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Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math
sciencehabit writes "Think women can't do math? You're wrong — but new research (paywalled) shows you might not change your mind, even if you get evidence to the contrary. A study of how both men and women perceive each other's mathematical ability finds that an unconscious bias against women — by both men and women — could be skewing hiring decisions, widening the gender gap in mathematical professions like engineering."
Women and men are equally bad at math. Specially at teaching math. It's not an easy subject and it's not a natural way to think about anything.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Because we all know that women are better than men at some things, but men are never better than women at anything.
https://xkcd.com/385/
What a shame that "ability at maths" is seen by TFA as the ability to "add up sets of two-digit numbers in a 4-minute math sprint".
I remember reading somewhere that middle eastern women are better at Maths than middle eastern men, but who cares, just because someone is good at something it doesn't mean they want to pursue it as a career. Maybe women have other priorities than men, who would have guessed?
Yes, of all the people in the world, it was my mom who taught me basic math.
Without her, I wouldn't know how to count. I wouldn't know how to add, to subtract, to multiply and to divide.
Of course I did learn more advanced math in the school, but the foundation of my math was laid by my mom.
Thanks, mom !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Handing knowledge down through the years based on personal experience was once, and for many generations, the best way to save information. It is better than no system at all (we're talking pre-widespread literacy), but the risk of passing along stereotypes and prejudices certainly existed.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I worked as a part time waiter while I was in college. One night I was waiting on a party of over 40 people (5 tables in all) and when I added up the final bill (it was in the '70s and there was no PC-based POS back then) manually (over 80 items in total, including drinks and desserts ) and handed it to the folks, an old guy looked at the bill and scolded me for "not doing it right".
I was right and he was wrong, but, as he was the customer, I couldn't tell him that his math sux, so I did the next best thing - I call the manager and let him add up the total bill.
It came up the same. (I did say I was right).
The moral of this story is ... don't be harsh.
Joe sixpacks don't do much math, and you don't get them to do extra-ordinary level of math without them feeling very sorry for themselves.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hardly anyone thinks this because there is ample evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the average woman is probably about as good at math as the average man. But when you're hiring in a "mathematical profession" you're not looking at the entire population; you're looking at the set of men and women with relatively high mathematical ability. Within that set, at least in the United States, men outnumber women. This could very well be the result of socialization; I'm not necessarily arguing from physiology. But it's hard to argue with numbers. The ratio of men to women among the set of SAT takers with a perfect math score, after adjusting for the fact that more women than men take the SAT, is 2.5 to 1. So, all else being equal we should expect about 28% of engineers and mathematicians to be women. Interestingly, if you look at the percentage of Math Ph.D.s granted to U.S. citizens (in 2010) women earned exactly 28%. With respect to engineering and computer science, approximately 20% of bachelors degrees (in 2008) were granted to women, so there may be work to be done there. My guess is that this is due to the stereotypical reputations of CS/Engineering (bearded hackers with poor hygiene and huge egos) being less appealing to women than to men.
I didn't even have to read the post to make the conclusion
My ex-girlfriend was once helped through a math problem by her teacher, and they figured out that the solution was the half of x, so the teacher told her to write that down.
She wrote down '/'.
Your skill is based on your education and how much effort you put into it. I think the unconscious bias is more of a social thing. I don't think women have any less capacity for intellect, but I do think there is a large group of females out there who would rather post about drama and "OMG my new shoes" on facebook rather than focus on science and self improvement. It isn't that they can't. It's that society has molded a lot of them this way, and the stereotypes emerge.
Men just don't trust that women can do something important right. This includes math problems, but also meeting an important deadline, hiring important people, or taking decisions.
I know this sounds like a troll post, but I am serious. The gender gap is not just a problem with maths, or because women get pregnant and care for a baby for several months. It is much broader, and women are indeed held back by men, because men prefer to stay in control in certain cases.
However, I think we should approach it from another perspective: Those in charge (in a company, government) don't trust many people to take important decisions or to do any calculations right. However, women are overrepresented in the group of people who are not trusted with these tasks, but men are present in that group too.
I've never thought women are 'bad at math' or any other sort of difference that I hear proclaimed by one or two douches here and there. You know the type, the ones that parrot utter nonsense no matter what the topic, incapable of independant thought...I just tune them out.
full disclosure I should note that I live a pretty solitary lifestyle...
In Venezuela women are perceived as better in math and sciences. And usually they are.
In my experience, being a doofus does not significantly decrease mens self confidence. Employers tend to hire confidence, women tend to marry confidence. Any measure of "perceived ability" is measuring confidence. Male birds tend to puff their feathers out, and also to self report their superiority to mates, and if we can translate bird, no doubt the male peacocks report they are better at math.
Gently reply
In the rush to kumbaya and make it out to be "the sisterhood versus the patriarchy," a lot of women and male feminists don't notice that there is a sizeable contingent of technically qualified women who by and large have little respect for most women. I saw this in college with the women who took CS seriously feeling like they had to work twice as hard because half of the girls were getting by, in their minds by "flipping their skirts and smiling the guys" to get them to do their work for them. A good friend of mine who was a mechanical engineering major observed the same thing in his department at a different university. In fact, our oldest female professor was notorious for being ruthless on the girls because she literally wanted to drive out any girl who had in her mind that women in CS should be allowed to get by in any fashion that even resembled "advancing on their backs."
So if anything, I would say be careful about letting female engineers interview other potential candidates unless they are known to be genuinely fair-minded. You very well may find that it's actually the women, not the men, who are discriminating.
when it all adds up tears & innocence are our real treasures & we're running low. never a better time to consider ourselves in relation to each other & our surroundings as opposed to some vdo presentation of how we are 'supposed' to be...
I could be that PERHAPS there IS a difference in some math skill between males and females?
I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest that the sorts of hormonal variations that developmentally result in gross anatomical changes might actually have an impact on the subtle chemistry of brain development as well...we're perfectly willing to recognize that (speaking broadly) women are in fact better at multitasking or that men are better at 3d shape understanding. Is it impossible that there isn't actually some real difference in, say, instinctual math that vanishes in a focused, testing setting?
I'm 46; I've found over my life that often these sorts of 'common perceptions' commonly HAVE a kernel of truth in them. Often misapplied, misunderstood, or blown out of proportion, but nevertheless a root in fact.
I will say that I've far more often seen women spend 15 minutes trying to precisely divide a dinner tab more precisely than men, who'll tend instead to just throw down roughly their share plus some, even if that results in the wait staff getting a huge tip. I know that's not specifically a math skill, but it's one of those real-world anecdotes that feed this perception.
-Styopa
If their clothes had pockets, they could carry money on their persons and get more counting practice in.
Pockets. Think about it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
http://horaspoker.com
If their not, they're naturally bad at most everything. Science: It's a Girl Thing ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Put out by "Women in research and innovation"; saying if you ain't hot, how you gonna be good?
This is my observation from studying maths:
1. In general women are better than men. If you take a random woman and a random man, the woman will with big probability be better.
2. The most smart (read genious) are often men. It is not often you meet a genious so, most of the time the best bet is a woman if you need to pick someone good at maths.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
That's because men keep telling women that 4 inches is actually 8 inches.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I've seen in my family several instances of discouragement. (To a daughter) "You're like me, not good at math", (the daughter) "I don't like science, Math is too hard". Well I guess when you're told that, you just believe it.
I had to help my wife learn math when she was taking nursing and I can tell you she never considered herself good at math. Turns out she missed a few things in the beginning and since it builds on itself, couldn't learn the rest of it. Once I filled in the few holes she understood the rest just fine. She felt so empowered, she taught herself the rest in fact.
Math is not a novella, there's no story to be interested in. It's not an opinion that changes from person to person. And believe it or not it doesn't come naturally to most people. What it is though, is a tool. One that, with training and practice, can be very useful. It's not about being good at it. It's about being trained correctly. If once people are trained and can see the utility of this especially powerful too, someone decides they don't like it, well then I'll accept that they shouldn't go down that road. But if I see one more man tell his daughter she's no good at math so don't try, I'm going to give him an earful.
True story. I was at the doctors office yesterday. The female nurse assistant was getting blood pressure, weight, and height. 6" 7'.
"Hey Julie, can you do math?" she called to the receptionist.
I looked up at her. She repeated her question. I interjected "Huh?"
"Oh, well I need your height in inches." "Well it's 12 times 6 and add 7." "I know, but I don't do math."
"OK then, 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, that's 5 feet, and one more makes 72, and then add 7."
She looked at me like I had two heads. Well I do, but you know what I mean.
"So that'd be seventy-nine, right?" She looked at me, I THINK she then looked at her friend for confirmation, and then wrote it down and said, "I never liked math in school. I even managed somehow to skip some of the mandatory classes." "I can tell", I thought.
I just shook my head, wondering if she was a nurse or an assistant. Or maybe an assistant's assistant.
Maybe she was new, maybe she was a temp, maybe it was just really a bad day. But I've never had someone who was so seemingly ?dumb? as she was. But she wasn't dumb, she just "didn't do math".
I'm not a PhD at all or theoretical physicist or anything, but I just can't imagine. "I don't do math" is just like "I don't do words" to me. I couldn't imagine life without either of them.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Growing up I always remember girls being better at math.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
All my mom knows how to do is multiply...but that is why I have seven siblings.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It really gets hard when you start comparing ability between white women and black men.
Actually, you do learn math by rote memorization.
No, you learn arithmetic by rote memorization.
Arithmetic is to math roughly as learning to use a pencil to write letters is to literature: it is the objects that are used to do math. You can't write if you don't know the difference between a, b, and c; but knowing how to write legible a, b, and c is not "writing."
Those of us who were interested in math from the beginning were training it all the time by playing around with numbers or geometrical objects, which is just rote memorization with spices on top....
Indeed. You have to be comfortable with the basic objects you're using before you can have fun using them as building blocks.
Exactly, the article is just perpetuating sexist nonsense IMHO.
Mothers (generally) run basic day to day accounts of family spending and one of my earliest memories of math is my mum calculating the family monthly expenditure.
Mattel released a talking Barbie doll that would say "Math class is tough!" That sounds like a pretty deliberate bias.
As a math and science teacher, I've seen multiple studies on performance of different genders in math and science. There is a gap in North America, although it's closing rapidly. (In the past 40 years, men have gone from having 20% higher averages than women to having 2% higher averages than women. Evolution doesn't act that quickly; it's a purely social bias.) Men still perform slightly higher than women in this region because there are still teachers out there who expect more from male students and push them harder. In other words, if the teacher *expects* female students to get 60s and down and *expects* male students to get 70s and higher, then that teacher who sees a male and a female student with 68% averages, then the teacher will work with the male to improve his performance, but not put in the same effort with the female student. It's a horrible thought, but it's still happening out there. The same is true for race factors, for "learning disabilities" (which I would rather call "learning anomalies" but that's another story) and more.
Bottom line: there is a slight and closing gap between men and women in math and science in North America, not because there is any biological difference in this particular area, but because social biases that exist in the system are failing the female students more often than they are failing the male students.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
The job was simple: As accurately and quickly as possible, add up sets of two-digit numbers in a 4-minute math sprint.
So really the article is bogus as they are two different things (and if you think otherwise, it's probably because you've only every done arthimetic and don't really know what mathematics is).
As it is, anyone in the UK who's ever watched Countdown will have been disabused very rapidly of any anti-woman bias in arthimetic skills.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Hardly anybody hires based on gender bias. You do not hire a gender, you hire a person. It doesn't matter if women in general are or are not as good as men in general at a given task, as long as the particular woman you are interviewing is.
All this whining about "gender bias" and the following excuses to try to take responsibility from people for their own failures sickens me.
Now, more on the topic, regarding gender differences, the average is not very different from men and women, so for basic math there is not much of a real difference. On the top, though, which is considerably more relevant to math and logic related profession there is a real biological gap, and no it is not social:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Men and women are quite different in many things, it is a politically correct idiocy to try and force the concept that these differences are only aesthetic.
The trouble with americans is that they think there is only one. (Math)
But it is plural - Mathematics
In the rest of the world its called Maths
Until we come up with a solution to the difficulties posed by overpopulation and start living sustainably, life extension is probably a bad idea, it'll only aggravate some already major challenges:
Option 1) Life extension is expensive - it doesn't directly complicate population issues notably, but it keeps the same rich bastards unfamiliar with modern technology and carrying really old prejudices in power even longer, making adaptation more difficult
Option 2) Life extension is cheap - oops, now we've just aggravated the population explosion. Maybe it's only by another ten percent on top of the 40-70% coming out of Africa and Asia (who presumably mostly still won't be able to afford it), but that's still an extra billion people to deal with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The social and economic consequences of this very simple fact are more than enough to explain all questions of societal expectations and wage differences, among other things. It doesn't matter if a theoretical woman is better or equal to the typical man in math or anything else, what matters is the more practical problem of whether a TYPICAL woman is better or equal to a typical man in X or Y. Facts, history, and preferences tend to favor men working long term in high physical or mental stress environments for longer periods. Likewise, those same facts, history, and preferences tend to favor women working in caretaking and homebuilding fields. Both types of jobs are equally noble, but undeniably different. Personally, I think women get the better end of the deal.
Trusting someone who doesn't/can't/won't do elementary school math with your life is a bad idea.
And yes, you do need to find another doctor that one's nurse should scare you. Perhaps even to death
However man are better in hiding it and they don't giggle whey they don't know.
What?! I don't know how people can live this way.
ayottesoftware.com
The solution, of course, is "norming." Create a special math in which designated disadvantaged classes might better succeed. Then legislate federal mandates so that "normative math" is standard curricula for federally funded schools, and for government use, for example in budget preparation and statistical analysis for social program design and management. (I'm not serious; however, I predict that something similar is bound to be introduced in a legislature near you...)
I've always had the perception that women were better at math, in general. Maybe I've met a lot of brilliant women, though.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
basic math includes logic. Makes perfect sense to me.
are a product of the same cultural conditioning.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here's the abstract, with suitable fixes in bold:
Women outnumber men in undergraduate enrollments in most of the developed world, but they are much less likely than men to major in mathematics or science or to choose a profession in these fields in developed countries. This outcome often is attributed to the effects of negative sex-based stereotypes in the USA.
In many other countries women are generally assumed to be better in all academic subjects in elementary school.
Perhaps we should look at education for the cause of this disparity. Do teachers have different expectations for boys and girls in math? Do they encourage the two sexes equally? As a former teacher, I could see that girls generally, and it's a solid generalization, already by the age of 10 felt that they weren't 'good at math'. This impression was difficult, but not impossible to change.
Men have learned to compete for something. Women compete against each other. In the few venues (like sports) where head to head competition occurs, it does so under very structured rules. And winners are judged by the superiority of their skills, not tripping their adversary. That's considered poor sportsmanship.
Its a cultural thing, taught from a very early age. Think about the stereotype of a man who talks trash behind other people's back. When men do trash talk, its is to each other's face as a precursor to some competitive act. Like the (usually staged) face off before a boxing match. Even then, the object is to remain cool and prove one's superiority in the ring rather than tossing insults back and forth.
Have gnu, will travel.
Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math
Proving that it's so simple to think facts even women can do it.
without an article full of feminist rhetoric ;(.
Apparently the discrimination of the Patriarchy is now subconscious: probably putting drugs in beer and subliminal ads in football commercials.
I found this quote near the bottom of the article to be most enlightening...
"members of disadvantaged groups are costing themselves"
Sounds like unconscious bias to me - if you *assume* that women are a "disadvantaged group," is it any wonder you find that women are disadvantaged in your study?
Oh, and since the researcher was female and can't do math, the results are probably crap anyway ;P.
Maybe count how many questions were about bullets, cars, boats, and velocities. Not sure about math, but in physics it's a well-known issue with textbooks... they just appeal to male interests, but you can create a textbook that covers the same content but teaches it using more relative examples.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
My sister has a Masters Degree in Mathematics and also teaches an advanced placement Calculus class at a local high school. Women bad at math????
I know that to be different. I would rather think that it has to do with having the ability to think in an abstract manner. Some people can do this easier than others. Gender has nothing to do with it.
For example cab driving. I never see female cab drivers so they must be very bad at that.
Here in the US, we have this federal mandate called Common Core Math. It sucks big time. My guess is that in 5 years, boys and girls will equally suck at math!
The old 'boys are better at math and science' crap still exists today, and it serves no one.
Even at my daughter's school (which is considered one of the better prep schools in the region), I was dismayed that their competitive robotics club has 1 girl (out of like 12). I was a bit p*ssed when I asked the headmaster about this during a parent's meeting and he answer was basically that more boys are drawn to the club than girls. I was thinking, 'yeah.. no f-cking sh*t Sherlock, but did you consider WHY this is the case and what are you doing about it?' Needless to say, I was unimpressed by his answer and it's certainly made me reconsider just how 'progressive' this school really is when the person leading it has that kind of attitude.
My own example aside, I think plenty of people in academia, technical professional positions, etc still have this attitude, and it's bad for the kids, and our competitiveness as a nation. Some of the sharpest women programmers/engineers I've known are from India, not exactly the bastion of gender equality, and yet...
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
A well-known feminist women's group recently did there own study of women's attitudes towards math and found that will 30% had trouble with math the other 85% said they had no trouble at all.
My wife knows way more math than I do. Not that I am a slouch, I did study higher level math and science (what I like to call applied mathematics) and got good grades; but I haven't used anything more complicated than algebra since I have left school. On the other hand, my wife is uses highly complex mathematical equations 5 days a week.
Stuck in beta-hell...
PLEASE give me the classic-view alternative!
Any man who's had a woman buy something that we would never need, but considers that because she bought it on sale, saved us money, knows that women can't do math.
I went to a college that only had business and engineering majors.
Actually, the business majors were typically for the kids that realized after 1 or 2 years of college, that an engineering major was too hard for them, so they switched to a business major.
In any case, at my school, the ratio of boys to girls was 14 to 1. This is similar at all engineering colleges across the nation.
But why? Is it because it is harder for girls to get into engineering schools? No, in fact, it is easier. Engineering departments want girls so they make the requirements easier for them to enter. There are also a LOT more scholarship options for girls who are majoring in engineering. Companies are the same way. They want diversity, so they are MORE likely to hire a female engineer over a male engineer, if the candidates are otherwise equally qualified.
So, don't talk about a gender gap caused by the hiring process. There is a gender gap because there are not enough women interested in becoming engineers.
Good singers very much know how to sing, and how to teach. I have received instruction from a number of them.
My father taught, and was very good at math. I also teach, and used to teach math to my fellow students in high school.
Being good at math is like being a good programmer -- iterative process, more than one way of doing things, things build on other things. Not something that everyone is good at, but not something that "you can't teach because you are good at it".
I come here for the love
Before you mod me down, read my post (and the article)!
What really surprised me was that the article text actually states that women's math scores were below that of men in every country tested:
Although the female test-takers lagged behind males on the math portion of the test, the size of the gap closely tracked the degree of gender inequality in their countries, shrinking to nearly zero in emancipated countries like Sweden and Norway. That suggests that cultural biases rather than biology may be the better explanation for the math gender gap.
So apparently, it is entirely objective to state that the test results indicate that women are worse at basic math than men. Except in Iceland.
Woman apparently are also always better at reading comprehension than men. (See the article.)
The authors argue this results from misogynistic prejudice. However, if you look at the actual article, the correlation is not exact. Norway and Sweden are more emancipated than Iceland, yet have lower female math scores relative to the males. Portugal, France and Poland also introduce a deviation from the trend. Thus, 5 of the 10 countries evaluated do not correlate well with the authors' suggested trend, indicating that the emancipation index is probably not the right metric to be comparing to.
but so are men, so there's that...
That is a good way to think of it. To mathematicians these are " known pattern" but to the average person they might as well be magic. I know plenty of women who are "not good at math" but can make complex crochet and needlepoint patterns without thinking about it. To them, those are just " known pattern".
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The only person I ever knew who bragged about "doing multi-variable calculus for fun" happened to be Asian. Is that a personal or cultural bias?
If everybody thinks it is true then it must be true. After all, that is how we proved Global Warming and Climate Change. Worked for witch burning too back in Salem.
If "Maths" is plural, shouldn't that be "In the rest of the world they are called Maths"? Ipso facto: Math.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
it was in the '70s and there was no PC-based POS back then
Were there no calculators back then?
I studied those two for a while... and the numbers that come out may as well *still* be magic. If I had just a pencil and paper (and hopefully a flat surface), and hadn't memorized tables, I'd be hard-put indeed to figure out the sin of a 30 degree angle (Okay, how about 47 degree?)
If you associate the word “man” with the word “math” more quickly than “woman” and “wombat,” for example, that reveals a possible bias.
earth can support at least 100 billions of humans both in food, energy and shelter department, main issue is very bad organization, and very low R&D also sooner or latter we will colonize other planets so i am not really worried for future living space, and the more the people the more R&D, the sooner we are going to do it
we do have huge shortage of labor force, that is why we are trying to stop wasting resources (people) on menial jobs and replace those with robots so that bigger percent of people can work in science and R&D, and not waste their life flipping burgers.
if you did not notice our scientific advance is still very slow, we don't even have nuclear fusion "under our belt" let alone life extension/immortality or space travel, and there are many more technologies we don't even know about let alone work on
I don't think women are bad at math, if math were a social activity you would see women touted as better at math than men. Instead, it's a quiet activity that requires processing information without communication. There was some comedian that had a routine about this, I forget who, but it was something about how women can't stand to go more than a few seconds without talking about someone or about themselves.
With the exception of my Mom (BS in Microbiology and runs a computer lab), every woman I've met has either complained about math or asked for help, even though they were doing just fine on their own, they simply couldn't stand the solitude of it.
http://xkcd.com/385/
Cherrypicking one or another exception doesn't mean anything, specially when this exception is notorious for having a bad educational system that is far from developing the potential of their people as the american one is. All over the countries with the best educational systems men score a bit higher than women, specially at the top. But these people like to think that everything is a matter of breaking taboos, that we're actually all clones of one another with the very same skills, the very same personality, the very same nutrition and so on; and that if only, if only, everybody thought "let us all be good and love one another because we're all the same!" purpurine would suddenly fall from the sky, the credits would roll up and everybody would be happy forever.
It's a matter of what kind of society you want, if you want a liberal society where laws are nothing but a common agreement to keep people from causing a ragnarok, then the best thing to do is to make people develop/discover their skills the best way they can, there's nothing more just and egualitarian in such a frame than meritocracy, their contribution to the society will come in form of paid services. But if you want a society with pre-fixed rules, then you have pre-fixed stereotyped roles, you'll have to create people to fit precisely those roles, this will also make people agree with their roles and compare their their capacity with the role, not with money, but feminists aren't okey with that. These people want both, they want a society with no pre-fixed rules whatsoever but at the same time a society where everybody abides to some kind of magical platonic notion of equality and must feel ashamed if they overperform someone in any way.
Egualitarianism is a mental disease, you don't need to be smart to realize that equality (or "equity" as they call it now) is nothing but a silly concept, there's no such thing as equality between two different entities sharing the same environment (no matter how complex this environment and these entities are); and there's no such thing as equity between two conscious (that is, capable of interpretation) entities sharing the same environment, they'll inevitably create images of one another and act according to these images/interpretations; but don't tell them this, reality is too harsh for them, they'd rather just blame you and say that you're being opressive.