The Boston Globe has a very interesting piece on women in the sciences today. It argues that even if a man and a woman have equal ability in a math/science field, the man will be more likely to pursue a career in that field.

Key graf:

One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other “hard” sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

This is a similar thesis the the one Christina Hoff Sommers had in The American awhile back — except this time, the evidence cited fits it. Basically, the data indicate that women prefer to work with people, and men prefer to work with things.

Don’t worry, feminists — the way to solve this is to change the jobs so women will want them more, not to just let the disparity be:

For example, the choice to drop out of high-paying finance careers appears to be driven by the longer hours required in those jobs, says University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand. …
“I’ve gone from the glass ceiling to thinking, if these jobs weren’t 70 hours a week, women might not need to take so much time off,” she says.

Of course, proving that choices play a large role is not the same as disproving ability differences. Indeed, even when comparing only equally-math-qualified men and women, there’s still a role for such disparities:

Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

No word on whether there’s a biological component to this!