groups (six with second year students, two with third year students) and 47 telephone interviews (23 with third year students and 24 with people who had recently completed a chemistry PhD programme) participated in the research.

The research identified that the following factors, which relate to the doctoral study experience, and deter a larger proportion of women than men from remaining in research beyond their PhD.

During doctoral study, a larger proportion of female than male participants had:

 Been deeply affected by what might be termed ‘standard supervision issues’ (e.g. enjoying little pastoral care and having to cope with a supervisor who lacks interpersonal/management skills);
 Encountered significant supervision issues, which they felt powerless to resolve;
 Experienced a lack of integration with their research group, isolation and exclusion (and more rarely,
bullying);
 Been uncomfortable with the culture of their research group (about working patterns, time and
expectations and the level of competition between group members), especially where the culture was
particularly ‘macho’;
 Developed concerns about poor (though normal) experimental success rates, apprehensive of what this may infer to others about their skills and competence;
 Formed the impression that the doctoral research process is an ordeal filled with frustration, pressure and stress, which a career in research would only prolong; rather than short-term pain for long-term gain.


The research suggested that where women do not wish to pursue an academic career, this is because they perceived the rewards on offer insufficient to overcome the challenge and compromise entailed.

In contrast to male participants, female participants had:

 Come to view academic careers as too all-consuming, too solitary and not sufficiently collaborative;
 Come to the conclusion that the short-term contract aspect of post-docing could not be reconciled with other aspects of their life, particularly relationships and family;
 Come to believe the competition for a permanent academic post was too fierce for them to compete successfully;
 Come to believe they would need to make sacrifices (about femininity and motherhood) in order to succeed in academia;
 Been advised in negative terms of the challenge they would face (by virtue of their gender).

The report concludes that the chemistry PhD programme and academic careers are modelled on masculine
ways of thinking and doing, which leaves women neither supported as PhD students nor enthused to remain in research in the longer term. Cultural as well as procedural change is required to address this.
********

In Economics, there are still fewer women full professors than men, although there are signs of change. Here's a story that takes note of the fact that three recent winners of the Clark medal are the mothers of young children...  Women making gains in economics, but progress is slow

Should you guess on the SAT? And do you? Katie Baldiga finds men and women are different.

What accounts for the gender gap in (high) test scores, for the fact that SAT scores predict college success less well for women then for men, and perhaps for other gaps that persist between men and women?  An innovative line of inquiry is carried out in a paper whose title telegraphs what may be part of the answer:
Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess and the Implications for Test Scores by Katherine Baldiga

Here's the Abstract:  "Multiple-choice tests play a large role in determining academic and professional outcomes. Performance on these tests hinges not only on a test-taker's knowledge of the material but also on his willingness to guess when unsure about the answer. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men. The experimental test consists of practice questions from the World History and U.S. History SAT II subject tests; we vary the size of the penalty imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer signifi cantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in these test-takers, and differences in risk preferences fail to explain all of the observed gap. Because the gender gap exists only when the task is framed as an SAT, we argue that differences in competitive attitudes may drive the gender differences we observe. Finally, we show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our experimental test, putting women and more risk averse test-takers at a disadvantage."

Katie's experiment is designed as follows. Each subject participates in only one of four experimental conditions, determined by whether there is a penalty for answering incorrectly or not (i.e. whether points are subtracted for wrong answers or not), and whether or not the test is framed as an SAT, by reminding participants that the questions are drawn from SATs and will be scored like SATs. That's the "between subject" part of her design, and the abstract makes clear how those comparisons played out.

The "within subject" part of the design is that every subject participated in three tests. The first consisted of the SAT questions, and subjects were free to skip questions they did not feel confident they could answer. The second was a test of risk aversion. The third test consisted of the same SAT questions as the first, but subjects were asked to answer every question even if they were not confident that they knew the answer. Having the data from the three tests for each subject allows Katie to compare, on the first test, subjects who did equally well when they answered all questions, and to determine how much of the skipping of questions can be accounted for by differences in their risk aversion. This is what lets her see that the women skipped more questions, and got lower scores than the men, even when they could answer the same number of questions correctly. Which could be one of the reasons why the women's scores would predict future performance less well than the men's.

Katie is a theorist as well as an experimenter: here are her other papers, on social choice theory. She is on the job market this year; you could hire her.

If you are at the ESA meetings in Tucson tomorrow you can also listen to her in what looks to be a great session (I've heard all the speakers before):  Friday, November 11, 1:20 pm – 2:40pm,
Session 4, Ocotillo: GENDER 2

Katherine Baldiga, “Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess”
Johanna Mollerstrom, “Framing and Gender: It's all about the Women”
Muriel Niederle, “Do Single-Sex Schools Make Boys and Girls More Competitive?”