Although women are underrepresented in the most mathematically intensive fields, the gender gap in these fields has narrowed over the past 2 decades. In my E. L. Thorndike address I summarized the temporal trends in sex differences for 8 fields and considered factors that drive both the underrepresentation of women and its recent narrowing. I…

In an attempt to provide some indication as to whether the recent employment trends among scientists is resulting in a drop of the ability of students entering scientific fields, GRE files were used to construct a history of aptitude test statistics for 1966-67, 1967-68, 1970-71, and 1971-72. For the latter three years, students were classified by…