Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!marla@Sun.COM
From: marla@Sun.COM (Marla Parker)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Women's Abilities at Details
Message-ID: <12363@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 19 Jul 88 17:19:28 GMT
References: <12218@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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In article <12218@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> fester@math.berkeley.edu writes:
>This posting motivated me to go compile the data I had requested in
>another newsgroup, regarding what subfields of math women tended to go
>into.  I had requested that data because I had noticed what seemed to
>be a pattern....namely, that women seem to be clustered in algebra and
>topology.

Um, for those of us who abandoned math after vector calculus, what, in 
general terms, is topology?  And "analysis" is such a broad term, could
you give us an idea of what it means here?  And where does geometry fit
in, if anywhere?

I wonder where geometry fits in because one of my favorite questions to
ask people is which they liked better in high school: geometry or algebra?
Almost everyone has a definite opinion, and if they didn't like either,
they at least found one to be easier than the other.  I have not noticed
that the algebra/geometry people split along gender lines at all.  It
seems a total mix to me.  My informal ongoing survey is about 10 years old.

In hs, algebra was a breeze for me.  Geometry I loved, but I literally
stayed up until midnight doing geometry homework every single night for
most of tenth grade.  I loved it, but it was much harder for me than
algebra.

My best friend, who is now a dancer, was just the opposite.  She thought
geometry was easy, but algebra made no sense to her.  In a basic econ
course at Berkeley, faced with something like 2x + 7 = 15,  she said,
"Can you help me with this?  No, wait! I can remember - something about
moving the 7...?"  She figured it out, but it was a struggle.

marla