I don’t really know what the reason for the gender imbalance is, though I suspect reasons 4 to 8 all play a part, but I think it’s highly likely that if you could find explanations for the gender imbalance in undergraduates studying math, physics and computer science, among sci-fi fans, programmers and libertarians and within the classic works of philosophy then you’d have sufficient explanation.
The fact that this question has been debated in all those areas for many years and we don’t have very good answers suggests that it is not easy to answer. I think the suggestion of a greater focus on instrumental rationality and concretely useful applications for the real world is a potentially good approach to reducing the imbalance and likely to deliver better results than a likely extended effort to find an explanation for the imbalance.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think our efforts would be better directed to attempting to address the imbalance than in trying to explain it (though obviously theories about why it exists might be useful in guiding attempts to address it).
I don’t really know what the reason for the gender imbalance is, though I suspect reasons 4 to 8 all play a part, but I think it’s highly likely that if you could find explanations for the gender imbalance in undergraduates studying math, physics and computer science, among sci-fi fans, programmers and libertarians and within the classic works of philosophy then you’d have sufficient explanation.
The fact that this question has been debated in all those areas for many years and we don’t have very good answers suggests that it is not easy to answer. I think the suggestion of a greater focus on instrumental rationality and concretely useful applications for the real world is a potentially good approach to reducing the imbalance and likely to deliver better results than a likely extended effort to find an explanation for the imbalance.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think our efforts would be better directed to attempting to address the imbalance than in trying to explain it (though obviously theories about why it exists might be useful in guiding attempts to address it).