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Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem?
theodp (442580) writes "Citing a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (free to Federal employees), the NY Times reports on how elementary school teachers' pro-boy biases can discourage girls from math and science. "The pipeline for women to enter math and science occupations narrows at many points between kindergarten and a career choice," writes Claire Cain Miller, "but elementary school seems to be a critical juncture. Reversing bias among teachers could increase the number of women who enter fields like computer science and engineering, which are some of the fastest growing and highest paying. 'It goes a long way to showing it's not the students or the home, but the classroom teacher's behavior that explains part of the differences over time between boys and girls,' said Victor Lavy, an economist at University of Warwick in England and a co-author of the paper." Although the study took place in Israel, Lavy said that similar research had been conducted in several European countries and that he expected the results were applicable in the United States."
There are problems at all ages. It starts even before school. Don't try to blame one group. Don't blame anyone, just give them the solutions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That answer is unacceptable. They must choose science and technology. We must force them to choose because we have these quotas that must be filled.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business. Why this is even an issue is beyond me. How is it considered a good idea to encourage more people to work in fields they're not interested in? Why is tech singled out as the one and only important field?
Correct. We must have gender equality and balance in all fields of employment. Unless, of course, it's a dirty or dangerous job. Men can have those.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This is absolutely correct, I have kids and the school system is definitely set up for the women.
Boys get in trouble just for being boys. All of the ages things are learned at is in sync with when girls mature and are ready for the teachings.
School is not biased towards the boys at all.
Being a millenial, I can attest to the fact that growing up interested in technology and science automagically branded you a nerd. You were picked on relentlessly, harassed and ostricized socially, and generally spent a lot of time avoiding direct contact with interpersonal engagements that did not pass a battery of personal safety tests. Chess club or magic the gathering at school was considered your Turing test for a friend. Billy Graham and the moral majority however were convinced you were the devil incarnate for playing the game, which was verboten in many schools despite its keen ability to teach logic and strategy.
Fast forward through the sanguine post columbine era of education by doctrinal purity and it just got worse for nerds. after 1999 nerds faced a pretty large degree of scrutiny and fear. I for one wore a lot of black, kept to myself, made excellent grades, and played a lot of doom/heretic. My prize to claim for having spoken a bit too loudly with friends about a quake match and my affinity for the shotgun with quad damage was an entire week of suspension due to a 'zero tolerance' policy. I failed calculus, spanish, and was left scrambling to figure out how i was going to graduate based on this seemingly arbitrary application of "justice." my parents were angry at me, and i in turn was angry at them for having never taken my side in the ordeal but i digress. If you believe that the tech diversity problem is due to inherent gender affinity and poor marketing to minorities, you're sadly mistaken. People avoid STEM because they dont like being beaten down like subhumans.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let me summarize this entire thread so we can get back to stuff that matters:
"Men and women are different, deal with it" (rotates between -1 flamebait and +5 interesting)
"That hasn't been proven" (+3 insightful)
"Gamergate is evil" (+3 troll)
"Gamergate is good" (rotates between -1 flamebait and +5 interesting)
"Here's a comprehensive discussion of the merits of this article" (no moderation)
"The patriarchy is real" (+2) "No it isn't"(+4)
Here's my own input:
Slashdot will you PLEASE stop running the sjw story of the day. You're not fooling anyone and it will never come out the way you want until you start actively censoring comments. And pushing clickbait isn't giving you any points either.
Everyone who holds a gender-based opinion on this: PLEASE take half the time you would otherwise argue about this and review the latest studies, but take into account who funded them and the difference in funding dollars for two conflicting points of view.
Everyone else: I hope you see the obvious agenda-pushing that has been happening these last few months and inoculate yourself against it with knowledge.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
There's only one problem here, and it's called the "social sciences".
These are pseudo-academic programs that have been put in place in many institutions of higher learning. While this gives them the aura of legitimacy, the fact remains that their methodologies are not worthy of being called "science", and their standards are quite poor when it comes to performing research.
By lacking the solid foundation that real fields of science like physics, biology and chemistry have, the "social sciences" degrade into debates about the merits of different -isms ("feminism", "communism", "racism", "genderism", and so on), and once that's been discussed to death, they just start making up problems ("diversity in the tech industry") to "investigate".
For some participants it's just an easy way to get money. For others, it's a way to fight back against other inadequacies in their life, like a lack of ability. And for others it's just a power trip.
Regardless, anything coming out of the "social sciences" should be taken with a really big grain of salt. Or better yet, it should just be ignored. It's likely a big load of bullshit to begin with.
Obviously because these jobs pay well. No one cares about diversity in construction work because it's dangerous and the pay isn't very good, especially in proportion to the harm one must put himself everyday.
I'm generally for eliminating biases that cause people to feel certain life paths are inaccessible to them. Problem is that the media has singled out a few that are of special interest to them. If, for example, a man wanted to become an elementary school teacher, he'd likely be met with suspicion at every turn that he's a pedophile. But no one cares about this; in fact, the only concern is fields that are male or white dominated. In the the few that are female or minority dominated, "diversity" is not a concern. As we all know, "diversity" is a code word for "social re-engineering." That's fine but let's call it that. No one gives a flip about a diverse classroom or work environment for the sake of learning or productivity. They just want people who aren't white and male to be rich.
What's really interesting to me is that the feminist sites (like our buddies Jezebel) don't focus much on tech. They jump up and down when they find an article about bias, of course, but they seem to care very little about the lack of women in programming aside from that.
Because equality is about making things shitty for the other side to get revenge for historical unfairness.
Perhaps, but that wouldn't explain the results of the difference in grading
Did anyone ever stop to think that boys are better, and more interested, in some things than girls (and vice versa)?
I'm getting very sick of the daily "It's our fault that there aren't more women in tech" SJW blame-fest here on Slashdot. Are there fashion industry sites out there with a daily "It's our fault aren't their more straight men in fashion" blame-fest? Because, if not, then STFU and accept that some groups are just more attracted to certain fields than others. What do you propose as an alternative, that people's career choices be FORCED on them?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
We must have gender equality and balance in all fields of employment. Unless, of course, it's a dirty or dangerous job. Men can have those.
Yep. I have yet to hear a peep from feminists complaining that there aren't enough women garbage collectors, miners, or fishermen. They only want the GOOD and EASY desk jobs.
When I was in Middle School in the mid 80s, everyone knew that computers were going to be a major part of the future. At that time, personal computers did not yet have an OS To Rule Them All, and the amount of things one could actually accomplish with a home computer was relatively limited. Pretty much any home computer of that era booted straight into BASIC, and most people perceived computers primarily as things in which people wrote software for to tell it what to do.
At that time schools were trying to make use of computers in the curriculum (beyond Apple IIs playing Oregon Trail and entering LOGO instructions to move the Turtle), and what most schools went with was BASIC programming. Our school had recently "upgraded" from TI-99/4A to Color TRS-80 (which was upsetting to me, because I owned a TI and could program for it very well). So my entire grade of 7th graders spent an entire semester programming in BASIC. Every boy, every girl - all of us. We always worked in teams of two (mostly boys paired up and girls paired up, as is typical at that age). Further, this was commonplace in most schools of the era.
So here is what we *should* have seen. Since we had boys and girls all being equally submersed in the writing of software for hundreds of thousands of children, if boys and girls equally relate to, identify with, and enjoy programming, then we should have seen a surge of that generation of girls also becoming computer scientists. But we did not. When I was in college less than a decade later, my fellow majors in CS consisted of only two females (and I'm friends with both of them on FB still). One does not do anything related to computers at all. The other is still involved in technology, but is more interested in and active in designing artistic elements at the company where she is CTO.
I think we're seeing the overall, general difference between male and female here. I think it's obvious that different talents and thus careers seem to carry with them trends in certain kinds of personalities. Generally, do musicians, artists, executives, managers and computer science people each seem to have personality tendencies that go along with their career? Those tendencies aren't "learned" by being in the career - those individuals had those traits before they entered their profession. So it is my belief that, generally, the typical female does not relate to software development. Perhaps it is because male and female brains are indeed physiologically different in various ways, and it is more enjoyable and / or natural for a male brain to think in a single-track mode required to deeply delve into one specific thought process for a long time while developing software. Or maybe it's for other reasons along that line.
Regardless, my point is simple. Why is anyone trying to point fingers at our educational system instead of just admitting men and women are different, and women just simply may not like software development?
Better known as 318230.
How do you explain the research that certainly strongly suggests there is such a bias? And given that the bias is assumed to be unconscious, how can you be sure that you don't also have similar biases, affecting your judgement?
Well, for one - the study and research were done in Israel, not in the United States. Despite the author's conjecture that "The results should apply in the United States as well" - Israel is NOTHING LIKE the United States in education, culture, or....well, a lot of things.
What if I visited the Ivory Coast, or the Congo, or Nigeria, and did a study on elementary schools? The headline would read, "New Research Shows lack of White students affects diversity."
Then I wrote a research paper about how there's not enough white children in schools. I'd give that study about the same merit. Israel has radically different social bias - they are virtually a country of martial law - justifiably so because of the daily threats they live with. Their educational system reflects that. Applying it to the United States is bollocks. Israel doesn't learn about slavery and the U.S. civil war, or about our political system or national pastimes in school. Seriously, bollocks.
Or unless it's a female-dominated profession like nursing or teaching. Then the gender balance is already OK.
Pro-boy bias?
As a parent of a 4th grade boy I would say the idea of a pro-boy bias is absolutely laughable.
In elementary school, girls are a teacher's dream -- polite, hard-working, focused. Boys are their nightmare -- boisterous, easily distracted, physically busy and fidgety.
When you walk through the halls and see the student work on the walls, the girls' writing is neat, their sentences well-structured and complete and if there's an artwork component, it's also very neat, colorful, etc. The boys work (with a small handful of exceptions) is almost always the opposite of this.
About the only thing that could justify a "pro-boy" bias would be that boys' end up monopolizing teacher time because they're like herding cats and the girls generally don't need as much attention to get the expected results. But calling this "bias" isn't at all accurate as it implies the teachers have an agenda in favor of boys rather then needing to give them some extra attention because otherwise they won't learn at all.
Let's define the basis for this being a problem:
Are we suggesting that in all workplaces, any skew in gender-balance is a "problem"?
There are multiple problems with this position, not the least of which is "free will". Go to any college campus in America or Europe and you will see social sciences and language studies heavily populated by female students. Is this a problem? Should universities limit the amount of women allowed to study Italian? Why or why not?
Hard sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science on campus are mostly male.
The feminist argument is that this skew in gender balance is the result of prior socialization. But this claim of nurture over nature is not only unproven, it is utterly untestable. Needless to say defining "problems" based on untestable criteria does not pass anyone's logic test. And to pretend that men and women 'would' have the same interests if it weren't for society is to not only discount the empirical evidence of every culture throughout history, but the very real biological and chemical differences between male and female brains.
To suggest that men and women 'would' have the same interests and motivations were it not for socialization despite the empirical evidence to the contrary and the clearly documented biological differences is a desperately unlikely scenario which would need rigorous proof if it were to be accepted. But the cult of feminism -- much like fundamentalist religion -- would rather pretend that it is their platform that is valid despite oceans of evidence that it isn't. Those who 'disbelieve' are infidels and must be silenced.
But let's get back to the original question: Why is it a problem that technology is primarily male?
If it is indeed to be our cultural premise that all careers should reflect a 50/50 gender balance, then what of the 'less sexy' fields which are primarily male? What of the world's most dangerous professions? Logging? Fishing boat crews? Electric powerline installers? Military combat? Mining? Underwater welding? These are no longer strength-related fields. And as we all know, male workplace deaths outweigh female workplace deaths at a rate of 9:1. Where is the feminist outrage against this "problem" of unfair male access to tragic death? (Never mind the fact that it is dangerous work that pays the best, and is a direct contributor to salary imbalances).
But no, "technology" has been singled out. Why? Because it's sexy. It's in the news. And the payouts can be spectacular.
So clearly this isn't about gender equality. It's a power grab.
Well, yes, but this wouldn't explain why, when the papers were anonymous, girls did better.
Perhaps, but that wouldn't explain the results of the difference in grading
Did anyone ever stop to think that boys are better, and more interested, in some things than girls (and vice versa)?
I'm getting very sick of the daily "It's our fault that there aren't more women in tech" SJW blame-fest here on Slashdot.
And I'm getting very sick of the anti-SJW "I refuse to read the article, but will expound about how awful SJWs are because of my truthy gut feelings" bullshiat. You didn't read the article. The post you're responding to pointed out the difference in grading, and if you had read the article, you'd realize that GP was referring to:
Beginning in 2002, the researchers studied three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through the end of high school. The students were given two exams, one graded by outsiders who did not know their identities and another by teachers who knew their names.
In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects.
Now, because you're clearly the slow kid who needs to have everything spoon fed to them, let me repeat: the students took the same test twice, and it was graded by different teachers. If the teachers did not know the gender of the student, the girls scored better. If the teachers did know the gender of the student, the boys scored better. These are farking math tests - there's a right answer and an infinite number of wrong answers. There's no reason that someone should score better or worse based solely on whether their name is Dick or Jane, unless the teachers are consciously or unconsciously discriminating.
So, now do you understand how your comment, "did anyone ever stop to think that boys are better, and more interested, in some thing than girls" is not just irrelevant, but totally wrong? The only thing you've shown is that you are worse than everyone who actually bothered to read the article.
The article is talking about primary school children, not women. 50 years ago women (generally speaking) weren't interested in management, politics, science, high level medicine, or a host of other traditionally male occupations. So now, if women generally aren't interested in IT (largely due to the hostile environment that any male dominated sphere inevitably creates), should we maintain that prejudice for future generations?
Wow, you hit the heart of it there. If that study is true, I can't help but ask WTH??? Unfortunately, the two sentence summary makes it sound really badly done. But as usual, It may just be bad science reporting. Can someone find the original study?
The quick summary makes us ask:
1) Were there really two tests? If so, why?
2) Why would something as objective as a math test be graded subjectively? Were they giving partial credit or something like that?
3) Which scores were correct? The teachers, or the outsiders?
4) What were the results of outside graders when they didn't know the names?
One could not conclude gender bias on the part of the teachers based solely on what they printed. For all we know it was a handwriting issue, and when someone knew the children's gender they forgave the boys for bad handwriting. There's too many possibilities here. It is tough to blindly trust this since it violates our inherent sense of justice, and gender bias is so political that the studies themselves are sometimes gender biased.
We really can't judge the study without more details...
Honestly, where did this idea come from that there is a conspiracy to keep women out of the tech field? I work in a school with both high school and primary students (as the IT manager, not a teacher) that offers advanced computer classes (compared to other schools in the area). And not once have a I heard a teacher say no girls or this is geared for guys etc... (yes I know anecdotal evidence bla bla)....Hell even when I was in high school people did not ever say this profession is men only/women only...or even hint maybe you should not go into this field because you are a man/woman. In fact everybody is always told (falsely IMHO) you can do annnnnnything you want with your life (nice fairytale).
Why is this not a major issue in other male dominated fields? Like car mechanics? Or trucking? Taxi? Miners? People who cut trees for a living?
You want to know why? Because companies like Google, Apple and other tech giants are probably looking for another way to bring down salaries of IT workers by trying to recruit from another pool of workers.That is what, IMHO, it comes down to. Outsourcing and H1B visas (or wtv they are called, not from the US) are not very popular policy and are getting harder and harder to increase/justify.....So they are looking at the next best thing: get more women involved! In a perfect scenario it should hypothetically double the number of IT workers and nothing can be done to stop it (if you did how dare you you sexist), unlike the other methods.
It's all about the benjamins my friends, nothing more nothing less. If Apple really gave a shit about society & fairness, it wouldn't be using slave labor to manufacture the goods that lead to the hugest income reported EVER by a company. Hypocrites.....
No, pay them in line with the critical role they play in our society. And if you think that teachers' retirement benefits are extravagant, that's because overall (at least in the USA) retirement benefits are a joke, if they exist at all. 401k plans are fine and all, but you're putting your future in the hands of Wall Street, which has no interest in whether you can feed yourself after you retire.
The more you cut teacher salaries, the worse the teachers, because anyone with any brains at all will see private sector employment more and more appealing. Yes, there are bad teachers out there. Yes, they can be fired if they fuck up badly enough, union or no. (I'm sure there are plenty of bad teachers that aren't fired because the powers that be know they won't be able to replace them, because nobody wants to teach.) Being a unionized employee doesn't mean you can't get fired, as much as the right would like you to think so. CBAs ensure progressive discipline, not no discipline. In a nutshell, this means you can't be fired because you gave the wrong kid (whose parents are rich and powerful) an F on a test.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
My female colleagues and managers are WITHOUT EXCEPTION great software engineers. I wonder why your workspace is so bad?
It's hard to blame it on "the women" because then you'd have to explain why places like my workspace doesn't suffer. So it must be something else. Any ideas?
Wow, talk about a sweeping generalization. I know lots of female engineers who have engineering related hobbies, but naturally they do tend to put those to one side somewhat once they start having families. There are only so many hours in the day, and kids take up a lot of them. The fact that some guys don't really pull their weight isn't really something to be proud of.
Anyway, that is mostly irrelevant to the argument. I know lots of engineers who do something completely different in their own time. They want to get away from work, have a change of pace. It doesn't mean they are bad engineers, they just have different tastes to the ones who spend every waking minute thinking about code or electronic circuits or mechanical designs.
Do you think the best doctors go home and practice surgery for fun or something? Lend each other scalpels and MRI scanners?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
WTF?
Nobody with any real experience can honestly say 'My * colleges and managers are WITHOUT EXCEPTION great software engineers.' unless they are COMPLETELY clueless about what a great software engineer is.
I suppose if you replace * with 'great software engineer' it might be technically true. Trivial case.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No. Fucking. Way.
Do you realize what privatized "public" education would look like? It'd look great at first, until the inevitable consolidation starts in. Soon, we have the school equivalent of Wal-Mart. Then, once the monopoly is established, budgets will be cut and cut and cut, until the teachers are making minimum wage and class sizes are 100+. The company running the school would have a vested interest in finding the schools as little as possible. We all know how well that works in the health insurance industry. So, instead of sending your kids to a school with board members selected by the community, they go to a school where the decisions are made thousands of miles away. Look at private schools (and charter schools, for that matter) now: you can be excluded for the color of your skin, your faith, and especially your income.
Think about Walmart running your local school. Minimum wage teachers that are brought into this country on work visas, who know nothing about America other than the pay is better here, and who may or may not speak English well enough to be understood. No arts classes, no music, probably no Phys Ed (too much liability and the equipment is "expensive", where we define "expensive" as "it costs any money at all"). And what happens when some company like Hobby Lobby starts running schools and decides that evolution has no place in the schools (it's only a theory, after all), because as a non-governmental organization, they are not required to keep the church out of the schools.
Bad, bad, bad idea. If you don't like the schools, there are plenty of excellent private schools already. If you can't afford the tuition, or your kid is the wrong color, you have the choice to home-school. You have choices; you're not required to send your kid to public school.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.