As part of my antistupidification efforts, I've been listening to educational podcasts. Among them is the very popular Astronomy Cast, essentially a weekly lecture on astronomical phenomena by an Illinois Astronomy prof.
Astronomy class at Ohio State was where I finally learned a love of—hell, a use for—physics, and catching up on the many developments since then (exoplanets! dark energy! inflationary universe?!) has been exciting indeed.
Last week I learned that the podcast's audience is 91% male. Presuming that most listeners are just intellectually curious sorts like me, that is an alarming ratio indeed.
I was still mulling over what does that stat mean? when I visited a friend, a successful female executive and an active champion of get-girls-into-math causes. Surely she could help explain the gap. Or at least help me name it. The astronomy gender divide? The intellectual curiosity gap?
And so we talked about it, animatedly, while I watched her 6 year old daughter play in the background, moving antique furniture around her room-sized, incredibly elaborate, ridiculously expensive dollhouse.
"In the end, no one really knows what causes the gap," my friend shrugged. We came to no conclusions. No, we didn't.