"Hard" Sciences: A "Boy Thing?"

[napoleon_in_rags]

7. The barriers are starting to be challenged.

And that's a wonderful thing. I remember the struggle of the one afro-american woman in an upper level CS class I took. She got hammered, by what I considered to be discrimination, and she didn't make it through. It was a shame because she had the smarts.

If you want to understand the nature of this discrimination, consider the question you see on certain "intelligence" tests that lists a small series of numbers and asks you for the next one. If you're a grown up thinker about information, you'll realize that for any small series of numbers, there are an infinite amount of algorithms that could produce them and then diverge after that series. It takes a certain arrogance to choose one of them, and announce that one to be the "correct" one. What the test is really testing isn't intelligence, but how much you think like the test maker, which algorithm you think is THE one. And that's the nature of the discrimination you see in the hard sciences. You get a group of sheltered upper middle class white boys together, who were all raised in similar circumstances and think very much the same, and a new form of cultural "correctness" emerges... Some of it corresponds to real hard scientific/mathematical truth, but the other part of it corresponds to a cultural way of thinking which is really quite independent from scientific truth, but is merged with it in their minds. If a person with a different cultural background who doesn't share their way of thinking, but has a gift for the actual science tries to become part of this kind of scene, they will always be at a disadvantage.