Actually the strongest claims about the gender imbalance from the nytimes article are "And a 2006 study found that female academics in the life sciences — Ms. Tariyal’s field — were filing about 60 percent fewer patents than their male colleagues."
But when looking at the referenced research[1], the methodolgy is:" One possibility is that men and women do
qualitatively different kinds of research. In particular,
if women are risk averse in their research
choices (15), there may be a gender difference
in research Bpatentability.[ We believe such a
difference would manifest in the extent of
scholarly impact. To explore this possibility,
we created a data set of the 23,436 articles
published by the women in our sample and
matched each paper (by publication year) with
a randomly drawn article from the pool of male
scientists_ papers. This yields a sample of articles
with a 1:1 gender ratio. We then examined by gender and year, the average number
of citations and the journal impact factor (JIF) of
these papers. We found that the per-article mean
citation count for male scientists is very similar
to that of women (table S3). Moreover, the
gender gap in average JIF actually favors
women (average JIF for male: 4.06; average
JIF for female: 4.12). Overall, there is no
evidence that women do less important work
based on standard measures of scientific impact."
Which sounds like a way to measure the average quality of research(via mean), not for comparing the highest quality research by males and females, which is what counts for VC investments(and probably for patents) - and which should have high correlation to risk preference of males/females.
I'm not saying their claims aren't true, I'm just saying that they haven't presented any arguments or data in the article.
Edit: Haha, I didn't realize my original comment was flagged. I guess I was wrong to call it "bullshit", I should have called it "propaganda". But probably even that would be to "politically incorrect" (or "inconvenient") to be acceptable here...
And RE: the edit I just noticed that you made, you appear to have confused "propaganda" and "politically incorrect" with "factually correct".
A claim was made and backed up with data-driven scientific study and you still aren't able to perceive it as anything other than propaganda? I feel sorry for you.
It's a reasonable post that makes points I, frankly, am not qualified to judge, so I will not try to.
Your post stated that the author had provided no argument nor data, when it did exactly that. I am able to judge the existence or non-existence of text, so I replied.
No, "bullshit" was meant only for the way those claims were presented in the article. I didn't really see how they were relevant to the rest of the content (and to the title). It seemed like somebody thought "Oh, we could slip some feminist propaganda in here!"
http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
"Examining Exclusion in Woman-Inventor Patenting: A Comparison of Educational Trends and Patent Data in the Era of Computer Engineer Barbie"
which contains a specific section on data comparisons, so I certainly wouldn't say it is "without any arguments or data".