Once women embrace stem, there’s no going back to the old culture of ‘pink-collar’ jobs

The influx of women from the former Soviet Union, with their strong science and engineering culture, altered gender norms in Israel, write Naomi Friedman-Sokuler and Claudia Seni

Momentum-Transfer to and Elementary-Excitations of a Bose-Einstein Condensate by a Time-Dependent Optical Potential

We present results of calculations on Bose-Einstein condensed $^{87}$Rb atoms subjected to a moving standing-wave light-potential of the form $V_L(z,t) = V_0(t) \cos(q z-\omega t)$. We calculate the mean-field dynamics (the order paramter) of the condensate and determine the resulting condensate momentum in the $z$ direction, $P_z(q,\omega,V_0,t_p)$, where $V_0$ is the peak optical potential strength and $t_p$ is the pulse duration. Although the local density approximation for the Bogoliubov excitation spectral distribution is a good approximation for very low optical intensities, long pulse duration and sufficiently large values of the wavevector $q$ of the light-potential, for small $q$, short duration pulses, or for not-so-low intensities, the local density perturbative description of the excitation spectrum breaks down badly, as shown by our results.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Wittgenstein und die Wittgensteinforschung in Rußland

Beginnen wir unsere Betrachtung mit dem Jahre 1958, als in der damaligen UdSSR die russische Übersetzung der "Logisch-Philosophischen Abhandlung" erschienen war. Das Buch erblickte die Welt dank der Anstrengungen von Frau Sofia A. Janowskaja, die viel zur Entwicklung der mathematischen Logik unter den Bedingungen des ideologischen Drucks der dialektisch-materialistischen Ideologie beigetragen hat. Die Übersetzung wurde gemacht, da man Wittgenstein als einen bedeutenden Logiker betrachtet hat. In den 60-er Jahren wurde diese Betrachtungsweise beibehalten. Die Ansichten von Wittgenstein wurden mit dem Positivismus des Wiener Kreises gleichgestellt, man betrachtete ihn als Gegner der Philosophie und als Apologeten der mathematischen Naturwissenschaft. Die Philosophie des dialektischen Materialismus wertete die These, daß philosophische Sätze und Fragen unsinnig sind, als direkten Angriff auf sich selbst, was das Verhältnis zu Wittgenstein und die vernichtenden Einschätzungen zur Folge hatten, die jede schriftliche Erwähnung seiner Philosophie begleiteten

From Pink-Collar to Lab Coat. Cultural Persistence and Diffusion of Socialist Gender Norms

This paper documents the persistence and diffusion of Soviet gender-equal norms, exploiting the 1990’s mass migration from the Former Soviet Union to Israel as a natural experiment. We track educational achievement and choices of an entire cohort, comparing gender gaps among Native students versus immigrants from FSU and other countries. We find evidence of vertical and horizontal diffusion of Soviet norms with respect to tertiary study field choice, especially those directly related to labor market occupations. In both traditionally male-dominated STEM fields and traditionally female “pink collar” jobs, such as education and social work, gender gaps are smallest among FSU immigrants. We show that these specific preferences are not explained by comparative advantages, as measured by early achievement.Finally, we show that among Natives the gender gap in field choice narrows with the presence of FSU immigrants, reflecting a shift in choice patterns of native women shift towards STEM and away from Pink collar study fields

Gender streaming and prior achievement in high school science and mathematics

Girls choose advanced matriculation electives in science and mathematics almost as frequently as boys, in Israel, but are very much under-represented in physics and computer science, and over-represented in biology and chemistry. We test the hypothesis that these patterns stem from differences in mathematical ability. Administrative data on two half-cohorts of Israeli eighth-grade students in Hebrew-language schools links standardized test scores in mathematics, science, Hebrew and English to their subsequent choice of matriculation electives. It shows that the gendered choices they make remain largely intact after conditioning on prior test scores, indicating that these choices are not driven by differences in perceived mathematical ability, or by boys’ comparative advantage in mathematics. Moreover, girls who choose matriculation electives in physics and computer science score higher than boys, on average. Girls and boys react differently to early signals of mathematical and verbal ability; and girls are less adversely affected by socioeconomic disadvantage