Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Bah humbug!

"M. Pierre CURIE, le savant qui découvrit le radium, a été écrasé dans la rue et tué net par un camion"

From the National Bureau of Economic Research: Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias? (2008).

India randomly assigns some provincial villages to be governed by women (hoorah for policies implemented by random assignment!). These researchers found that exposure to women leaders shifted some stereotypes

We exploit random assignment of gender quotas across Indian village councils to investigate whether having a female chief councillor affects public opinion towards female leaders. Villagers who have never been required to have a female leader prefer male leaders and perceive hypothetical female leaders as less effective than their male counterparts, when stated performance is identical. Exposure to a female leader does not alter villagers' taste preference for male leaders. However, it weakens stereotypes about gender roles in the public and domestic spheres and eliminates the negative bias in how female leaders' effectiveness is perceived among male villagers. Female villagers exhibit less prior bias, but are also less likely to know about or participate in local politics; as a result, their attitudes are largely unaffected. Consistent with our experimental findings, villagers rate their women leaders as less effective when exposed to them for the first, but not second, time. These changes in attitude are electorally meaningful: after 10 years of the quota policy, women are more likely to stand for and win free seats in villages that have been continuously required to have a female chief councillor.

Though I agree this post might be better suited for the Open Thread, The Science Babe, physics Ph.D. Dr. Deborah Berebichez, comes to mind.

However, I am questioning the merit of generally emphasizing minority groups in order to reduce their associated disadvantages. I wonder if this emphasis perpetuates a sense of having to differentiate between groups of people. Ideally, any gender or race based disparity would merely be a statistical coincidence rather than a consequence of racism and sexism. My hopes are that the primary reason for combating racism and sexism is rooted in a very humane understanding and compassion and NOT in further emphasizing the "obvious" difference in the groups yet at the same time calling for a certain "equality". My hopes are to diminish the conscious recognition of differences, solely based on characteristics like gender and race, in people in the first place.

Something I posted to Facebook earlier today; please bear that audience in mind when reading it:

It's Ada Lovelace Day, a day for celebrating and publicising the achievement of women in the sciences, and since I talked about the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics yesterday, I figure I'd go two-for-two and talk about Elinor Ostrom today.

In March of this year I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Elinor Ostrom, about her work in common pool resources, which won her a Nobel Prize in 2009. To date, she is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in this category. I wanted to ask her a question about organised crime.

Imagine you own one of several fishing boats on a lake. The fish are a common pool resource. Without any kind of governance, the lake will be over-fished, because no single fishing boat has any incentive to restrict their catch unless all of them do, and it's too easy for any single boat to defect from any mutual agreement, so no agreement ever gets made. This is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.

There are a few options that tend to arise from this situation. The first is government intervention, where legislation is passed to limit how many fish any one boat can catch. This tends to go wrong, because legislators don't know very much about the fishing industry.

The second option is to merge all the fishing boats into one big fishing company. It now won't over-fish, but it will cause monopoly problems. Fish consumers will pay relatively more money for relatively less fish, and some mechanism has to exist to stop anyone else setting up their own rival fishing company. This is not optimal.

Elinor Ostrom's work concerns the third option: stable self-governance between multiple parties. This is ridiculously hard to achieve in real-world situations. Ostrom carried out extensive field studies in developing countries to find out under what circumstances a common pool resource could be sustainably managed by the people using it, and by extention, how we might design systems to let people do this. It has important implications for the development, welfare, politics and environmental protection of poor and wealthy countries alike.

During the Q&A of the lecture, I wanted to ask her if she had considered extortion in organised crime as a potential area of study. It fits the criteria of a common pool resource, and economists love organised crime, so there's a wealth of data about it. Unfortunately I wasn't picked to ask my question.

In June of this year, ten weeks later, she died of pancreatic cancer, and now I will never get to ask it.

If you want people to write blogs on day N, perhaps it would be better to say it on day N-7. Even better to say it on LW on day N-14, so at day N-7 there is enough data in the discussion.

I'm a big fan of the mathematician Matilde Marcolli. In string theory, Eva Silverstein (cosmology) and Mina Aganagic (string math). Anastasia Volovich does twistors.

Two book recommendations:

• Gender Codes, a scholarly tome on how gender in the IT field got the way it is now
• The Computer Boys Take Over, a more popular book on roughly the same

I think this should have been a link in the Open Thread to the post on your own blog, not a crosspost.

If Ada Lovelace is the best example of a notable woman in computing 50 years from now, I will eat my hat.

It's obvious there are more notable men in STEM history than women. Thus a question that arises is if the notable women who do exist in STEM history are there because they're better than the men, having overcome despite discrimination, or if they're being retroactively singled out, a desperate lowering of the bar to identify SOME example.

However, this question of retroactive affirmative action is not the issue recognizing Ada Lovelace is trying to address. I don't know enough history to know if Lovelace is a worthy example, but I think it is important for people in general to identify with successful people similar to themselves so that they can imagine being like those people someday. Personally, I don't particularly need to look at someone's gender to identify with and be inspired by them. When an impoverished immigrant Jew like Einstein overcomes Nazis and scornful teachers and whatever else, I, despite being a Chinese woman from Pittsburgh, identify with his struggles and don't let people thinking I'm stupid because I'm smiley or shy or a woman or whatever deter me. However, many people do need role models to help them realize nascent interests in STEM subjects, especially if the peer group they identify with are not typically interested in those topics. For most, it's easier and more enjoyable to hang out with your friends doing girl things than go off on your own to explore programming or science in a room full of boys who ignore you.

Regardless of innate or learned differences in men and women, by far the first factor in this result for past populations is the number of men in STEM vs women historically, which is why the present is such an exciting time for women in STEM- there are a lot more females in STEM now! There may well be more notable women in STEM in our lifetimes than have ever existed. This idea inspires and motivates me to become one of them!

Do some men find posts singling out notable women offensive/ annoying because they think elevating a perhaps undeserving woman is unfair to all the deserving men? The suggestion of discrimination and affirmative action towards one set often upsets people in the complement of that set because humans have a strong instinct for fairness and hate injustice. Affirmative action is unfair to people who had nothing to do with past injustices, even if they're benefiting from them, so I sympathize with the negative comments, although I don't know whether two wrongs make a right in practice. My hope that we will soon have a bevy of women undeniably worthy of recognition and honor in STEM history.

Rather than writing about a specific person, I wrote a blog post on Why Ada Lovelace Day is Important. It includes a review of a thorough study on gender bias among science faculty published a few months ago. It's really distressing to me that even in 2012 there exists this much male privilege in science academia.