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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.
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!
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.
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
Aye! Aye! Aye!
I volunteer to be part of this experiment. Infact, I will give it my all!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
http://xkcd.com/385/
The way many studies show this is that the average scores for boys and girls are roughly equal, with boys slightly outperforming girls, however girls tend to have a much lower deviation, most girls score about average, whereas boys are much more likely to score either very high or very low.
My problem with this article is that it writes off a 7% difference as an illusion. And doesn't actually give any of the figures, just results (which I can't really trust without figures, especially after how the one figure they do include contradicts the article headline)
"Math is hard! Let's go shopping!"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
They focused in skin color... hair color would had lead to a more eath-shaking conclusion.
In Western culture, pull a string on a Barbie and she'll say "Math is hard!"
Maybe we are all equally capable at math and cultural factors hold us back rather than propel us forward (example, technology). If anything, our ability to rely on technology is holding us back - as an example, its a culture shock for a lot of freshman college students to not use calculators.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
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.
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
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)
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.
So in your mind the geek community is exclusively male...? I think I see the problem here...
Studies of 10 year old boys and girls have shown equal rates of pregnancy. But as they mature this gender gap widens, so 'obivously' there is a cultural bias here that must be corrected with affirmitive actions.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.