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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."
I want more women in my IT department! Too bad nothing will come from this...
(even if anything does come from this, it'll probably take a decade or two, which makes me feel old already)
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Next they'd have you believe that girls fart and use the internet too... I'm not buying it!
I'm a boy, and I've met girls who I'm better at math than.
Therefore boys are better at math than girls.
Heh, stupid girls probably can't even follow simple basic logic like that ;-)
Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one.
Ok then, so in most of the western world, boys are better than girls at maths...
Was the study conducted by a male or a female?
Boys test scores have been degrading for years as classrooms are intentionally made more "girl-friendly". Parity thru hamstringing if you ask me.
Wait so:
result 1: While previously it had been believed that boys solved harder mathematics questions more adeptly, that trend has been reversed.
result 2: Our standardized test material contained no hard mathematics questions.
Does anyone see anything wrong with this? Their results may be true, but that doesn't mean the study was valid.
Technology (Internet, computers) have evened out the playing field, so modern girls don't have to suffer from the dogma and can use the tools at hand without artificial barriers.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
The math in this study was done by girls.
--- What?
I was just commenting about this with a coworker this morning, and how the Minneapolis Star Tribune indicates Minnesota high school girls are still lagging behind boys. I said we just need to bump down the high school boys' performance a couple notches and we'll be good: no child left behind!
I always thought the claim was that boys (after a certain age) have a better spacial judgment than girls, and that perhaps can translate into some very narrow and specific 3d geometry problem solving abilities (since presumably boys might have a better 3d visualization ability as a consequence).
But the claim always seemed a bit tenuous and overstated.
Increase a number of dimensions by one or more and spacial visualization in 3d advantage disappears and one has to use pure intellect to see anyway.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Girls?!? Whats that?
Is that a new Linux distro without a Pentium flaw?
You know what that means...A WITCH! - Family Guy
I've been sort of disheartened by the quality of math instruction in the US lately, and it's got nothing to do with gender. It certainly seems like newer students lack a lot of the critical math skills that were drilled into my head years ago, based on my limited exposure to new people entering the job market/taking the occasional class here and there.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I disagree that Linux users don't have girlfriends. In fact it looks like your average Linux user is in his 30s, married, has one or two kids and complains that his kids are horribly behaved, and therefore is miserable.
Did anyone really expect there to be a gap in ability? I hope not... I always figured the gap was in interest, and the real debate is whether or not that gap in interest is inherent in some way or is just the result of our culture and the way people are raised and socialized.
white boys should breed with asian girls, creating an uberrace of math chomping supergenius kids
i for one welcome our eurasian einsteinchan overlords
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Girls have more fear of math. They are not worse at it. The typical observation is that girls do not dare try it, while boys perform badly and do not mind. This is a cultural problem, not a capability issue. Same is, incidentially, true ofr technology: Girls are afraid to touch it, while boys break it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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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White girls are stupid.
"But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."
So in other words they dumbed down the tests, just like in every other field. Reminds me of the military when they lowered the standards to allow women in the eighties.
Seems kind of biased to me.
Anything you can do I can do better!
Depends. There are a lot of words in the article, but few figures, which makes the meaning of the key phrases ambiguous. Does "no gender difference in scores" mean simply that the hypothesis that the mean score is the same can be maintained at a reasonable confidence interval? Or did they also analyse the standard deviations? I can well believe that the mean scores are the same but that the boys have more outliers. In that case, to say that boys are better than girls at maths or to say that they aren't is a subjective choice.
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.
Cynical Idealist
White guys need to start hooking up
with more asian girls....hmmm
Assuming we do this , 20 years from now :)
our country will have plenty of really hot
nerdy eurasian girls that are math geniuses
All in favor?
Aye! Aye! Aye!
I volunteer to be part of this experiment. Infact, I will give it my all!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
This is a highly publicized story about nothing. The results of the study were actually that the standardized tests that were analyzed were faulty in that they didn't provide questions that required critical analysis. (They mentioned it in passing in the Science article, but it's better seen in the CNN article about the same study.) So this study is being publicized, even though the "results" (that there is no gender difference in mathematical ability) are based on an admittedly faulty test. Anyone else see any problem with this? This is a political matter, not a scientific matter. If you're a true scientist, you'll ignore the study. Not that I'm against the idea of gender equality in mathematics - I believe that this is an interesting, outstanding question. However, the hasty results of this study hinder our quest for the scientific truth of the matter.
I thought that Girls Just Want to Have Sums.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_just_want_to_have_sums
http://xkcd.com/385/
"Math is hard! Let's go shopping!"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The findings aren't that there is "no gap" in the math abilities of boys and girls.
The findings are that there is no performance gap between boys and girls when taking state standardized tests - tests which the article then goes on to point out have lopped off all difficult questions (with math problems rated from Level 1 to Level 4, they found that most state tests had zero Level 3 or Level 4 questions).
To oversimplify, I'm sure if I took a room full of 6th graders and had them do 2nd grade math, we wouldn't see a skill discrepancy between the boys and the girls. But that wouldn't tell us jack crap about their ability to do 6th grade math.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
My girlfriend just owned me in Call of Duty 4 and Halo...and now math? Guys, we're doomed to being eliminated from the human race, especially since science can now extract sperm from bone marror (see link).
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
It won't be a new message. Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study led by psychologist Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found a "trivial" gap in math test scores between boys and girls in elementary and middle school. But it did suggest that boys were better at solving more complex problems by the time they got to high school.
So she (Janet) did the MATH wrong....
They focused in skin color... hair color would had lead to a more eath-shaking conclusion.
How it Works
Or that there are genetic differences between white and asian people.
"...researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."
Any guesses as to why?
Here it is:
Schools (particularly in the UK) pride themselves on their ability to attract students from outside their catchment areas. To do this they have to look as good as possible. Not for the purpose of seeing how well their teaching methods are actually working, standardised aptitude tests are used by local education authorities and other organisations to rank schools by the number of A grade pupils they can churn out - notwithstanding the fact that a significant portion of said students leave school barely able to read or write and utterly lost on a pocket calculator. Still more cases exist where students leave with less common sense than they were born with.
Exams /should/ be hard. They /should/ tax the brain. They /should/ make one think and they /should/ force at least an attempt at lateral thinking. These days the hardest part of any exam is recalling what was written on a chalkboard two semesters ago. This is just plain wrong in my eyes, although in the eyes of a Government who wants to control the people the situation is just perfect. Keep the sheep stupid and they won't see beyond the boundaries the shepherd sets.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Agreed. No difference at all.
The difference is in motivation - they simply are not interested.
After all, I am sure that all of us could spend hours doing many of the things and jobs that women find so fascinating (fashion, cooking, PA, advertising, sales etc) perfectly competantly - but its true that we simply do not want to.
Judging high-end mathematics aptitude by looking at low-end mathematics test scores is no way to run a study. Anyone can learn mathematics well enough to get a decent score on the SAT; it would be like using rudimentary literacy as the measure of Pulitzer prize potential. What next, flipping burgers at McDonald's will make you the next Iron Chef? No one seriously doubted that males and females learn mathematics with similar aptitude in any case, so this seems to be a combination strawman and low-rent dig at Larry Summers that misses the point more than anything.
The controversy, which is not very controversial, has to do with differences in genders to directly manipulate certain kinds of complex system models mentally. While it tends to manifest in some areas of applied mathematics, it does not reflect any ability to learn mathematics per se.
I hate studies like this as they do nothing but implant ridiculous generalized notions into people who want a simple answer to complex questions. What really matters in terms of intellectual ability is that all humans of all sexes and races possess an enormous capacity for learning, and conclusions on ability should be made at an individual level, not groups.
is Principle Skinner. "I dont have any opinions anymore. All I know is that no one is better than anyone else and everyone is the best at everything."
Standardized math exams amount to rote memorization. No more difficult than ace-ing a Latin exam.
Nazis used all kinds of "science" to make their point, they didn't just declare other races as inferior, they used scientists to base their claims. See my point? In TFA science is used in sex battle, to compare two sexes, which is sexist by nature. More than that they compare races, implying that asian men are inferior to asian women and inferior to white men.
Thank you, this is stupidest and not politically correct article I ever read in last 10 years, coming most likely from feminist "doctor".
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
I mean, maybe there was a gap if you took the average of a bunch of kids from either gender and compared them...but when I was in 5th grade, the two kids with the best math scores were a boy and a girl. And I had to work really hard to keep up with her...
I went to an all male high school. There was an adjacent all female school, so it wasn't like we were missing any of the socializing aspect however I do believe that it helped with the in-class learning as distractions were removed. But not too far.
The higher level/more difficult classes where you had to work in teams were mixed to prepare for the outside world.
http://xkcd.com/385/
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I am not surprised by these results at all. The school system has been trying for years to achieve parity in education between boys and girls. And that parity was not attained by teaching progressively harder subjects, but by requiring easier tests. Additionally, differences between men and women are much more likely to appear at the extreme ends of their fields. That's why we have men's and women's sports, for example. I would think it is very likely that men are better than women in some academic fields and women are better than men at others, since the sexes have different hormones and brains that are not the same.
This is not to say that there will not be women or men in those fields who are just as good, they just won't show up in equal proportions.
no, no!
This is how it works!
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
That is why so many people lost trust in science. We have bunch of politically correct "researchers" that can prove whatever desired by their political clients. Global warming has exactly the same problem. Even if the science is true, it is lost in nonsens of propaganda of Al Gore and other priests from the church of enivromentalism. Normal people do not know who to belive anymore. JAM
There are more male winners of the field's medal. This article makes a pretty convincing case that the reason is because males have a wider sigma and that there will be more male super geniuses than women. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
Nay, nay, a thousand times nay!
Math Classes should focus on Math Concepts and should push students in this regard but should not make it so students have to waste a bunch of time doing multiplication and division by hand say past the 5th grade. Math classes should ALWAYS allow a calculator and a computer with a spreadsheet program and a program like mathmatica would be better. I do ALL my math in Excel now that I actually have a job and I can't figure out why anybody would want to WASTE a bunch of time on mundane math when it's understanding the concepts that matters.
I think this study conclusively shows that:
there's no difference in outcomes based on gender.
Any other questions go unaddressed.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing further research based on the theories that there exist better teaching methods for both boys and girls, exploiting the respective differences in brain organization (I know, that kind of heresy gets you Larry Summers'ed.) We've trended towards LCD on those, from what I've heard folks in the field say. One researcher I heard recently was talking about how mental agility exercises used by the elderly can be adapted and customized to benefit younger individuals, even in specific subjects. Whether boys or girls would perform better on math, on average, with an optimized curriculum, I believe is an open question. And so what if a boy does better? There are a heck of a lot of things girls are better at, IMHO, and math isn't necessarily the pantheon of human knowledge. And, so what if a girl does better? Why do we care, again?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This always trips me up. When I see "Girls = Boys at math" I automatically think Girls are Boys at math. It's the case whenever I see a single '='. So my question is: What is proper, = or ==?
Yeah, real equal. Women average better than men in most school subjects and more women than men go to university. There are loads of female dominated jobs and academic subjects, yet no affirmative action for us. When women want to work a 25 hr week in a career that's "rewarding", the feminists complain that women average lower salaries.
That's feminism: When men are doing better at something "Men and women are equals, the men must have had an unfair advantage!". When women are doing better, "Men and women have different brains and are good at different things!"
When will the geek community use their intelligence and realise when that they're being shafted?
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Gee, here is what the article says:
"Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study ... did suggest that boys were better at solving more complex problems by the time they got to high school."
[Now, this study:] "The study's most disturbing finding, the authors say, is that neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests..."
Of course there is no longer any differences between boys and girls, because the part that makes a difference has been taken away. Judging from the comments, reading comprehension is certainly not strong among the readers here.
Now to the people who blame everything on discrimination, and boys being in a privileged class. Today's classrooms are run predominately by female administrators, more than 90% of the teachers are female, curricula are tailored to girls (*). Even math problems are increasingly word based rather than equation based. And some call this merely correcting the disparities between boys and girls. Einstein was right when he said stupidity has no limits, such is this generation we are living in.
(*) For example, an earlier study points out that reading classes predominately use fictions as course material, something that girls prefer far more than boys, who on the other hand, prefer something that is real and tangible, such as history.
So in your mind the geek community is exclusively male...? I think I see the problem here...
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
DeSadeski: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Strangelove: Thank you, sir.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
one sex has been shown to have a predilection for something doesn't mean you as an individual will, or that you can't buck the odds and shouldn't try.
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.
The problem isn't if girls are better than boys at math or vs versa.
The problem comes in when we force individuals in to these generalizations.
Even if boys tend to be better than girls at math it should never mean that a girl can not be very good at math or that it is bad that she is good at math.
Maybe there are difference. But it only because a problem when we forgot that people are individuals.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You must be new here.
Do you have data to back up that claim?
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
It's predominantly male.
Obviously, you think that men are the only people who would be interested in fairness in this issue? Sounds like you've got a lot to learn.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
You sir are a racist or a bigot.
No just kidding, good point.
But Barbie says Math is hard. Girls aren't supposed to believe her? What's next? Girls not believing that a woman's figure is supposed to look like Barbie's? That's just un-American!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"No Gap Found In Math Abilities of Girls, Boys " I guess that's a better title for the article than "White girls suck at math, US to remove math from tests much easier" ...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
We think that since we discovered what DNA is and have a caveman's understanding of how genes work, we can be an omniscient god and figure out each individuals pre-determined fate. I think that, especially in the science crowd, the Nature aspect is way overblown compared to the Nurture part of it.
You're certainly not gonna convince me it's nature by some craptastic standardized math test.
Add some financial incentive via state and federal funding and it's now become important to not only the teachers but the schools to turn out students that excel on those standardized tests.
Being creative people, the school administrators found that the best and easiest way to obtain those high scores on the tests was to make the tests easier. The companies providing the tests were happy to comply with the wishes of their best (and only) customers.
Combine this with high school classes where half or more of the final grade is based on attendance (!) and what kind of education do you think our children are really getting?
I demand you cease your terrorism, sir!
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Careful there. My guess is that you are basing this "fact" solely on grades. Grades are indicators of two things: intelligence and drive. You can be very, very smart and do very, very poorly because you don't apply it. You can also be very dumb and apply yourself and still do poorly. Smartest people may not always make the best grades... Einstein anyone?
Development notes at http://devscribbles.blogspot.com
Never in my life have I encountered a serious situation where the system favors girls or women over me. Not in school, not in business, not in anything beyond women getting to order first in restaurants. While girls have very slightly higher average scores in grade school and a slight majority when it comes to overall university attendance, the "advantage" is both very small and in my opinion caused by the fact that most girl-focused subcultures are more compatible with academics than are those focused around boys.
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
Yeah, real equal. Women average better than men in most school subjects and more women than men go to university. There are loads of female dominated jobs and academic subjects, yet no affirmative action for us. When women want to work a 25 hr week in a career that's "rewarding", the feminists complain that women average lower salaries.
That's feminism: When men are doing better at something "Men and women are equals, the men must have had an unfair advantage!". When women are doing better, "Men and women have different brains and are good at different things!"
When will the geek community use their intelligence and realise when that they're being shafted?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Back when I was in 5th grade, there were 2-3 girls in my computer class that were much better programmers than I. Much better.
Fast forward to today. They're housewives. I'm a Software Engineer. It's sad and disheartening. I wish there were more women in my field.
It's like puberty fried their brains completely. If it weren't for that I could easily envision them being much better at what I do than I am. But something happened in the intervening years. The only thing that makes any sense is puberty. Until that point the differences between boys and girls are superficial, but prior to that they were much better at it than I was.
I'd like to see the results of this experiment re-run on the same people when they're in their late 20s or early thirties.
Question everything
58% to 42% in the UK in higher education (2005-2006). I wish there had been someone like you around in 1984 when the situation was the exact reverse of the current one. "Hey, it's no big deal and it doesn't make any difference!". Would have come in real handy.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
From what I've seen reported on the study, the authors were looking at averages being the same. That's what I've seen over the years as well. What I've also seen is the standard deviation for boys is greater. Boys are usually at the bottom, the middle and the top with the girls usually clustered in the center. Admittedly, my sample sizes are small and I'm looking at a self-selected group.
I've coached a Middle school math program called Mathcounts for the past 12 years. I coach in a Mathcounts region just south of the Silicon Valley. The program is organized around annual competitions that are structured as a hierarchy: school/region/state/national. Winning at one step gains a student, or group of students, access to the next level of competition. We've managed to do well at the regional competition and have sent at least one kid to the state level 10 out of 12 years.
At the regional level, gender has never been an issue - we send as many girls as boys to state. At the state level, gender is most definitely an issue as the top 16 kids out of the 150 or so regional winners are overwhelmingly boys. You'll usually see a 2 to 1 ratio and sometimes the boy's will sweep the top 16. In the sample I cited, I counted 6 girls out the top 38 contestants. Remember, I'm talking about the top 1% of middle school children in California. Most of the top kids are Asian which means anybody from India to Japan.
A key difference I've seen between my Asian and non-Asian students has been their parents. If I have a strong Asian student, strong odds are that the kid's parents are first-generation immigrants. First-generation parents tend to emphasize excellence far more than parents who have been here awhile.
Do you have data to back up that claim?
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
http://xkcd.com/385/
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
In ancient Greece, olympians performed their competitions nude because it was believed that the physical development of the sexes caused disparities between athletic development. A study done this week in England, however, proves the Greeks just how wrong they were. When 12-year-old girls raced against kindergarten students, they were found to win at the same ratio as 12-year-old boys. "The boys won 100% of their races against the 5-year-olds, and the girls won 100% of their races against the 5-year-olds. With no observable difference in athletic ability, we believe this study will finally aid in breaking down a wall of athletic segregation that plagues our sports industries" the study reports.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Boys are gooder at math, I boy, I like math. Maybe me not good at english, but maybe girls better at word knoledge. Really, schools are dumbing down math. I graduated in 1996, and I didn't own a calculator until I was in grade 9. I went to university, and now as an engineer I perform calculus on a calculator that wouldn't be acceptable for a grade 6 math program. The new graduates, who should be able to pull Maxwell's equations out from memory, like reciting their own name, they "axe me", "who the hell is Maxwell, and why do I need his equations?"
I am not a nerd, I just play one in real life. My avatar thinks I'm a total loser.
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.
No, it is only qualified if the differences between the genders are independent of the decisions justified by said differences. If the decisions have the perverse consequence of causing even more differences, then you have to bring the decisions into question.
The Pygmalion effect means that you can't separate performance from expectation of performance. Expectations of superior performance are, all too often, self-fulfilling prophecies.
Are you adequate?
And in other suprising news today... the Pope announced he was Catholic.
To all you virgins: Thanks for nothing.
There are some disturbing quotes from that article that cast doubt on their conclusion that boys and girls are completely equal in math abilities:
>> 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.
They're reaching cross-culture and cross-ethnicity to find data pairs that cancel each other out. Statistically, I raise a wary eyebrow. But that's nothing compared to:
>> Another portion of the study did confirm that boys still tend to outscore girls on the mathematics section of the SAT test taken by 1.5 million students interested in attending college. In 2007, for instance, boys' scores were about 7% higher on average than girls'. But Hyde's team argues that the gap is a statistical illusion, created by the fact that more girls take the test. "You're dipping farther down into the distribution of female talent, which brings down the score," Hyde says. It's not clear that statisticians at the College Board, which produces the SAT, will agree with that explanation.
If girls have an average score, then no matter how many of them take the test that average should remain the same. That's what *average* means practically by definition. If you keep adding values from a population sample to an average, if that sample is well-chosen, those samples will consistently fall along a certain distribution and continue to do their job to hold the average where it should be.
If you have the scores 5, 10, 10, and 15, does doubling the population sample to get *another* set of scores of 5, 10, 10, and 15 change the average? Of course not.
And yes, 7% IS a statistically noticeable deviation. From a population sample that large, a deviation of 7% is significant.
I think the only way for their argument to hold would be to argue that there are many would-be low-scoring boys who fail to take the test. But that itself should be the subject of study, not just a side observation.
Not only are they wrong, but the College Board practically told them they were. They collected data, performed flawed analysis, and then ignored the fact that the people who administer the bloody test disagree with their results.
... who messed up computing the results.
(Just humor, not flamebait.)
There seems to be other things that influence the math score too. The following article points to a corrolation between equal rights and math score.
http://www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2008/June/200806091508371CJsamohT0.8132898.html
Interesting read.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
That's the point the article is trying to make but I don't know if the data backs that up. There are both genetic and cultural differences between males and females, just as there are both genetic and cultural differences between whites and Asians. I don't see how this data can prove whether culture, genetics, or a combination of both are at work here.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Math is overhyped in education in my opinion. No, this is not sour grapes for not doing well, I did relatively well in the subject. The issue is that only a narrow handful actually use math much, and will forget most of it by the time they do. It would make more sense to hire a consultant, just like we do with law. Should we all learn detailed law in high-school IN CASE we need it later? My brother, who's an engineer, generally agrees. If its merely to "stretch the brain", there are more powerful puzzles.
Table-ized A.I.
Men are pretty much better at whatever they want to be better at. Now I understand all history books were written by "men", yada yada, but if you pick the best male mathematician of all time agaisnt the best female mathematician of all time who is better? Or the best alive, or even the top 5 would be men before a female even entered the list. Even a fruit cup will jump into pretty much a 99.9% womans industry and dominate (ie. Fashion). Females might be better at cooking and cleaning, but we gave you that one... wait not cooking, the best chefs are male -- atleast you can clean?
... I'll bet they had some girls calculate the survey results.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I don't know where the truth lies on this issue, but I do know this, if you say that boys are stronger than girls in math, you will get huge numbers of people to tell you are wrong and why, but if you say that girls are stronger than boys in language, very few will venture to disagree.
(On a purely anecdotal and personal level, my wife has a degree in math, which by her own admission, she did out of spite; several high school teachers told her that girls can't do math, so she made it her mission to prove them wrong. But when I mention to her that I don't think our son's language skills are as developed as some of his peers, her answer is always not to worry because boys aren't as capable as girls in language skills.)
Maybe when you've been on the receiving end of oppression for 10,000 years, maybe when you live in a society that isn't geared toward promoting the dominance of your sex, maybe when you weren't raised in an environment of almost absolute privilege, you get to complain. But on the whole, the fact that you might be complaining that women are smarter than you and dominate a few areas of the job market, while still lagging significantly behind in most others, is just fucking pathetic. Grow a pair, be a man.
IAALS.
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.
Sorry, just couldn't resist.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah. Personally I've always found the tech Girls vs. tech Guys thing a culture problem of geekdom and nothing more. I have meet several girls who are good at tech but just never got in to the field because it's a 'guy' field. The comment from the GP is the typical "get off my lawn" argument that geek guys have on the issue. Most people I have dealt with (both guys and girls) view a tech girl more negatively then they would a tech guy at first and then have no trouble treating them as an equal after they have proven them self. There is a clear guys are better then girls thought out there but there is no substance to it.
No Gap Found Between Maths Abilities of Boy and Girls.
There, fixed for you.
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
I don't think you are correct. I remember reading a study a year ago that compared men and women's salaries for the same jobs and levels of education and experience and the results were women paid 15% less overall (25% less when one only looked at the private sector).
I don't recall who the study was by and Google does not turn it up right away. Do you have a source for your claim?
I'd also like to note that even if there is reliable data showing men and women make the same amount for the same job (with the same qualifications, experience, hours, etc.) that does not necessarily indicate equality as it allows for it to be harder for women to get high paying jobs. For example, if you look at all the people who are CFO's for fortune 500 companies and determine that the men and women make about the same, but 90% of those CFO's are men, that could very easily be an indication that it is harder for women to get those jobs because of discrimination. Alternately, it could indicate that for social reasons women are less likely to go into a career track that would lead them to such a position. The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
Another portion of the study did confirm that boys still tend to outscore girls on the mathematics section of the SAT test taken by 1.5 million students interested in attending college. In 2007, for instance, boys' scores were about 7% higher on average than girls'. But Hyde's team argues that the gap is a statistical illusion, created by the fact that more girls take the test. "You're dipping farther down into the distribution of female talent, which brings down the score," Hyde says. It's not clear that statisticians at the College Board, which produces the SAT, will agree with that explanation. But Hyde says it's good news, because it means the test isn't biased against girls.
Duhhh, this explanation does not pass Occam's Razor.
She is suggesting that the distribution of girls mathematical skills is somehow different than the boy's skills distribution who take the test.
If both groups (boys and girls) both follow the normal curve, as they should do, for each sex, then the difference between boys and girls is real.
For the sake of getting the "right" results, Janet Hyde seems to have made up a totally unprooven factor, "skewed math skills distibution in groups", to be able to still get the results of "no difference between boys and girls"
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
At my last job I, and about every other man, was overlooked for positions and raises for women that had less education than, less experience and less seniority. Sure, it might be better on average. But in certain industries, it hurts to be a man, and there's no affirmative action group for us. Frankly, I don't want one. I find better opportunities elsewhere.
...the closer will be the average scores of men and women. As you go up the ranks of academia you'll find fewer and fewer women - even in mathematics departments of Scandinavian universities that people claim are more equal. (That statistic is easy to check with a web browser BTW) Fewer women are good at the hard stuff.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
How about this for a source?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Most people I have dealt with (both guys and girls) view a tech girl more negatively then they would a tech guy at first and then have no trouble treating them as an equal after they have proven them self.
Are you sure it's not 'cause the girl's typically a newbie, and all newbies tend to be treated quite badly at first by a vocal subset of geeks. I
I dunno, I've never felt like anyone was viewing me negatively 'cause of my gender, more like a sparkly object 'cause yeah the # of girls interested in tech seems tiny. And actually, the sparkly factor may be where the negativity comes in, 'cause I've noticed it sometimes comes with kid glove behavior.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Never in my life have I encountered a serious situation where the system favors girls or women over me. Not in school, not in business, not in anything beyond women getting to order first in restaurants.
I recall at the end of high school, when I was looking at scholarships to fund my higher education, that there were plenty of scholarships available that had a gender or racial requirement, making me ineligible. That is a situation where women had a real advantage over me. One of the universities I was applying for also had a quota for both races and genders, which meant women with lower test scores were admitted aver men with higher test scores. Again, that clearly favored women over me.
Now it is entirely possible that other social factors provided males an advantage over women, like math teachers who wrote recommendations that subconsciously took into account their prejudices about gender. Still, if you didn't see anything that did not clearly favor women, either times have changed or you were independently wealthy.
I'd also note that while participating in hiring a technical writer for a tech start-up I worked at, we hired on a woman who was clearly less qualified than one of the male candidates. This might be because all the other writers were women, but I also overheard comments from a higher up manager about our company "needing more women" as we were mostly men simply because the field we worked in is mostly dominated by men. We actually went out of our way several times to hire women when possible, but most of them ended up being less than competent and were eventually let go. Whatever the case, women were given preferential treatment in several cases.
Like my posts? Dunno 'bout you, but I dig the karma.
Seriously though, it's the old demographics issue. Something like %10-20 of engineering schools/comp sci programs/hard sciences, etc. are female, and slashdot pulls primarily from those populations(but even then a small subset, say y%, y20.) So y% of 10% means slashdot should only have a couple of girls (and I've seen at least one comment by a girl, excluding me, on almost every post here) just 'cause of distributions.
open source modern art: laser taggi
What if, for the sake of argument, the average male was inherently better than the average female at mathematics? What is this difference? How much of the performance gap between the "average" male and the "average" female is due to this inherent difference and not cultural factors? Is this theoretical inherent difference between the genders as significant as that between individuals of either gender? In other words, does it make sense to talk about girls' problems in math, or rather to target special help for individuals of either gender who have math problems? Or how about, for that matter, grooming exceptionally talented individuals of either gender for science and math careers?
Whether or not this inherent gender difference even exists, it is still a near certainty that girls' math and science performance and participation is negatively affected by cultural factors, including the persistance of the debate as to girls' inherent inferiority in these areas. So wouldn't it make sense to try to identify and encourage individual girls who show signs of exceptional talent, so that their talents aren't unnecessarily lost to society? It's not as if the U.S. has an overload of native-born scientists and mathematicians these days.
FWIW, I read a study a few years back claiming that anemia lowers one's capacity for technical thinking, and that even the mild anemia suffered by the average high schooler who has started having periods was sufficient to explain the achievement difference between pubescent boys and girl. Any medical types want to comment?
Never seen female only scholarships? I have. I've never seen male only scholarships however.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If I gave a fuck about that I wouldn't be much of a man would I?
I'm not here to worry about female or male feelings when I post. I'm here to discuss topics and rant on them at length. And to maybe find that nugget of knowledge that shows through now and again in the comments here. The good stuff.
Also, the fact that you assume that slashdot moderation is somehow a group consensus shows a real lack of understanding.
At my last job I, and about every other man, was overlooked for positions and raises for women that had less education than, less experience and less seniority. Sure, it might be better on average. But in certain industries, it hurts to be a man, and there's no affirmative action group for us. Frankly, I don't want one. I find better opportunities elsewhere.
See, legislation such as affirmative action is based on studies, not anecdotes. That's probably your problem.
But the whole industry is filled with ego and men deal with it fine everyday.
Honestly, I don't see a need to bring in more people based on gender or attract more women. This is a merit based industry. If you do well then no one cares what gender you are. Why should we worry about attracting more women to computing? What is the need?
I feel like a lot of people are ignoring the main point of the OP - the difference appears to be cultural, not gender-based. Instead of arguing about discrepancies in teaching methods geared towards one gender or the other, we could be discussing the importance placed on math in Eastern vs. Western culture, or something along those lines. But simply arguing back and forth isn't going to bring anything new to light.
I'd prefer it based on logic more than anything else. But legislation and logic are mutually exclusive.
My own brief experience as a inner-city math teacher would at first suggest that girls are better at math, but on reflection I think it merely seems that way because the girls are generally less arrogant about their own abilities and are more likely to ask for help, or to pay attention when I force it upon them. It is not unusual for me to to find myself trying to teach a boy who insists that he does not need my help (or anyone's) and can do it by himself (by doing nothing) even though he obviously cannot. It's a cultural thing, of course, but I have not been able to break through it yet.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
Wow... did you feel the breeze from the point flying over your head?
Bigot eh....
Sally has 6 slices of bread, 12 pieces of ham and 6 pieces of cheese. How many sammiches can sally make before the man of the house gets home from work?
I'm helping maintain equilibrium; both me and my girlfriend are horrible at math. Actually that means I'll need to produce two math competent offspring to keep the human race evened out.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Maybe when you've been on the receiving end of oppression for 10,000 years, maybe when you live in a society that isn't geared toward promoting the dominance of your sex, maybe when you weren't raised in an environment of almost absolute privilege, you get to complain
So, when the oppressed group gets some power, it just does the same thing they did to them? Besides, the degree to which contemporary society is geared towards men is questionable.
the fact that you might be complaining that women are smarter than you and dominate a few areas of the job market, while still lagging significantly behind in most others, is just fucking pathetic
He's saying the coherent course of action would be to give men as much of an unfair advantage as women have. That we should make affirmative action universal and make every company, career, field, etc. representative of gender and race, even if it means we won't have the best person we could have in every spot.
One of the problems with this equality thing is that we can't have, for example, a company with 1/10 men and another company with 9/10 men. Each one seeks an even distribution when it might not be the most efficient thing to do.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
"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."
Reminds me of that controversial book The Bell Curve. Its authors were blasted as racists and it remains controversial today despite the fact that the research that went into it has been widely accepted as sound... and then quietly brushed under the rug.
When the book was first published, I remember some discussion about it on Good Morning America (or one of those shows) in which it was noted that the correlations between gender and intelligence are as remarkable and deserving of study as those between race and intelligence. One thing that particularly struck me is that it tends to be males who either raise or lower racial averages, and that either way, it's exceptional outliers who swing the average, not the majority closer to the mean. In other words (and I choose this as an example because it was mostly blacks who raised hell about the book) there really is no "unexplained" 14 IQ points or whatever between the average black and the average white. The median and the trimmed mean for blacks and whites are about the same. It's just a handful of exceptionally stupid black males who swing the mean for the entire race.
Okay, this article discussion is getting tricky, but you found a piece of the answer. Here's my view.
In America, women take different social tracks from birth which lead them away from technical pursuits more often than not. This operates at a holistic national level that is easily supported by anecdotal evidence.
Of the girls who decide to go into a technical path of life, and get the necesary education, then that subset of resulting women on average likely raw talents on par with the overall pool of average men who also go down technical paths of life.
Then when it comes to navigating the organizational dynamics, there are indeed some political factors affecting the hiring placement of women candidates. There are also political factors affecting the assignment of pay packages.
In organizations whereupon policy has negated the petty politics, then that small subset of cases should see the women both performing and being paid on a par with men.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Most people I have dealt with (both guys and girls) view a tech girl more negatively then they would a tech guy at first and then have no trouble treating them as an equal after they have proven them self.
My view from the computer science field is that social factors result in both positives and negatives for the probable competence of a woman who has trained herself for a career in CS. Generally, I think it is considered socially undesirable for women, which weeds out most candidates except those exposed to repeatedly by a pro-CS environment (a parent or relative or mentor who is an expert and gets them into it at a young age) or those who have natural gifts that give them an advantage. This, taken alone, would tend to mean there are fewer women in the field, but they would be more competent. Then, however, they go through a formal education which is weighted against them due to quotas which allow less competent ones to continue and preferential treatment from peers (I knew a girl who did not write any of her own code and had several CS boyfriends happy to help her with all of it). As a result, a significant number of the women who go into CS end up with an inferior education and inferior experience. This carries over into the workplace where the male-dominated culture tends to give them more leeway and hire them preferentially just to have a few women in the workplace.
Overall, It is hard to say what all this results in. From my personal experience, working with really, really smart people on the high end of the CS field, I'd say about 2/3 of the women programmers/architects we hire are below the average for the company. The remaining 1/3 are at the top of the game, better on average than the men. Not many tend to fall into the middle. That's just my perspective though. Statistically and across the field as a whole things could be quite different.
Most people I have dealt with (both guys and girls) view a tech girl more negatively then they would a tech guy at first and then have no trouble treating them as an equal after they have proven them self.
Are you sure it's not 'cause the girl's typically a newbie, and all newbies tend to be treated quite badly at first by a vocal subset of geeks. I
I dunno, I've never felt like anyone was viewing me negatively 'cause of my gender, more like a sparkly object 'cause yeah the # of girls interested in tech seems tiny. And actually, the sparkly factor may be where the negativity comes in, 'cause I've noticed it sometimes comes with kid glove behavior.
This is a problem a lot of women in tech have noticed - at least in the 90s, women sometimes had LESS expected of them at work, and as a result were not taken seriously when higher-level positions opened up.
My common sense tells me the tests were flawed, because everyone knows that by the time girls can count to 10, guys can count to 11.
wont work. Either put up (show it by having atleast 30% or more of girls in engg. or related fields) or shut up. Note that this applies to everybody in just about anything.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
I'm not sure it makes the sense to play the "YOU POOR VICTIM" card, if that's the card being played to support "affirmative action". I also don't know any women who live 10,000 years to experience that, nor any men come to that.
Here in the UK, girls are outperforming boys at GCSE and A Levels ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/883836.stm ) - does that mean we should have "positive" discrimination in favour of boys to make up?
I don't for one minute doubt or support the horrendous sexism that still exists in many areas of live - but that doesn't mean it's related to this particular issue, nor does it mean the answer is more discrimination. I feel that any decisions should be made on an individual level. So sure, at an interview you might take into account that a person's individual experiences means that they had it harder than someone else, and that they might have better potential despite lower test scores. What you don't do is judge people based on what's between their legs, or the experiences of their forefathers (what are we, Klingons?).
Oxford and Cambridge have a problem with getting state school applicants, and there is a huge inbalance. But they don't resort to discrimination or quotas - rather they have programmes where people go to state schools to encourage people to apply, and people's background is taken into account on an individual level (e.g., a private educated person might have 6 A Levels whilst a state school person doesn't, but the state school never allowed that person the chance to take that many).
(And before anyone accuses me of wanting some male-only club, the huge inbalance in gender in maths/computer University courses and jobs is something I hate, and would much rather there was a 50/50 split. But that doesn't mean I support discrimination, no matter what I personally want.)
I always thought women were better at math - none of them ever confused six and twelve inches.
That is all.
jobs at a bra fitting plant.
..........FULL STOP.
I can only imagine the uproar were anyone to start using a phrase like "estrogen poisoning" to refer to the functioning of female brains.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
1. Start new company
2. Hire ONLY FEMALES
3. Give them a 5% increase in standard industry wage
4. Undercut all those FOOLS that have male employees
5. Skip step 6
6. ??????????
7. PROFIT!
OK, sure, it seems quite reasonable that people of lower intelligence have more kids.
But it's probably been that way for a very long time. I'd imagine that some illiterate peasant bog-farmer had more kids than, say, Sir Isaac Newton, for example. (don't know if that's actually true, but you see where I'm going, right?)
What keeps us from already being in the grips of an Idiocracy type situation is that there's minimal link between your IQ and that of your parents. Yes, there is a link, but there's a lot of environmental factors that matter much more.
And there's lots of evidence that there's a whole lot of brain development that happens in the first 5 years of life or so. The difference between living in poverty and not, living in a stable household and not in those initial years has been shown to have a dramatic effect on success (however you wanna define it,) in later life.
Given a chance to flourish, good nutrition, a stable emotional environment, intellectual stimulation, decent schooling, etc., a kid born to below-average IQ parents might not be another Einstein or Gauss, but they'll do just fine.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Short answer is yes. Long answer is that is what they are doing they are just far harsher on girls then guys with it. They treat every girl as if she is a "what part is the mouse again?" level newbie even if they have a comp sci PHD.
Caveat: my country may not be the same as yours. YMMV.
Where I live the breakdown of kids entering university is 3 girls for every 2 boys. Yet still all we hear about is how girls are "disadvantaged" and need extra resources thrown at them to improve their performance in university. Meanwhile the boys aren't even making it to university.
And the entrance split isn't the fault of the universities - they base their acceptance on high school results. In the high schools the honor roll positions and scholarships largely go to girls. And yet still we hear how girls are disadvantaged in school and need more encouragement and resources thrown at them to achieve equality.
One has to wonder what the definition of equality is in the educational sphere - nothing but female students?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
Ah yes, blaming the victim - tried and true.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Seriously, it's not just math. The "best" serial killers and mass murders have been men. Same with the 'best' totalitarian dictators. The tallest (and, IIRC, shortest) individuals have been men.
The standard deviation on virtually any trait you measure for men will be larger than it is for women.
There's a lot of theories why this is, but I don't think much of evolutionary psychology, so I'm not getting into that, but yeah, this is why it's ridiculous to point to the fact that almost all winners of the fields medal have been men as evidence for an innate math superiority on the part of men.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
When i read the headline, I assumed that the found that boys can learn math as good as girls do. In my part of the world (Eastern EU) it is assumed that girls have much better math skills on average than boys.
I don't think you are correct. I remember reading a study a year ago that compared men and women's salaries for the same jobs and levels of education and experience and the results were women paid 15% less overall (25% less when one only looked at the private sector).
The poster was correct. About 10 years ago Statistics Canada did exactly that kind of study and found less than a 3% difference in income after normalizing for these sorts of factors. Less than 3% among younger groups (for reasons that should be obvious). But that's never what gets reported. Instead it's "Women earn 65 cents on the dollar compared to men"... of course that number is achieved by, amongst other intellectually dishonest things, comparing women working 30 hours/week to men working 52 hours/week. Well duh, yes working longer at the same job means you make more money... do they really expect to work less hours and still get paid the same? Well, sadly, yes I've heard that suggestion made in the name of "equality".
Here's another statistic that rarely gets any press - men put in more time for the benefit of their families than women. Again from Statistics Canada. Yes, when you include all the time getting to and from work, time at work, time doing things for the family at home etc. etc. men put in about 4 hours a week more than women.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Girls have a more socially-oriented brain structure that tends to react with less confidence to unfounded criticism. In my opinion, all people get treated equally bad in tech circles, but typically girls get less confident under such pressure and fail to advance.
Alternately, it could indicate that for social reasons women are less likely to go into a career track that would lead them to such a position. The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
<cough> <cough> Well yes, proving a negative has always been rather hard.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
This article claims that A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O' Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job..
Of course, women are now graduating college at higher rates than men. There was a recent study mentioned in the New York Times which claims that in US urban areas, women 21-30 earned more on average than men (as high as 120% in Dallas), although nationwide women in that age range only made 89% of men. The suspicion is that urban areas are attracting more college and higher educated women.
At the same time, I've seen a couple of industries that are notable anti-female, so while things are getting better in general, things still have a long way to go.
I know this from experience.
The geek COMMUNITY is predominantly male, but there are tons of female nerds and geeks out there.
They just don't want to come to our party, because we're a bunch of socially inept misogynist pricks.
I see it every day.
Guys in junior high mostly don't dare doing anything uncool.
Soccer? cool. Math? FUZAKERUNA.
So it's far more common to see girls doing anything academic in junior high.
And the funny thing, this even extends to the traditional martial arts. There are more girls than guys in my son's kendo club.
The ravages of the hormone changes post-puberty do different things to girls than to boys. Definitely makes it harder for them to handle linear logic/math, but surviving the changes seems to give them an advantage in the non-linear stuff.
That much is true in Asia as well. But Asia has this really strange cultural bias against guys being caught doing anything that smacks of WORK, so the girls have a chance to get ahead a bit before their hormones kick in in high school.
I think the fear of work in guys is also hormonal, and the hormones kick in earlier than for girls. But asian culture has this knife that cuts down kids who stick out, which makes it that much harder for the boys to buck the peer pressure to join the soccer or baseball club.
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
So one woman CEO at one company in the U.S. solves the world's sex discrimination problems?
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
Assuming men and women have equal opportunities, such an average is appropriate. The expected value for the sex of an employee should be roughly 51% female, because of the male/female ratio. An average of salaries should show a slightly higher mean wage for women, since as a higher percentage of the population they have a slightly higher probability of being in very high paying positions. The distribution of salaries is not normal, instead it has a very high end that causes the mean to be significantly higher than the median. This distribution means that the mean salary for the more numerous sex should be slightly higher, assuming equal job opportunities.
Sure there are gender biases and cultural biases and racial biases and income level biases.
The source of the social problems from all this is that we refuse to look at the individual differences and insist on making the statistical biases the rule. That's turning statistics, logic, all reason upside down.
We should quit saying, women do poorly at subject C, therefore, Miss Q, you should avoid subject C at school.
Yeah, if we follow this path of logic very far, we end up down a road where standardized schooling becomes impossible. But I think that could be a good thing. Standards shouldn't be used as a straightjacket, they should be used as ladders and ropes for climbing and swinging on.
Sally has 6 slices of bread, 12 pieces of ham and 6 pieces of cheese. How many sammiches can sally make before the man of the house gets home from work?
As many as she wants?
Having the *ability* to do math does not automatically cause people to do math. They also have to decide they like math.
You'll notice that the women who *do* go into math tend to be very good at it. One could conclude that this is because women are actually better at math than men, but that's not true either -- there are also men who are very good at math. What's really going on is that a lot of women aren't *interested* in math.
In both genders, there are a few individuals who are exceptionally good at math, and they tend to go into math or related fields. In both genders there are individuals who can't do math to save their lives, and they usually *don't* go into math, which is just as well.
But in between you have individuals who are pretty good at math, but also pretty good at some other stuff. At some point they decide what they want to do with their lives... and when they're making that decision, the males are, on average, more likely to pick math, and the females are, on average, more likely to pick something else -- as evidenced by the fact that some fields are skewed almost as strongly the other direction. For example, the overwhelming majority of library workers are female. This is not because women are naturally better than men at working in libraries. It's because for various reasons they're more likely to *choose* to do that. And no, this isn't just a stereotype, it's really true. I work in a library and have attended numerous library-related conferences and things, and typically in a group of sixty people you can count the men on your fingers. The bias is so strong, that it overrides the otherwise male IT bias: the majority of library IT people are female. Ability isn't the issue. Desire is the issue. What people *want* to do with their lives is heavily influenced by their gender. (This is partly cultural, but not entirely.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Everyone knows Anonymous Coward is male, so, no points for you Mr Coward.
Am I the only one that realizes the obvious implication of this study? That Asian women and White men must begin mating exclusively with one another? We won't even bind their feet (...at least, those of us who aren't rednecks won't...), and we'll split the house work (...at least, those of us who aren't rednecks will).
You really don't know what a mean is do you?
An average of salaries should show a slightly higher mean wage for women since as a higher percentage of the population they have a slightly higher probability of being in very high paying positions.
Think about this for a second. Second issue is this - women are generally considered the primary caretakers of children, and at the same time, are more likely to take time off, or prefer to work less hours. This is probably a good reason why they make less.
None on hand (and I'm certainly not going to waste time trying to dig it up for a Slashdot discussion, since it's usually obfuscated).
If you can, find some of these "studies" that include some raw data, or more than just a soundbite conclusion. Look through said data and be sure to normalise for factors such as shorter working hours. You will find that, for the same job, women are paid the same salary.
(After all, if women really did earn significantly less, employers would be falling over themselves to save money on staffing costs by employing them.)
I don't think you are correct. I remember reading a study a year ago that compared men and women's salaries for the same jobs and levels of education and experience and the results were women paid 15% less overall (25% less when one only looked at the private sector).
Then why aren't employers falling over themselves to save money by employing women ? Knocking 25% off your salary expenses (a significant part of any budget) would confer a substantial competitive advantage.
I don't recall who the study was by and Google does not turn it up right away. Do you have a source for your claim?
Not on hand (and they were in dead-tree format anyway).
I'd also like to note that even if there is reliable data showing men and women make the same amount for the same job (with the same qualifications, experience, hours, etc.) that does not necessarily indicate equality as it allows for it to be harder for women to get high paying jobs.
This is a different topic to "same work, same pay".
For example, if you look at all the people who are CFO's for fortune 500 companies and determine that the men and women make about the same, but 90% of those CFO's are men, that could very easily be an indication that it is harder for women to get those jobs because of discrimination. Alternately, it could indicate that for social reasons women are less likely to go into a career track that would lead them to such a position.
Or they just might not be interested because, you know, men and women are different.
The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
Correlation != causation.
Or, to put it another way, "discrimination" in outcome is not evidence of "discrimination" in process. No-one seems to scream "discrimination" that a disproportionate number of high-level sprinters, for example, are black.
So one woman CEO at one company in the U.S. solves the world's sex discrimination problems?
Who said anything about that ? I was talking about salary comparisons.
Assuming men and women have equal opportunities, such an average is appropriate.
It is completely inappropriate. It does not account, for example, for the fact that women (on average) work significantly fewer hours than men both in short term (ie: a 40 hour week instead of a 50 hour week) and the long term (ie: taking several years off to raise a family).
(Whether this happens by choice or "discrimination" is irrelevant. It happens, and therefore any calculation which does not account for it is wrong , meaning conclusions drawn from those calculations are, similarly, wrong .)
This is just one of the more obvious and glaring bad assumptions that an overall average takes - there are several others (for example, that the distribution of males and females within any job will be normal).
The expected value for the sex of an employee should be roughly 51% female, because of the male/female ratio.
Only if you're working with unrealistic and broken assumptions. Real people with differences are not the same as simplistic equation people, who are identical.
Who did the math behind this study? Was it a boy or a girl?
Grow a pair, be a man.
Back to the kitchen, be a woman.
Please stop using the term 'affirmative action' and use its real name: discrimination.
The UK Minister for Equal Opportunities wants to make it legal to discriminate against men, on the basis that men get higher pay than women.
Of course, the report she's basing this one notes that women in part time work get paid a higher rate per hour than men in part time work do.
Quite how this justifies discriminating against men in pay and job offers I'm personally a little confused. Lets just say I know how to get my gender legally changed and if necessary, I will.
Please stop using the term 'affirmative action' and use its real name: discrimination.
I discriminate between cheap wines and expensive ones, a hamburger from McDonald's and one from Chez Henri... What's so bad about discrimination?
Oh, wait, you meant that it was sexist. Sorry, no. That term is specifically reserved for discrimination based on gender by a person in power - it's part of the definition.
The UK Minister for Equal Opportunities wants to make it legal to discriminate against men, on the basis that men get higher pay than women.
Oh, excellent. Well, welcome to the 1970s, Limey.
Of course, the report she's basing this one notes that women in part time work get paid a higher rate per hour than men in part time work do.
She might also be basing it on the study that women earn less than men in the same jobs, even when corrected for experience, time, benefits, etc.
Quite how this justifies discriminating against men in pay and job offers I'm personally a little confused.
Again, this is because you think discrimination=sexism. It doesn't.
Lets just say I know how to get my gender legally changed and if necessary, I will.
Oh, well, feel free then. Because if your salary is the only possible consideration you could have when deciding whether to have a penis or not, then you probably should base your decisions on that.
She might also be basing it on the study that women earn less than men in the same jobs, even when corrected for experience, time, benefits, etc.
Except that the study sadly didn't show that. Oops.
The study did show that women working part time earn significantly less per hour than men working full time. Which is the statistic she quoted to justify this foolish suggestion.
Obviously this loses its significance when you correct for experience, time, benefits, etc - oh, and whether the job is full or part time. Because at that point, the study shows that the corrected earnings per hour for women are higher than men.
Again, this is because you think discrimination=sexism. It doesn't.
If someone is discriminated against on the basis of gender then it is sexism. Shit, check http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sexism if you don't believe me.
Even taking your unusually narrow view of what constitutes sexism, "Affirmative action" invariably involves somebody in a position of power discriminating against another person.
If the legislation stated that it was fine to pay women 20% less than men because women get maternity leave and men don't, and because women take more sick leave than men, then it would be discriminatory and sexist.
Maternity leave itself is sexist. Why should women get so many months off on full pay because of a lifestyle choice? Sweden offer men equal rights in this area, why can't other countries.
If legislation is brought in that permits favouring women over men when recruiting then it is discriminatory and sexist.
I don't think these are complicated concepts.
Because if your salary is the only possible consideration you could have when deciding whether to have a penis or not, then you probably should base your decisions on that.
You may be amazed to discover that it's possible to change your legal gender without taking any medication or receiving any surgical alterations at all. Legal gender does not have to resemble physical characteristics.
A lot of people, like me, hold views that are at odds with the feminist orthodoxy on matters such as the workplace, education and affirmative action. People like you label it as hateful misogyny for two reasons. Firstly, to make the issue emotive rather than theoretical. Secondly, to re-enforce the taboo that exists around questioning the pillars of feminist theory in the social sciences.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
the 'intellectual equality' between the sexes?
Answer: Because genius is and has been the domain of the trailblazing spirited male mind, and many people just 'can't stand it.'
Sir I read your post and your discussion of the unpopular politically incorrect realities of the spirited male mind is not lost or wasted on me.
This conversation relates directly to the shortage of women who actually stay in the tech professions after beginning training for them. In my high school, a male kid who was a year behind me in math was voted "class genius." He was a perfectly nice kid -- wasn't his fault that he fit a positive stereotype for being a male good at math, and I fit a negative stereotype for being a female good at math. It not being his fault, I only took a quiet revenge: when it came time for his yearbook photo as "genius", I wrote an equation on the board behind him that he didn't understand. Every geek female has a similar story. I regret to say I went into law and journalism, where I faced my share of harassment for being female and ambitious, but not quite what I would have faced in a tech profession. Any woman who stayed in math and the sciences in the '80s despite the continual harassment, discouragement and insults had to be not just twice as able as every male coworker but also a warrior with the hide of a rhinoceros. The sad part is, I thought the tough-hide requirement had lessened over twenty years. Apparently not. Not judging by this place.
The article is more pop-science to advance some specific agenda. First it claims they are equal, but then the article says "Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.". The article doesn't say gender or sex doesn't matter -- just that gender alone doesn't influence it. Like, "duh!". Diet, culture, genetics...sure, they influence -- but the fact is that gender does enter into performance. There nonsense statistic that even though girls used to do less well, and now still do 7% less well on the SAT, now its because more girls are taking the SAT -- so its not because they girls don't do better -- but because more of them take it?! Right...I believe that -- but they didn't count the boys with dark hair! That would shift it by 32% in reverse! Or is it the blue eyes?...
What seems to be the case is that there is a greater spread of distribution among males than among females. Anyone above at or above some 'midpoint' takes the test -- the males who are less intelligent than the average female don't take the SAT -- but the highest scorers (among whites, apparently) are males -- not females. Just that females are closer to average. Well in any field, if they try to employ people above average in that field, then since more females would cluster near average, they would hire more males from the top. Now why this is reversed in asian families is anyone's guess -- but there are "class" differences, where class=members of sex female, or members of sex male. There are societal expectations in each culture for each sex. That still does not mean males = females. Nor does it imply that sex-discrimination isn't occurring. There are other data that would need to be collected.
-l
http://www.iwf.org/campus/show/18948.html
this is the source. and the study comes from the IWF (independent women's forum!).
to sum it up, they found that when controlled for all the variables above, women make about 98% of what men earn.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
i was like WTF!? for a second, than i realised you could be right. it is no evidence of gender discrimination but it is evidence against the gender wage gap (myth).
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
I don't mean to sound like a troll, but men seem to dominate the janitorial field as well. I honestly can't think of a woman who definitely can clean better than a man.
testing out my trending skills
Yes, and no.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but remember that men aren't allowed to have men only companies. Women are allowed women only companies. Technically, we could have 75% - 100% of the workforce made up of women, and affirmative action could even know about it, but affirmative action wouldn't step in to help us.
testing out my trending skills
So you missed the study where people admitted that they didn't hire women for top leadership positions because women aren't viewed as capable of leading? And the other one where people are often hesitant to hire women for important jobs because they're viewed as potential mothers? That women getting the same results as men had their accomplishments consistently undervalued?
what's that now?
Second issue is this - women are generally considered the primary caretakers of children, and at the same time, are more likely to take time off, or prefer to work less hours. This is probably a good reason why they make less.
And this is the fault of women, not society? If men and women were viewed as equal partners in child-rearing, instead of the responsibility falling primarily to one partner over the other, wouldn't they both take time off to look after the kid?
what's that now?
I believe hormones do play a significant part. In my experience the only female I knew who was adept at using Linux had a beer belly and an above average amount of facial hair. As we all know, hormones affect the way things grow and develop which does include the brain. I believe that women have less capacity/capability for certain higher level mental functions then men because of it and a higher capacity/capability for emotions.
If you've been in school, you've encountered one.
The old school approach was the cumulative final. Girls did poorly on that so research was done on how girls could do better. What they found was that girls would do better (and boys worse) when there were more tests, more quizes and more homework. So the curriculum was changed to the system which played to girls' strength and boys weaknesses.
According to the data I've seen, when it comes to test time, the boys do rather better than girls. It is homework in particular which girls are better about doing.
Anecdotes: I've seen several professors/teachers independently give similar opinions on what they see in their classrooms. The girls are on average much more dutiful, but those that are inquisitive are overwhelmingly male. And a quote from the article which reminded me of this: "the boys tend to be a little more idiosyncratic in solving problems, the girls more conservative in following what they've been taught."
Ever consider that people don't particularly like you because you seem to do little other than whine, complain and demonstrate your pettiness?:
Five of them, actually.
Except that the study sadly didn't show that. Oops.
There's more than one study, you know. For instance, there's the October 2003 study from the US General Accounting Office titled "Women's Earnings" that found that when corrected for hours worked and experience, including part time work vs. full time work, women still only earn 80% of what men do. Oops.
Obviously this loses its significance when you correct for experience, time, benefits, etc - oh, and whether the job is full or part time.Because at that point, the study shows that the corrected earnings per hour for women are higher than men.
Ooooh, fail. "When we account for differences between male and female work patterns as well as other key factors, women earned, on average, 80 percent of what men earned in 2000."
If someone is discriminated against on the basis of gender then it is sexism. Shit, check http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sexism if you don't believe me.
Okay, sure. Hey, look at that - it's not just "discrimination based on gender = sexism". It specifies either being based on traditional gender roles, or restricted job opportunities.
Seriously, why would you link to a definition that disproves your claims. Is this your first time on Slashdot?
Even taking your unusually narrow view of what constitutes sexism, "Affirmative action" invariably involves somebody in a position of power discriminating against another person.
Oh, weep for poor Whitey! The Man is keeping him down, by not allowing his historical actions in keeping minorities and women down to continue. If only we could start on, well, not a level playing field, of course, but an unadjusted playing field that directly reflects the status quo as its been for hundreds of years!
Maternity leave itself is sexist. Why should women get so many months off on full pay because of a lifestyle choice? Sweden offer men equal rights in this area, why can't other countries.
And they should. I'm glad we agree on paternity leave.
You may be amazed to discover that it's possible to change your legal gender without taking any medication or receiving any surgical alterations at all. Legal gender does not have to resemble physical characteristics.
It depends on your jurisdiction, and you'd still require evidence from your doctor, therapist, and others strong enough to convince a court that you're transgender. It's not like filling out a form.
Oh, weep for poor Whitey!
Now there's a crass assumption. Plus of course, it's perfectly possible to be male and against sexism, or black and against racism. Although affirmative action may be sexist or racist it's possible to be a black woman and against affirmative action.
I'm not a black woman.
I'm struggling to understand why you're even trying to argue here. Your points are poor, you're quoting US statistics in response to my UK ones, you've making false assumptions about me, and attacking me personally. What exactly is your point here?
My point is that affirmative action on the basis of gender is sexist. The link I provided confirms that definition of sexism (while also providing others - fortunately I've been on Slashdot long enough to know that there can be many answers). You haven't disproved that.
Now there's a crass assumption.
Actually, it was crass sarcasm. I thought that should have been painfully obvious.
Your points are poor, you're quoting US statistics in response to my UK ones
No, I quoted and cited a study in response to your non-quoted, non-cited assertion. There's two fundamental differences there, and the country of origin isn't one.
you've making false assumptions about me
Again... Sarcasm. The only assumption I made about you is that you aren't an oppressed minority. Bet I'm right.
and attacking me personally.
When was that?
What exactly is your point here?
Well, I made a long post above, and you only responded to one line in the sarcastic paragraph in the middle. Maybe you missed the point. I'd go back and read it, and try responding to any one of the other paragraphs. They'll clear up your confusion nicely.
The phrase: "...do little other than..." gives it away: I'm a stranger to this speaker, so I would guess the above is a phrase he habitually directs at a woman he abuses in real life, someone he believes he knows well. Classic Internet misogyny again: posts with female usernames attract displaced anger from men and boys who resent their mothers and girlfriends.
It's not like they're given these jobs. They have to fight and sacrifice a lot to get there. They don't get to spend a lot of time with family. Many of them didn't take a lot of vacation time and worked 60+ hours a week to get where they are now.
Which would you rather do, work nonstop climbing the corporate ladder or stay at home and raise your children. There are a lot of women who would take the latter choice. There is virtually no opportunity for a man to make that choice.
They treat every girl as if she is a "what part is the mouse again?" level newbie even if they have a comp sci PHD.
That's what I call kid glove treatment, which I've gotten my fair share of. And when I complained to the dean about a specific professor doing this, the dean told me I was gravely mistaken. So, trying to give that prof the benefit of the doubt, maybe a combination of sheer lack of exposure to women in tech and the few they meet often not being the most tech savvy* has conditioned many guys to treat most girls like total n00bs. Plus, I've noticed a screwed up sense of chivalry sometimes coming into play.
*Most of the people I've met in comp sci are totally clueless about tech, not just girls. I just think numbers (and girls often being more willing to admit that they're newbies and ask for help) make it seem like more girls are newbies.
open source modern art: laser taggi
"so I would guess the above is a phrase he habitually directs at a woman he abuses in real life"
Of course you would, as you are a stock example of the misandrist cult.
Pretend that you are not just another man-hating feminist: "He was a perfectly nice kid." But of course you must attempt to humiliate him: "I wrote an equation on the board behind him that he didn't understand." And of course you are the uber-capable, twice as good as any man, blah blah blah woman.
You are a stereotype.
No, you are attacking a stereotype who lives in your own mind.
What, pray tell, is misogynistic about acknowledging that women are as capable as men in math skills, fart, and use the internet, that is, that they're fully human? Are you just one of those people that continually wishes to keep them in the role of victim?
Notmysig
I'm nearly 32, and it was in place when I was a teenager.
According to studies as well as psychologist opinion, girls largely base their self-worth on their fathers.
Different statements apply to individuals and to populations. Sex (to avoid the difficult term gender) does not predict the average math aptitude of random samples of males and females. Their population means are close as can be. Sex does predict the number of male and females individuals in such a random sample likely to differ greatly from the population mean. Their population variances are quite different.
When considering a non-random sample of math high-achievers, it requires no phallocentric conspiracy to account for a preponderance of the subpopulation with a larger variance, only Baye's Theorem.
If you hold unswervingly to the gender-feminist axiom that males and females have identical distributions of everything except reproductive organs, it will be necessary to reject this argument. But you're going up against lots of good data. I find the durability of said axiom when confronted by inconvenient data hugely amusing. Intellectual honesty is clearly not an issue when the mission is rolling back the patriarchy.
--
phunctor
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.
This tells us a lot more about your mathematical skills than your wife's.
For the love of all things holy, please study statistics for a minimum of 15 minutes before opening your mouth again.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The most simple business logic.
,that have the same productivity per hour as men, but spend less time on professional activities the same amount?
FACT: Men are more likely to sacrifice personal time for work and/or professional activities. Women are less likely to do that.
Why should an employer pay women
I'd bet that women that do actually spend the same amount of time working have better/faster/more rewarding careers then men.
I have several female colleagues in contrast to them male colleagues do at least 1 hr of overtime per week, and countless on professional development. Female colleagues get in at 9:00 and 17:00 they are OUT for the day, NO exceptions in 2 years now. I am and all my colleagues(both male and female) are Java developers.
As for a job cleaning, your probably right. What I mean is some women take pride in having a clean home. Like strive to be great at it where I haven't seen too many men get into it the same (as with cooking or fashion). Even though I was being a little sarcastic, that's not at all a bad thing, I don't see why its a problem, yes some women want to be math geniuses and programmers and maybe in some places find resistance in that but feminist make it seem like your a barbarian or living in the ice age if your a female or want a female that wants to have babies and maintain the house (cleaning, cooking, the kids health, usually keeping track of the bills and more also), its not like its an easy job or not challenging -- it can be as rewarding as you make it. But guess what, to grow as a community someone has to have babies (men can't do it, nature has already chosen ladies to do this, this also impedes on their professional success in life, naturally. This has nothing to do with men keeping females down.). Then someone has to raise and care for them - which the natural choice would again be the female - as naturally she is the one that has to breastfeed, therefore the man has to work and progress in his professional career. Plus theres nothing like a Hispanic barefoot chick with a straw broom in the kitchen :).
I think that you are right about women doing a better job of keeping the house looking nice and tidy. Women probably love Ikea more than we do. I'm just generalizing, but I wouldn't be surprised if the best bachelor pad is just mediocre compared the best mainstream family household. It's apples and oranges, but still.
You're right about it being as rewarding as we want to make it. This is true for all jobs. I really hate it when feminists make it sound so bad. They really are insulting the women who want the job. They certainly aren't helping men to look at it in a positive way.
LOL I agree with almost all that you said, but this I take issue with. ;^P I don't discriminate against Hispanics. I want all women to be treated like that. ;^P And they can clean the washroom while they are at it. ;^P
That being said, I seriously do believe that men should do a bit of each chore, just so that we are constantly aware of how much work it is. Also, it gives us incentive to reduce the amount of work [e.g. do we really need to use 2 cups instead of 1?]. I get really angry, when people make extra work for somebody else without any concern for that person.
testing out my trending skills