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New Study Concludes Math Gender Gap Is Cultural, Not Biological
New submitter germansausage writes "A new study was published today in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, looking at data from 86 countries, to test the 'greater male variability hypothesis' as the primary reason for the scarcity of outstanding women mathematicians. It concludes that cultural and not biological factors are the chief causes (PDF) of the gap in math skills between men and women."
Ask any Scot.
A Kilt is NOT a skirt.
The best explanation I've found online is the marked answer here:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111013145703AAO6AEd
A kilt is a made to measure garment that is specifically designed to fit a man's anatomy, and as such it is usually very unflattering to a woman's figure.
A kilt has eight yards of material, most of which is taken up in the pleats, there are very few women who would want to carry so much weight in a skirt.
A kilt fastens on the right hand side, whereas a woman's skirt usually closes on the left.
Traditionally kilts may only be worn by men and boys, but nowadays many women like to wear tartan skirts, which are sometimes called kilted skirts.
The only women I know of who wear traditional kilts, are those who play in a pipe band, they also wear the kilt so as to keep the entire band uniform.
Many Scots especially the traditionalists, will take great offense if you call their kilt a skirt, as they see the kilt as their national dress, as indeed it is, and they are rightly very proud of it.
'spread out' is actually a key word here.
I can not recall where I had found it, but a while back I saw a piece breaking down math and language skills by sex. What it actually came down to was a pair of overlapping bell curves. In the past it was assumed the peaks were at differnt places, with males and females 'mostly' in the same space but not quite. Turns out the peaks were actually around the same spot, but with males being more 'spread out'.. so more high scores but a similiar number of low scores.
Within our culture, we tend to pay attention to the high scoring males and ignore the low scoring ones, giving the impression that males are 'better at math'. Similarly we tend to pay attention to the low scoring language males and ignore the high scoring ones, giving the impression that females are 'better at language'.
Do you really think the scientist involved in the study didn't think of that? (hint: read number 43 on their citation list). Come on.
Briefly, biology is what comes from your genetics. It's a product of your mother and father.
Culture is a worldview that you pick up from the people you hang around.
In 16th century France, brutal monarchy was perfectly acceptable. In 21st century France, democracy is the worldview, and no one would accept an absolute king. The genetics didn't change much but the culture changed.
More to the point, they have two reasons to believe that culture is what is making the difference. First, as culture has changed in the US, more women are being drawn towards mathematics. Second, in some places that are culturally different than the US, women even do better than men at math and science.
Please read the study next time, you'll be informed which will keep you from making idiotic comments.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
2 != 3, so your statement is false. You should have said there are 11 kinds of people.
You failed to understand the joke. Assuming the number X uses the lexical base of Y, with Y being represented in base "ten", then (X)_Y (ie: "X" in base "Y"), then, (X)_Y = (10)_3 = "three to the first power". Therefore, gmuslera's joke means "there are three kind of people, those that understand ternary .... ". You either thought he/she meant "binary", or you don't understand ternary. Your joke "there are 11 kinds of people" would technically be correct, if the original joke referred to binary rather than ternary.
Just amazing, what statements you can make about such clear data. Many, many studies to date have shown that male and female abilities in mathematics are roughly the same. Nearly as many have shown support for a higher variance amongst males, meaning there are more stupid and more brilliant men. This has been (and is) used as the explanation for the predominance of men at the very top levels of STEM fields.
So...this paper claims "greater male variability...[is] largely [an] artifact of a complex variety of sociocultural factors".
Look at Figure 1.B. in the paper and read their discussion of it. With three only three exceptions - two of which are outliers for other reasons, all of their data supports the variability hypothesis. The same can be seen in Figure 1.C - with the same three exceptions, all of the variance ratios are above 1, with an average around 1.16.
In the end, their data plainly supports the same conclusions drawn by all of the other studies. The sincere desire to reach a PC conclusion apparently blinds the authors to the plain meaning of their own data.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Support their needs by allowing them to not work as many hours and be available as much? Sure, but they will get paid less, which is also another equality complaint of women. Expecting women surgeons to get paid the same, have the same employment success, but not work as much is completely unfair.
And entirely a strawman. The wage disparity exists between men and women doing the same work, and that is where the complaint exists.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Just amazing, what statements you can make about such clear data. Many, many studies to date have shown that male and female abilities in mathematics are roughly the same. Nearly as many have shown support for a higher variance amongst males, meaning there are more stupid and more brilliant men. This has been (and is) used as the explanation for the predominance of men at the very top levels of STEM fields.
So...this paper claims "greater male variability...[is] largely [an] artifact of a complex variety of sociocultural factors".
Look at Figure 1.B. in the paper and read their discussion of it. With three only three exceptions - two of which are outliers for other reasons, all of their data supports the variability hypothesis. The same can be seen in Figure 1.C - with the same three exceptions, all of the variance ratios are above 1, with an average around 1.16.
In the end, their data plainly supports the same conclusions drawn by all of the other studies. The sincere desire to reach a PC conclusion apparently blinds the authors to the plain meaning of their own data.
If you bothered reading the text rather than just looking at the pretty pictures, you'd find that they were not disputing that variance exists, but that it's innate. Read the second sentence of that section:
If true, the variance ratios (VRs) for all countries should be greater than unity and similar in value.
But they're not:
In fact, the VRs calculated using the 2007 TIMSS eighth-grade data set studied in detail here varied widely among countries, ranging all the way from 0.91 to 1.52 (Figure 1A).
Variances for girls and boys also varied widely throughout a threefold range (Figure 1B). Countries with small variances typically had VRs within 0.2 of unity. Most of the countries with large VRs were ones that also had unusually large boys’ variances.
And you know what that means?
Therefore, we conclude that both variance and VR in mathematics performance vary greatly among countries.
And since the Y chromosome isn't different in each country, that indicates that it's not the Y chromosome causing those variances.
In the end, your sincere desire to slam the article for disagreeing with your beliefs apparently blinds you to the plain meaning of the study.
Kinda like how Bush Jr. destroyed the economy, then handed the keys to Obama, and now everyone's blaming him.
(I must apologize, I generally try to avoid turning everything into a political debate, but I couldn't resist this time.)
Is 1563649 a prime number?
As for biological factors, It seems to me the distribution curve for men is flatter than for women in most things. You get more insane/evil/retarded men than women. You also get more "ultra genius" men than women.
This is one of the hypotheses explored in the study. They find no support for it.