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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."
Wearing skirts is also cultural, not biological
I have seen an interesting counter argument to this.
It states that females are biologically equal to males in maths abilities, but superior to men in language ability. It this is true, men would tend to crowd into math heavy fields (Since they have a natural advantage there) while females would be more widely spread out.
Which is not exactly true. In rich worlds 80% of woman pile into 10 of the 120 job categories (Medicine, teaching, public service) while men are more evenly spread out.
I worked on a grant looking at math skills and correlating with language, gender, age, and other factors amongst three population groups (white, hispanic, and navaho). We followed a group of third graders through the fifth grade, and a group of sixth graders through the eighth grade. Very interesting stuff, and at least in my corner of the US it was very obvious that as students moved on in school they liked math less, felt it had less value, and also performed worse on the tests. In the third grade group almost everyone believed that math was important, that they would use it in their jobs, and stated that they liked math. By the eighth grade only a few still felt this way, and of those almost all were boys. I was the programmer, created the test instruments, database for the results, etc, so I never saw the entire set of results, but heard that the young cohort pretty much proved that there was very little gender or cultural bias against math aside from poverty (which interestingly seemed to indicate a dislike of it).
Girl's toys: Plastic tits and the phrase "Math class is tough!"
I still haven't figured out whether dysfunctional society caused the toys or dysfunctional toys caused the society, though.
Men may multiply...
Women divide into two, or more.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It was done by a man and involves lots of math.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Biology influences culture. DNA makes our brains, with well-proven gender differences, and our brains lead to our culture. Our culture is created directly by our brains, and also by the interaction with other people (brains).
What do you say we go back to my room and do some math: add you and me, subtract our clothes, divide your legs, and multiply.
You would have thought insight just from trans-people's experiences would have been enough to make this blatantly obvious.
I guess they're just too weird to consider.
Let's consider this .. the culture of acquiescence. Someone says, "Math is hard." Others who are struggling with math hear that statement and accept the reason they struggle is because math is hard, therefore failure (or accepting less than the best one can do) is allowable. So people sell themselves short, buying into the cultural belief that math is hard and only super intelligent beings (or geeks) get it, and since they are neither they focus their energies elsewhere.
Math isn't hard. It's easy. It's amazingly easy. What's hard is breaking through from simply memorising tons of details (which is rather difficult) to comprehension. Once you comprehend and begin thinking in a mathematical view, it's another language and a rather simple one at that (try learning French, with all those blasted dialects!)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Or boys and girls? And Mathematics..or Arithmetic?
If the differences were biological wouldn't one want to wait until key biological differences between men and women had settled out more, say..I don't know..puberty?
I don't know if the differences are biological or not, but reading through the study it seems a rather flawed basis to back the statement "Men aren't better than women at math, biologically".
When I have kids of my own, I'm raising them to be math and science nerds like the old man, especially any daughters.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
French is easy, man. Just replace the second half of an English word with "hohohoho" and you're there.
My Christian Comrades,
The Lord tells us that wives should submit to their husbands, and He granted men their greater ability to do math and science to help enforce this view. All of the neo-Nazi bra-burning feminists who wish to bridge this so-called "gap" are merely trying to undermine the Christian values of our nation. This is the way things are supposed to be, so there is no "gap."
Sincerely, Jake
My Fellow Mathematicians,
:)
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm (cool stuff for math history geeks!)
The Calculus tells us that The Numbers should submit to their domains, and It granted mathematicians their greater ability to do math and science to help enforce this view. All of the neo-Nazi math-burning Luddites who wish to bridge this so-called "gap" are merely trying to undermine the Mathematical values of our scientific establishment. This is the way things are supposed to be, so there is no "gap.", other than the gaps between prime numbers.
Sincerely, The Troll Feeder
PS: I was going to find something witty about the bible calling pi = 3, but then I learned something new today
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
So... any science that uses statistics is automatically bad science? That kinda rules out, well.. science.
I mean, there is this big cultural panic that women don't go into STEM and everyone wonders why. They point out that they are force fed dolls, and shows about mothering, princesses and other assorted crud, where boys are fed high strength stuff like GI Joe and Bob the Builder.
But that isnt the cause of the divide. The culture inside public schools is almost as immobile as governments, because the younger children adopt the values of the older ones to try to fit in, be cool, and seem more mature. The effect of peers on kids growing up has more profound effects than any specific media they are consuming - it is more a product of their behavior around one another than it is from what they watch on tv
I dont have any sources off the top of my head, but from other discussions on this topic, the general consensus is a home schooled boy and girl completely cut off from peer influence have absolutely no real discernible preference away from math, that statistically if you introduce math in interesting and purposeful ways, both of them can like it, and develop interests in it. There is no genetic or hormonal effect prohibiting either from developing a fascination with any particular field. So of course it is cultural, but I believe it is in the in-culture of public schooling, must less the culture of society as a whole, that keeps this problem from being dealt with.
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.
The phrase you are looking for is â feedback loopâ.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Well... you are right, partly, I think, in pointing out that there's still a lot of bullshit around. However, it is known that culture is, in fact, a very powerful mechanism (I think you can come up yourself with a bunch of examples). It is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish between cultural and biological factors, however, what is interesting in this study, I think, is that did an international comparison of boys vs girls' math scores and compared these to different socio-economic factors. I have to admit, I didn't take the time to read all of it, but they actually show a pretty convincing scatter plot between gender equality index and girls' math performance relative to boys'. If you don't look at anything else, look at that plot.
What about other factors that are different between genders?
I don't know about relative levels of aggression, I guess it is pretty much established that aggression level is at least partly determined by testosterone level and related hormones. An elevated level of aggression (btw, Lorenz defines aggression as social dominance behavior) would affect professional (or leadership) ambition, but I would guess that a lot of that (missing ambition) has to do with gender roles and legislation (parental leave, etc). Language ability? I think, somebody should do a study showing that the more time female caretakers spend with the child, the bigger the gender gap. Sounds like a challenge.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I've gone to many conferences for women in advanced mathematics and computer sciences and the number one thing I notice is how international they all are... even when they are supposedly for US women. I've said for years that the proof that there is no gender gap can be seen by looking at the mathematicians coming out of the former Soviet republics. Plenty of those mathematicians are women and they don't understand why so few American women enter the field.
By contrast, growing up in the US, I remember the "advanced" math groups in elementary school being pretty evenly split across genders. The disparity started increasing in junior high and was readily apparent in high school... and it wasn't because the math got harder. Many of the girls who picked up algebra quicker than most of the boys in fifth grade were opting not to take AP Calculus because "it wasn't really necessary." By contrast, a lot of the guys in the calculus classes hadn't been in advanced math before, but were taking calculus because it was "required to get in to a good school." That's not a biological difference... it's cultural. We have to stop teaching our girls that it's okay to be bad at this stuff.
It is controversial to say women have biological tendencies to be less aggressive, less ambitious toward leadership roles, and less attracted to hard science in favor of humanities.
These are predominantly due to women being less competitive and more cooperative than men. However, this is not guaranteed to be biological. All minorities ("minority" here referring to political and social power) group together in tight-nit groups, and are raised with a more cooperative attitude towards helping those in your group to protect your already limited power. Women are typically discouraged from showing direct or active roles, and thus become well trained in... for lack of a better word, "manipulative" and "coercion". (Guilt trips, implied requests actually being imperative statements, etc).
Meanwhile, in another culture, where the women sit around drink beer, spit, play poker, and leave their growing-old husband for the "newer model", women are brash, open, aggressive, competitive, and take strong leadership roles. Although, despite all of the swapping of cultural activities demonstrating what is linked to the gender of power, and the inferior gender (referring respectively to the gender with the political and social power, vs the one that does not) the men are still the ones who usually go out to get food, because they have a biological basis for greater strength and endurance. But of course, when the men fail to get enough food, ("because they're wimps") the women go out and catch food using their brains, demonstrating "why women are so much more powerful than men".
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Background: 1. I'm a math wunderkind (college classes in elementary school). 2. I spent ~20 years teaching math and programming to all levels of students. I read most of the study, and as far as I've been able to tell... A. They don't seem to reject the null hypothesis (Male IQ stdev ~= 16.5, Female IQ stdev ~= 13)... B. They don't seem to address my major analysis, which is differing attitudes towards risk. The best female students in the class are always the ones who do EXACTLY what you tell them to, perfectly. The best male students in a class are the ones who don't do what you tell them to, but try other things, and succeed brilliantly. C. Option 3 for reasons for variance is interest. Anyone who's ever had a boy and a girl, tried to be gender neutral with them, and watched the boy chase trucks and guns, and the girl chase dolls...there are questions of focus. D. On average, 1 of 100 guys is willing to spend 100 hour weeks trying to win. Girls have higher sanity scores. 100 hour weeks attempting to do a single thing is nuts...40-50 hour weeks is more sane, especially if you care about other things (like kids, friends, etc). however, Hours spent on a topic is roughly equal to skill. And so the insane people are the best.
So what you're saying is that once you've mastered all of the hard parts, Math is easy. That's good to know.
The trick with math, like any tools, is in the understanding of which to use, how to use and when to use - really, it's not difficult, but people choose to believe it's like some sort of magic they are unworthy to understand.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've heard the punchline with "when they cut 30% off my pay."
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
The article lists five hypotheses:
They claim that all but #2 are ruled out by their data. What I can't figure out is the distinction between 2 and 3. 3 is that the gap is "due to differences in opportunities available to males versus females." 2 is defined in their reference [2] http://www.jstor.org/pss/2112795 as being about access to jobs and higher education. I don't understand the distinction.
I got interested in this stuff recently because I teach physics, and our statistics showed that women had a lower success rate in our classes than men. This was kind of worrisome, since women generally do better than men in college, and women do better than men at our school in math, and in the other sciences besides physics. Turned out that if we controlled for what class they were taking, the effect vanished. Lots of women were taking the physics class for biology majors, which has a low success rate. Almost no women take the physics class fo engineering majors, which has a higher success rate. In the class for biology majors, women actually did better than men. It impressed me with how subtle this kind of thing can be.
Find free books.
What is there to memorize in math above a grade school level? I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm really asking. You need to know the operators of which there are 5 that are really important for 90% of the people out there (+-*/^) and you need to understand what = actually means (it means "equals" as the, the same. It does not mean "the answer goes to the left"). 'Consumer' math follows from the operators. Algebra follows from understanding 'equals'. Geometry I'll admit requires a bit more memorization, but not much that isn't covered by SOHCAHTOA or easily reasoned out by drawing shapes on a piece of grid paper. And calculus flows from Algebra and Geometry easily enough if it's taught the correct way. I'm seeing maybe 10 pieces of information that are required to be memorized to have a basic understanding of calculus (granted, there are lots of shortcuts that could be memorized but they aren't really necessary).
The problem is the fact that grade school and even high school math teachers are not required to take any higher level math to get their degree. They don't understand the subject anywhere near the level they should and (as you basically say in your comment) their discomfort advertises to the students "Hey, even the teacher doesn't really get this stuff, why should I be expected to?". And then the kicker: most elementary school teachers are female. There's been all kinds of research that says when a young girl sees a woman she respects suffer in a subject it can have profound effects on their attitude, which in turn has profound effects on their performance. The same is true for young boys and male teachers, but there are so few male grade school teachers that in the bulk statistics it ends up giving the appearance that girls are bad at math.
Oh please tell me you aren't serious. That sexist "wives should submit to their husbands" is a bullshit view fostered during a time when a male-dominated society was prevalent. Christianity needs to grow up (and yes I say that as a Christian myself) and learn to live in this century. These views that so many of the faith hold from centuries ago are the main reason that we are so hated now in the world. Do you want that? I don't.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
You're right. However, I must say that as a public school math teacher I chafe a little at the "inside public schools" comment, only because most of us inside really, really want to change, but it's mostly not inside factors stopping us, but outside influences (things like the math wars in the 1990s).
I have a colleague here who is a veteran top-notch math teacher who did his masters thesis on gender segregating his 5-7th grade math classes at a prestigious secular private school. Not only did the attitudes and engagement of the female student improve, but the male students also showed higher satisfaction and achievement.
The people who didn't like it? The parents. After the study concluded they couldn't keep doing it because parents fought to keep them from segregating the classrooms, facts be damned
There's some of that, and then there's the gross stereotyping on TV. The best thing that parents can do is keep their kids away from kids' shows (or any shows) on TV. Think about it - dads are always portrayed as bumbling nincompoops, attractive girls are either bitchy or bubbleheads, smart kids are always pencil necked geeks, and the cool people are the stupid rebels without a clue.
No wonder our kids adopt those attitudes. You want to be attractive to boys? Be a bubblehead. Want to be cool? Ditch school. GAH!
Interesting thing is that when looking at history societies tend to become matriarchal shortly before they collapse. They may stay around for 100-200 years of being matriarchal but collapse they do. The interesting thing is that the same societies were around for many more centuries or millenia prior to that as patriarchal societies. Makes one think.
Care to back that statement up with some examples?
"But that isnt the cause of the divide. The culture inside public schools is almost as immobile as governments, because the younger children adopt the values of the older ones to try to fit in, be cool, and seem more mature. The effect of peers on kids growing up has more profound effects than any specific media they are consuming - it is more a product of their behavior around one another than it is from what they watch on tv" A good book to read is Unlocking the Clubhouse. While the book is about Computer Science and not Math in general, it has a lot of insight into why the culture continues.
in my experience SOHCAHTOA is used in geometry (though you don't often actually do any calculations with it) it relates quite heavily to some proofs used in geometry and so many geometry courses typically teach some very basic trig.
geometry and trig seem to have a few overlapping areas. i have never really seen one taught without at least a little of the other in it as well.
And i do have a Math Degree...however this is not math advice, if you need math advice consult with your own mathematician.
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?
In other words, it seems pretty clear that having a female head of state makes your country far less likely to undergo a revolution or to invite the invasion of a foreign power. Of course, this is one of those correlation does not equal causation things. It could be that women are less likely to do things like get involved in wars with other countries, or to run repressive regimes. It could also be that free, open, egalitarian societies are more stable, and more likely to elect women. I suspect it's probably a combination of the two. Personally, I happen to believe that there are profound biological differences in men and women that tend to be reflected in how they govern... but if there really is a difference in the sexes, there's a strong case to be made that the women should be the ones in power.
The goal of this study, AFAICT, is to prove Summers wrong in the name of PC. The fact that they mention the Summers controversy in the first paragraph kind of gives that away. Summers was talking about why 'women may have been underrepresented "in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions"'.
It's telling that the authors of this study chose to include data from 86 countries in order to prove their point. In fact, they choose to focus on countries like Tunisia and Bahrain to make their point. Why not the USA, where most of the people in the tenured positions are coming from? Because when they do, the best that they can come up with is a statement like this: "For example, Hyde and collaborators ([20], [25]) reported that girls have now reached parity with boys in mean mathematics performance in the United States, even in high school, where a significant gap in mean performance existed in the 1970s. Likewise, both Brody and Mills ([3]) and Wai et al. ([51]) noted a drop in nonrandom samples of students under thirteen years of age, from 13:1 in the 1970s down to approximately 3:1 by the 1990s in the ratio of U.S. boys to girls scoring above 700 on the quantitative section of the college-entrance SAT examination."
3 to 1 is still huge, and they are trying to make the case that this result might keep going until it is 1:1 like the mean result already nearly is. In fact, that the result of boys:girls in SAT score above 700 (a measure of variance) is still 3 to 1 while there is gender equality in the mean result is an indication that probably 3 to 1 is the most female favorable result that they are going to get. Because the SAT is a proxy IQ test, this is basically saying that while the mean is equal there are 3 times as many men as women in the IQ stratum from which the people who are gifted enough to enter tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions can be drawn from.
But let's ignore that and focus on Tunisia and Bahrain, shall we?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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.
There are several types of color blindness. One type is as you describe, lacking a third type of photoceptor (RGB VS GB). In this case, the cone type responding to the next nearest frequency takes over (e.g. green for red), whereas in normal individuals the retina filters this low intensity signal out. Another type is an altered absorption spectrum. So the "red" cones might best respond to a slightly higher frequency signal than normal (the most common variation, present on 5% of X chromosomes).
As for color blindness being a disability in all circumstances, it isn't. Do you know how we test for it? We camouflage numbers in an array of multicolored dots. People with normal vision can spot some of them, people with various types of color deficiencies spot others (or different numbers). This is analogous to defeating camouflage in nature.
Tetrachromacy offers an additional green photoreceptor (e.g. red-green color blind father crossed with a normal mother). The benefit is increased differentiation of green hues. This doesn't grant bee-like perception of UV or IR or anything, but I'd be hesitant to call it worthless. After all, our visual color range is defined by our red and blue photoceptors. The greens are in the middle, and if absent (deuteranopia) then visual range is unaffected, but green things look more red or blue. As for how tetrachromacy might work in nature, guess what color most plants are...
Evolution is an emergent property arising out of mathematics and population dynamics, but we can identify many selection pressures. With vision, there's pressure to have mutations so no prey animal can evolve a perfect camouflage. That's probably why the color photoreceptor genes stay on the X chromosome. It guarantees that a handful of the population has altered color perceptions (mostly members of the male sex). An autosomal gene would enter an equilibrium at either a much higher or much lower incidence (don't get me started on altruism with a slightly disadvantageous gene that benefits the population... huge discussion there). Also, a gene can't become dominant. Dominant and recessive is an over-simplification. You have functional and non-functional proteins assembled from polypeptides encoded by genes, and if that produces symptoms it's "dominant" (again, very simplistic, DNA methylation & such alter it still, and there are proteins with variant function and incomplete penetrance).
evidently, whoever is in charge of utf support for this site
was more interested in the "math is hard" sort of toys.