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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."
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
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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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
Three out of eight in the department I work in are women. But only one of us started in IT. My background is music business administration and ending up in computers because a computer was donated to the not-for-profit I worked for in the early 1980's, and I couldn't stand to see it just sitting there not being used. However, I have noticed over years that it's a field dominated by men. Is it just me, or are men more curious than women about IT and other related areas in general?
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)
They focused in skin color... hair color would had lead to a more eath-shaking conclusion.
Men do tend to be more interested in technical things. In fact, the cog. sci. department has a related hypothesis that they're currently testing. The hypothesis is that Asperger's syndrome and the autistic spectrum is just the extreme case of the male brain (literally: testosterone poisoning).
Cynical Idealist
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.
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)
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.
The hypothesis is that Asperger's syndrome and the autistic spectrum is just the extreme case of the male brain (literally: testosterone poisoning).
I have asperger's and so do three of my children. My daughter (with asd) is entering the 9th grade this year effectively three years ahead of where I was in math. It's frightening. She skipped the 3rd grade and looks younger than she is. She looks like a 12 year old entering high school. I've been preparing her for a couple years for the time (about now) when I won't be able to help her with math anymore. It's really shocking to me how smart she is.
I think the human race, at least in the developed world, is selecting for intelligence. Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children. I think this natural selection mixed with how our environment has changed is responsible for the increased incidence in asd.
We need to think long and hard about how we educate children and what we consider normal. The one-size-fits-all public education system is the worst possible thing you can do to an asd kid.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
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.
"I think the human race, at least in the developed world, is selecting for intelligence."
You, sir, are outcho goddammed mind.
The intelligent people in developed countries are being outbred by the people of lower intelligence.
I know it is not science, but sheesh, haven't you seen Idiocracy?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
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.
Can you point to just one example of someone telling women they're "not supposed to be interested" in IT?
Because I'm calling bullshit on your comment.
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.
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.
Boys were given boys toys and shied away from doing 'girl things.'
Well first of all, that wasn't what I asked. But since you brought it up, I'm sorry that some parents buy toys their children don't want, but for most children, studies show that they do prefer those gender-specific toys, and that these aren't "perceived" roles, as you put it, but inborn preferences. Men and women are different because of our genes.
The question I asked, which nobody has answered yet, is if anyone can give an example of girls being told they not supposed to be interested in IT. I can give you an example of the opposite:
Think about what it means to be a geek. If you're a guy, the joke is that you'll be a virgin until you're 30, and you'll live in your mother's basement. What's it like for a self-identified geek male in highschool? You're a social outcast. Society tells you that you're a failure, and to be a real man, you need to do manly things and the most important thing for you to do is to get a girlfriend. Being a geek or a nerd as a male is a death sentence.
Now look at what it's like for a girl. Geek girls are awesome. Many girls self-identify as geeks even though they have no real knowledge or propensity for computers. It's just so great - it's considered so cool, that they actually lie about it. Anything that you want to do, as a girl, is encouraged.
So that's the world as I see it. Boys feel tremendous pressure to avoid being labeled a geek, being associated with computers, etc. But for girls, anything they do, and everything they do is just super. Wow, you go girl! Girl power! Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them, right? There are no examples of girls being told they're not supposed to be in the IT field because that's just ridiculous. That doesn't happen in the western world. A girl who wants to be in the IT industry is fawned over. She's so special, so awesome, we just love geek girls. But for a guy, it's a hard, lonely life.
And yet, even in this climate, more boys than girls choose the IT field. It is clear to me that this happens in spite of culture, not because of it.
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!
Keep in mind that the celebration of the girl geek is a fairly new social development. This certainly wasn't in place back when I was a teenager (I'm 30 now). Let's wait 20 years or so before we make any conclusions as to how this has affected the interest of girls in more scientific pursuits.
Additionally, I think that girls largely base their self-worth on the opinions of other girls, and girl-geekery, I suspect, is not celebrated largely within the female community just yet.