Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Interesting Fact of the Day - Coincidence?

As I reported yesterday, according to the Council of Graduate Schools' latest report (Table 2.13), there are four out of 11 graduate fields of study where men are over-represented by enrollment: Business, Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Physical and Earth Sciences, seven fields where women are over-represented: Arts and Humanities, Biology, Education, Health Sciences, Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Other Fields.  

For the four most math-intensive graduate fields of study, which are the fields where men are over-represented, the male-female ratio for enrolled graduate students is 1.70 to 1 (322,516 males to 189,372 females).  

Interestingly, according to College Board data released this week, the male-female ratio for 2010 SAT math scores of 700 or above is 1.69 to 1 (65,606 males to 38,728 females). 

Coincidence?

Update: More women (827,197) than men (720,793) took the SAT test in 2010.  At the highest test score of 800, the male-female ratio was 2.08 to 1 (8,072 males had perfect scores vs. 3,997 females). 

6 Comments:

At 9/15/2010 3:27 PM, Blogger Aurimas said...

Well, I'd like to see the overall female-male ratio for SAT tests before making conclusions. It might be so that more men are undertaking SAT as they need it for studies, and thus more men (in absolute terms) perform better in SAT tests.

 
At 9/15/2010 3:31 PM, Blogger Mark J. Perry said...

Aurimas:

It's exactly the opposite. More women (827,200) than men (720,800) are took the SAT in 2010.

 
At 9/15/2010 6:49 PM, Blogger Benjamin Cole said...

Interesting fact of the day is that more small business report cutting, rather than raising, prices.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) recently released a report, and survey of their membership. A snippet fomr that report:

"Inflation? Not a threat. Far more owners have cut prices than raised them for 21 months in a row. Deflation? It certainly feels that way to a quarter of the owners reporting price declines for the goods and services they produce and sell."

So small businesses report cutting, not raising prices.

Add to the above the report of the Boskin Commission in the 1990s, that found that the CPI and other government measures of inflation tend to overestimate inflation by 0.5 percent.

We may, in fact, be in deflation now, and we are certainly in deflation as far as small businesses are concerned.

Back to the NFIB, the same study found that weak sales is the biggest concern.

Given all of this, why are some members of the Federal Reserve pettifogging about inflation, and that more quantitative easing or aggregate demand will lead to inflation?

 
At 9/15/2010 7:28 PM, Blogger Jason said...

The absolute numbers shouldn't matter as long as there is a statistically significant sample. 700k+ falls into the statistically significant category.

What is really interesting is if you exclude some ethnic groups, the gap may widen. Black women / men skew the numbers a bit.

 
At 9/16/2010 6:08 AM, Blogger geoih said...

Quote from Benjamin: "Given all of this, why are some members of the Federal Reserve pettifogging about inflation, and that more quantitative easing or aggregate demand will lead to inflation?"

Because increases in prices are only a symptom of inflation, not a cause. Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply, which has skyrocketed since 2008. Much of this new money is locked up in bank vaults because the Fed is paying interest on it. Unless the Fed can suck that money back out of the system, inflation is inevitable.

 
At 9/16/2010 2:19 PM, Blogger nates said...

The fact that more women take it is relatively irrelevant. There aren't many 800 potentials choosing not to take the test. My guess is for people in the bottom quartile, the self selection bias is stronger among men.

But the point remains, there are more men acing the test.

 

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