Gender balance and attitude to risk

An article in today’s Guardian, British researchers win £1.8m mathematics prize caught my eye. Subtitle: Britons among five winners of inaugural Breakthrough prize, which hopes to turn mathematicians into 'the new rock stars'. One of the founders, Yuri Milner is quoted as saying: "We think scientists should be much better appreciated. They should be modern celebrities, alongside athletes and entertainers," ..."We want young people to get more excited. Maybe they will think of choosing a scientific path as opposed to other endeavours if we collectively celebrate them more."

I think it could work. The spectacle of mathematicians making millions for their work could indeed attract young people into academic mathematics. There’s just one catch: it’s more likely to attract boys rather than girls, due to the male mentality being relatively risk-seeking. It’s a pretty safe bet that big prizes and celebrity status for a very few mathematicians, will serve as a stronger magnet for boys than for girls. And that, of course, is unhelpful to the objective of better gender balance in mathematics and science.

I’ve seen some severe criticism directed at various changes to academic life that have taken place during the past few decades. Some of these changes, for example, the general lament about hard money being displaced by soft money, could be regarded as changes that appeal to risk-seekers. However, I have not so far seen any criticism that considers their effects on gender balance.

Relevant and Revelant Science

Listening to a program on Radio 4 on the way back home (I think it was Material World) one of the items was about work on predicting the support a candidate in an election can get based on his or her appearance. You extract a few features from their face, such as size of nose, plus others that hopefully capture the notion of a good-looking "commanding" appearance, and see how they correlate with election wins. (The feature extraction is probably the main technical challenge here.)

This is the kind of science that gets a lot of media coverage, but is really good science? It seems like a big majority of the scientific research that garners the press coverage is a kind of collective navel-gazing, studies of ourselves and how we behave. Results that purport to forecast an individual's life achievements based on early life events and his appearance --- it's questionable whether you really want to know some of the stuff that comes out. Any study that correlates sexual behaviour with some other feature or activity of our lives is sure to be hot news.

In support of this kind of work, it certainly looks more relevant to people's everyday lives. In contrast to my own research, for example. I wish people were as interested in the stars as they are in their own backyards, but I guess I can't make that happen.