However, I’m just not seeing it happening, and it’s not from lack of trying from the industry to both promote it in the classroom and encourage it from women in the workplace.

Take the place I currently work. We’re a collection of software engineers that help oversee a certain Antitrust case against a certain HUGE technological corporation. We try to find female and male applicants to fill high tech roles and I’ve helped carry out the interview process on dozens of candidates. For every 10 or 15 men we get one woman.

Me, I’d love to see women flood the tech workplace, believe me, the lack of gender diversity is wearysome in the extreme. But even with companies bending over backwards trying to find female candidates, they’re just not appearing in the tech market place. And mind you, this is from up here in the Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle Wa area, one of the tech capitals of the US.

Maybe you should consider asking women and girls who aren’t in the tech field why they aren’t trying to get into it? The pay is great, the work is intellectually challenging and rewarding, and you get to work with some of the brighter variety of the male gender.

From the way you made that “point” it seems like you’re having trouble doing that yourself, Phil.

Above comment here said:
“I agree with you that intelligence and physical attractiveness are not mutually exclusive. They also aren’t related, however.”

Absolutely agree. However, I think: being a nerd is positively correlated with being smart, and negatively correlated with being attractive. The reason for this is that attractiveness causes social skills, because of rare outcasting, and frequent social approaches. This is why, I take it for very low chance that any of the attractive girls in this website are truly nerds.

The post talked about the stereotype of “pretty women aren’t smart” – this is of course a false stereotype, BUT, there is a lot of truth to “pretty women aren’t nerds”.

Of course, you can consider all this just a terminology issue and include “nerds” as anyone inclined to technical and scientific worlds.

BTW, this might be a cultural/country thing, this blog post seemed to be very concerned with hot women being objectified as dumb and not taken seriously – I must say, this is the case NOT the case where I live (Israel). I don’t think there is any significant stereotype here correlating sex/beauty and intelligence…

Another note regarding sex and intelligence – I hold the belief that on average women are as smart as men, but that women have a much narrower intelligence bell curve than men do – meaning, there are a lot more men idiots and men geniuses, where as most women just fall average. I don’t have any firm evidence to back this beside my own personal experience, so I am certainly open to refute…

Nowadays “Beautiful minds” are more rare than “smart people” but very probably they are equally distributed among women and men. In the past they appeared in different sectors (and in science almost only men) mainly due to historical and sociological reason. Nowadays there are female BMs in science, business and politics.
I also think, BMs (both women and men) are very attractive by definition. It simply has to do with beauty, real beauty.

justmy2cents,
Alex

for the most part, i really enjoy this blog. and then every once in awhile, i have to wince when the BA introduces some skeptic gal with a helpful aside about her physical attractiveness. because obviously we can’t judge a woman’s thinking unless we know whether she’s hot or not, right guys?

PLEASE reconsider this habit.

Actually, the current thinking along the lines of why there’s more men in science than women is not that women aren’t talented or interested, but that girls start off just as interested and scoring just as well, but social pressures (peers, media, even parents) begin to push them out of the field starting in middle school. Even when parents try to encourage their daughters – for example a mother saying “I don’t know where she got her math skills from, goodness knows I can barely balance my checkbook!” – it unfortunately often does not get absorbed in the way it was intended – in this case the girl could absorb “my mother thinks math is only good for balancing checkbooks, and that girls shouldn’t learn more than that.”

For better or worse, it seems to me that the trend is towards increasing scrutiny of appearance and dress in male political figures as well. At least in Canada where I followed these things, I well remember the Stockwell Day speedo incident, and the interminable saga regarding Prime Minister Harper’s expanding waistline.

It is heart warming to see the youngsters working in teams to do the program.

Let me first say that Phil is so obviously not sexist that it’s shocking anyone could thing he is. Sure he describes sceptical and science-y women as “hawt” but when have you ever heard him apply that term to someone who’s into UFOs or chemtrails? I mean, come on, he even chastised YOU guys when you make breast puns about the well-endowed astrologist during the LA earthquake. He himself made no such references. And on the flip side, have you ever once heard him describe any nerd-girl as “plain” or “unattractive” or “poorly dressed”? Ever?

And I have to agree with Stephanie Chasteen and Jennifer Ouellette. I don’t see why we should have to renounce our femininity just because we’re geeky. I have grown up being told how smart I am but almost never has anyone told me I’m “beautiful” (the opposite of Stephanie’s situation). As a result, I always considered myself to be ugly and suffered from ridiculously low self-esteem despite being smart. And for a long time, I resented any links between beauty (of pageant standards) and intelligence for reasons all of which have been discussed here.

But it turns out I’m not ugly. None of us are. And that certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy compliments about how we look nice or how we are “hawt” (which I am!). If we denounce appearance as indiscriminately sexist or irrelevant, doesn’t that just make us ashamed of our appearance, albeit from the other side of the coin?

Frankly, the more women who look like average people are called pretty or beautiful or hawt by the likes of people like Phil, the more average women will stop comparing themselves to supermodels and start to feel beautiful for who they are. And women who like themselves will take up careers that interest them, rather than careers that make them seem more desirable. At least that’s what I think…

When I was in the engineering program at Berkeley, the ratio of guys to girls was something like 99:1. I met a lot of smart girls at Cal, but few of them really wanted to be engineers. That’s what’s “holding them back”: desire.

I now make video games for a living, and both at Rockstar games and EA the ratios of guys/girls was just about the same as in school. Poor me

I don’t agree with anyone who wishes women would snuff out all aspects of their femininity. It may sometimes make them seem superficial and frivolous, but aspects of masculinity also may make men seem power-obsessed and egomaniacal. Both things are not very complimentary on their own, but they are only facets of who the person really is.

What you have to do is realize that solely masculine men aren’t very interesting either. Their pursuit of money and sex isn’t laudable. A woman who devotes her life to being hot isn’t interesting, and her pursuit isn’t laudable. When you comment on her attractiveness, it’s simply feeding this empty pursuit. But a woman who is hot and smart–hot because she’s smart, or hot separately from being smart–has more laudable pursuits than her own attractiveness. Phil does a good job of noting that advocating skepticism is the good thing someone does, and disregarding any notion that a woman’s contribution to the world is her smokin’ hot body. In the same vein–I’d like a woman to think that her work is more important than her appearance.

But I don’t bar anyone from falling in love with shoes. Nerdgirls included.

Let’s not pretend that tall men and attractive women don’t get the better side of life. We cannot force people to conform to some imaginary ideal of political correctness–for them to disregard sex and appearance altogether, and not make anyone feel bad. But we can also remember that people can do much more useful and interesting things than look good–and it is these pursuits which really matter.

I haven’t been offended by the tone of Phil’s posts. Of course, I tend to fall on the not-easily-offended side of the spectrum. After all, I’m also a general aviation pilot and I wear a “Chicks Fly” T-shirt with a really cute baby chicken wearing scarf & helmet.

The Actuarial exams take on average 7 years to pass. Those women (and men) are very smart and competent. I am fairly sure that the women in the program were on pay parity with the men. A women Actuary (and men actuaries to a lesser degree) has her choice of employment due to legal requirements for large companies. There are very few incompetent actuaries; so companies want to get and retain them.

In addition, to working with highly intelligent women all of them were very attractive. If I have to work with someone my first choice is that they are intelligent and work well with others. If they happen to be attractive it is a bonus. (I am not on the hunt, happily married for 27 years so far.)

I read all the posts, before I started this. I’m reminded of two of the things, my mother told me: 1. Son, appearance is important.
2. Son, first impressions are important.
My puppy love, we were sophomores in H.S., and she was my first steady girl friend, was smart and good looking. I asked her, what attracted her to me?
What made her notice me? Boy, did her answer surprise me: the hem to the buttons on my shirt; my belt buckle; and the hem of my trouser’s placat; all lined up.
(In Jr. Hi, I was in marching band. My father [USAF for 29 years] taught me how to wear a uniform. I applied those principles to my civilian clothes.)

My parents were right. People do go a lot by first impression and by appearances. I think, that’s because that’s all we have to go by, until we get to know each other.

Since my laptop does not do well with videos, I have learned not to try to download videos.
But, I have read all of this thread.
There’s a Clairol shampoo commerical, the little song that goes with it. which I love: “Every woman’s beautiful, in her own way.”

I’m surprised none of you have mentioned that true beauty is more than skin deep. I think that any person with a loving heart (male or female) radiates a kind of beauty, for example.
A person may also have a beautiful singing or speaking voice.

In closing, I think it’s going to be awhile (in decades), before sexism washes out of societies. I have nothing against memebers of either gender appreciating the appearance of an attractive person of the other gender. That’s not my idea of sexism. I’m talking about lewd comments, not taking “no” for an answer, staring and other types of sexual harassment as sexism.

That’s my two cents worth.

Guys (of course, I surround myself with nerdy guys) are generally not dismayed to find out the “smart + sexy” equation applies to me — there’s generally this sort of “hey cool, that’s hot” look that passes over their face. But one thing that strikes me is that my smartness seems to play second fiddle. I can’t think of a single time when a man has looked deeply into my eyes and said breathlessly, “Stephanie, you’re so smart!” But they do tell me I’m beautiful. I look at them all googly-eyed and croon about how smart *they* are. Why this seeming double standard, even among men who value the fact that I’m smart? I’m with Phil Plait on this one — how can we expect ourselves to “rise above” millions of years of evolution? Men are attracted to me for the traits that we’ve been bred to be attracted to — those which signify fertility and health. You know, big hips, rosy lips, symmetric facial features, etc. I’m attracted to them because it seems they can outsmart the antelope. We’ve got these big ponderous brains that let us think about the nature of consciousness, the universe, and gender differences. But that doesn’t mean those brains can completely override those gender differences, even if we’re aware of them. We should be easy on ourselves.

The unfortunate result is that I’m much more confident of my looks than my brains. I accept compliments about my appearance much more gracefully than those about my smarts, where I tend to minimize, “Oh, I don’t really know physics that much.”

I’ve seen this too, this “girly stuff is demeaning” attitude. It bothers me. A lot. Because “boyish” stuff, like trains and hunting and barbeques, don’t have that same negative connotation. To me, the embarrassment we’ve got about girly stuff has to do with our negative attitudes towards women. Period. We think that handbags and high-heels don’t belong in a textbook (or anywhere serious) because they’re related to women, and we don’t value women. I don’t usually state such strong opinions, but there it is!

Cathy, I’ve responded to your comments (and quite a lot of this original post) at length on my blog – since I put in too many links last time in my comment.

http://podblack.com/?p=843

I disagree with your summation about girls and science fiction – but that’ll be a post for another time!

Isn’t it possible to think that a woman is SEXY without automatically turning her into a sex OBJECT?