Gender prediction through trivia performance

Gender prediction through trivia performance

Todd Schneider likes trivia, and he plays in an online league called LearnedLeague. Curious, Schneider wondered if there was anything interesting he could glean from the performance of the LLamas (Learned League members) that might apply to knowledge in general.

He looked at it from two angles. In the first, he simply calculated correlation coefficients between subjects. If you know world history, are you more likely to know geography? Yes. If you know math, are you more likely to be in tuned with pop culture? Probably not. The correlations aren't too surprising, but the correlation strengths are fun to poke at.

The second angle: gender prediction through performance levels in various subjects.

LLamas optionally provide a bit of demographic information, including gender, location, and college(s) attended. It's not lost on me that my category performance is pretty stereotypically "male." For better or worse, my top 3 categories—business, math, and sports—are often thought of as male-dominated fields. That got me to wondering: does performance across categories predict gender?

As shown up top, Schneider used a decision tree and got decent results. [Thanks, Todd]

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Playing chicken on the street and the ultimate battle for power

There's the unspoken agreement between two people who walk directly towards each other. You each shift a little bit to get out of the other's way, but some people don't like that agreement.

New York resident Cathy O'Neil noticed a certain pattern in this collision course. So she collected data implicitly by playing chicken with people who weren't up for shifting.

On the people who didn't shift:

And, as you might have anticipated, it's predominantly men. White men. Women, all women, and black and Hispanic men all get out of my way, especially Hispanic men, as do most white men for that matter. But there is a certain subcategory of white men that just don’t seem to know the rule about mutual accommodation, and the result is I've bumped into hundreds of white men on the streets of New York over the years. Some of them even turn around and say things like, why didn't you get out of my way?

I have a similar theory about pickup trucks on the freeway.

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Professor ratings by gender and discipline

Professor ratings

Based on about 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessor, this tool by Ben Schmidt lets you compare words used to describe professors, categorized by gender and discipline. For example, the above is the usage rate of "smart" in reviews, and you see lower rates with professors who are women than for men, for every discipline. This is true when you look at all reviews at once, just positive ones, or just negative ones.

Telling. And just the beginning. Do your own search and find out more about the data and models on Schmidt's FAQ.

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Where and why men outnumber women

Too many men

There are an estimated 60 million more men than women on this planet, based on data from World Bank. David Bauer takes a look at the places where the male majority is largest.

Although China and India are responsible for a significant portion of the disparity, there are several other countries of interest. The time series above shows the effect of migrant workers on the Arabian Peninsula.

The most gender imbalanced states in 2013 were all found on the Arabian Peninsula, Qatar being the most extreme. Less than one quarter of all people who lived in Qatar in 2013 were women. Those countries have attracted a lot of migrant workers for male-dominated industries, especially after oil prices started rising in the 1970s and the industry grew. Millions of men, mostly from South Asia, came to work on the Arabian Peninsula, but weren't allowed to bring their spouses and children with them, thus throwing gender ratios off balance.

Find out about other areas or compare countries yourself with the chart at the end of the article.

Sidenote: I've used World Bank data before, but it just occurred to me that they don't provide any values for margin of error on the site or in the downloads. Seems especially important in this case, when looking at such small percentage differences that account for millions of people.

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Decline of women in computer science

Women in computer science

NPR spent some time on the subject of the decline of women in computer science. Whereas the the percentage of women in other technical fields rose, the percentage of women in computer science declined, as shown in the chart above. Although it's tough to pinpoint a single factor, the time of decline coincides with when computer were mostly marketed towards boys in the 1980s.

In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.

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PhD gender gaps around the world

How Nations Fare in PhDs by Sex

Periscopic, for Scientific American, visualized the number of PhDs awarded in various countries. You might expect men to be in high percentages and women to be in low, but it's not always in that direction.

In the U.S., women are going to college and majoring in science and engineering fields in increasing numbers, yet here and around the world they remain underrepresented in the workforce. Comparative figures are hard to come by, but a disparity shows up in the number of Ph.D.s awarded to women and men. The chart here, assembled from data collected by the National Science Foundation, traces the gender gap at the doctoral level for 56 nations. The situation in individual countries varies widely, but as the numbers make clear, there are interesting exceptions to the global trend.

Each view shows a vertical dotted line to indicate where PhDs awarded are an even split between men and women. To the left of that dotted line shows where men earn more PhDs than women, and on the right, where women earn more than men.

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