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No Gap Found In Math Abilities of Girls, Boys
sciencehabit writes "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference. 'Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.' But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."
Right, but what they're trying to emphasize is that gender is not the discriminating factor. Rather, culture is. So your statement is kind of misleading in that it emphasizes gender as the discriminating factor, and subjugates "western world" into a circumstantial factor.
Other girls.
Seriously. Anyone who has dated a geek girl knows that misogyny is a drop in the bucket compared to the problem that girls geared toward science and math face from other girls who will be absolutely VICIOUS in putting them down.
The reason this never gets debated is simple. It would blow apart the entire "sisterhood" myth of feminism. To admit that there are a number of women who use "girliness" as a cudgel to beat the tar out of intelligent women, while there are a number of men who actually want an intelligent, educated mate, would be to force them to admit that women, not "the patriarchy," are really what's keeping the culture stagnant.
The article is much more misleading than my statement though, it claims girls are equal to boys at maths, then says boys are better (at least white boys and the average SAT taking boy).
The title shouldn't be "Girls = Boys at Math", it should be "Boys better than Girls at maths, but for cultural reasons, not gender related reasons."
I imagine that this title would never be chosen because it's either not politically correct enough, or not attention grabbing, regardless of it's accuracy
Girls just as good as boys at today's easier math?
Frankly, I've never bought that old CW about girls being worse at math than boys... especially since I met and married my math-major wife in college, who has always been much better at math than I am. It may be true that boys are more _interested_ in math than girls, and thus pursue it and are successful at it more often, but that's a completely different thing from saying that girls are somehow innately "worse" at math.
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Well, the idea is to see if there are any differences. Sexism is only sexism if it's baseless. If you have something like this to demonstrate that there are differences between the genders, then making decisions based on those differences is qualified. However, like they said, there is no difference. The smartest person in my school in every subject that I took in my last year of high school was female (except Music, but there were only 3 people). Of course, anecdotal evidence, take it with a grain of salt. The point is that finding out that there are no differences makes any attempts to make decisions based on gender alone an offensive and ignorant thing.
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My sister (we're twins) consistently kicked my ass at math and just about everything else, right up until we got to 10th grade or thereabouts. Then she turned into a vacuous fashion fiend with god-awful grades who liked hanging out with other vacuous fashion fiends.
I think peer pressure has a lot to do with how kids perform at things like math. Math is not cool, therefore if you want to be cool then you have to suck at math, or generally just suck at school.
I always got good grades, but I was also good at sports and generally avoided the "jock" scene and the do-nothing i'm-so-cool rich kid crowds. I'm kind of proud at having been able to achieve that balance.
Thankfully she grew out of it eventually, but not in time to do rather badly in high school. It's just as well she didn't need a scholarship to pay her way through college (where she did pretty good).
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result 2: Our standardized test material contained no hard mathematics questions.
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So in your mind the geek community is exclusively male...? I think I see the problem here...
Studies of 10 year old boys and girls have shown equal rates of pregnancy. But as they mature this gender gap widens, so 'obivously' there is a cultural bias here that must be corrected with affirmitive actions.
By the way, the next time somebody discusses the lack of female presence on Slashdot, think about the kind of things that get modded insightful here.
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
I wholeheartedly agree. Look at the difference in culture here. Girls have feminism. All their lives they're told that they're wonderful and special and have this innate power and value that comes from being a woman. Look at all the role models that women have in popular culture. In every movie and TV show, and especially in advertisements, women are always smart, always strong, always winners.
What are boys told? They are innately bad. Members of their sex are responsible for all the world's ills. Boys fall back on their instincts - they value themselves in terms of sexual conquests. They fall back on their instincts to achieve those. And the instincts serve them well all through high school, and they manage to feel okay. It's ok to cut school, ok to put all your time and attention into some stupid car (for example) because that gets you sex, and that makes you worth something.
Basically it's like you said, anti-intellectualism.
Boys were given boys toys and shied away from doing 'girl things.'
Well first of all, that wasn't what I asked. But since you brought it up, I'm sorry that some parents buy toys their children don't want, but for most children, studies show that they do prefer those gender-specific toys, and that these aren't "perceived" roles, as you put it, but inborn preferences. Men and women are different because of our genes.
The question I asked, which nobody has answered yet, is if anyone can give an example of girls being told they not supposed to be interested in IT. I can give you an example of the opposite:
Think about what it means to be a geek. If you're a guy, the joke is that you'll be a virgin until you're 30, and you'll live in your mother's basement. What's it like for a self-identified geek male in highschool? You're a social outcast. Society tells you that you're a failure, and to be a real man, you need to do manly things and the most important thing for you to do is to get a girlfriend. Being a geek or a nerd as a male is a death sentence.
Now look at what it's like for a girl. Geek girls are awesome. Many girls self-identify as geeks even though they have no real knowledge or propensity for computers. It's just so great - it's considered so cool, that they actually lie about it. Anything that you want to do, as a girl, is encouraged.
So that's the world as I see it. Boys feel tremendous pressure to avoid being labeled a geek, being associated with computers, etc. But for girls, anything they do, and everything they do is just super. Wow, you go girl! Girl power! Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them, right? There are no examples of girls being told they're not supposed to be in the IT field because that's just ridiculous. That doesn't happen in the western world. A girl who wants to be in the IT industry is fawned over. She's so special, so awesome, we just love geek girls. But for a guy, it's a hard, lonely life.
And yet, even in this climate, more boys than girls choose the IT field. It is clear to me that this happens in spite of culture, not because of it.