Harvard Pres Says Females Naturally Bad at Math

Man_Holmes writes "Harvard president says that women lack natural ability in math and science and this explains why fewer women succeed in math and science. Lawrence H. Summers later said that he was discussing hypotheses based on scholarly work and that it did not necessarily represent his private views."

Comments

Doesn't this guy say nearly the same thing?

[Gyan]

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psych prof. at Cambridge has a book:

The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain.

From the beginning of the book: "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems."

Has anyone read it?

P.S. This guy is a cousin of Ali G. Don't know what that ought to signify :)

Stupid phrasing of the obvious

[Meostro]

Men and women are different. Whoda Thunk!?!

He just said the right thing the wrong way... he was apparently trying to "be provocative" according to the same AP article on CNN.

He also gave an example of what he intended (emphasis mine):

"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."

He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.

That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.

Re:I'd be interested

[pla]

I'd be interested to see what peer-reviewed, repeatable research there exists on actual gender differences.

I lack links to peer reviewed studies (since most journals rightly fear that the internet will eventually drive them out of business) to back these up, but I can provide a few examples that a quick Googling will verify...

1) Female brains weight roughly 200g less than male brains.

2) Females use both hemispheres of their brains (five separate locii, IIRC) for language tasks, while males use only one hemisphere and (again, IIRC) two locii.

3) Males perform significantly (in the rigid statistical sense) better at 3d spatial orientation tasks than females do.


And, of course, the one that caused this entire argument, 4) Males score DRASTICALLY higher on tests of abstract and symbolic logic (ie, math). I don't even know why that counts as controvertial anymore. That particular horse died so long ago, we can't even beat the carcass, just sort of stir up the dust.

Re:In other news

[Rei]

Exactly. When I saw this thread, I was expecting a lot of "listen to the reasoning, don't just react" statements. What I wasn't expecting was a lot of people not only agreeing with the claim, but even going so far as to say "women should know their place" and things like that.

Before a continue, a disclaimer: My partner is both female and a math major, and several of my friends in college were female math majors (or math/cs), so I may be a bit biased on this one.

I don't find this notion to be true at all. I went to a school that was 70-80% male, and yet the math department had an even mix of male and female. If there was any bias, it was on the side of pure science vs. applied science (the women tended to migrate more toward the "pure science" - chemistry as opposed to chemical engineering, things like that). Other schools have found similar things - for example, http://www.math.earlham.edu/WomensBrains.html

Anyways, enough with the anecdotal evidence. Lets get to studies:

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Stree t_ Journal/vol25/25GSJ04b.html

"n a recent Brown study, women performed as much as 12 percent better on math problems when tested in a setting without men.

Women tested in single-sex groups scored a 70-percent accuracy rate on math exams, while women tested in groups in which they were outnumbered by men achieved only a 58-percent accuracy rate, said Michael Inzlicht, graduate student of psychology, who led the research. ... Different gender ratios never resulted in changes in male test performance; men consistently registered about 67 percent accuracy on math exams."

http://www.awm-math.org/articles/notices/199107/ le wis/

(An interesting article about women in mathematics - several interesting tidbits, such as while only 25% of math PhDs are female, only 30% of all PhDs period are female)

http://www.gendercenter.org/education.htm

(This tidbit: "In 1992, women received 52 percent of biological science bachelor's and master's degrees, 67 percent of law bachelor's degrees, 47 percent of business bachelor's degrees, 47 percent of mathematics bachelor's degrees, and 33 percent of physical science bachelor's degrees. (6)" - references "Where Women Stand: An International Report on the Status of Women in 140 Countries 1997-1998" by Naomi Neft and Ann D. Levine.)

In summary: it looks like there are ample women in mathematics at the graduate level; however, at the postgrad level, the numbers drop significantly. However, women don't seek postgraduate degrees nearly as often as men anyways; the ratio of male to female postgraduate degrees in mathematics is only 5% different from the overall average. Such a small difference can easily be attributed to the environment - an environment which Harvard's president made abundantly clear.