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US Wins Math Olympiad For First Time In 21 Years
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. won the International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time in 21 years. Gender diversity is brought up in this NPR article because the eight team members on the U.S. team were all male, but they made a point to mention that of the top 12 people participating in the U.S. Math Olympiad, 2 are female, which is better than last year when there were no females in the top 12. "I will say that it's not really a super-great spectator sport, in the sense that if you are watching them, it will look like they are thinking," Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head coach for Team USA says. "Although I will assure you that inside their heads, if you could spectate, that would be quite a sport."
Its not just the US. Australia has a lot of data from national standardised testing, notably NAPLAN.
Girls consistent score slightly higher on average in most subjects. I don't think this means any failure or conspiracy in our schools, as it is well know that boys develop later. The difference is very obvious in early school years. If it is considered "a problem that needs fixing", you could set the start age for girls a bit earlier, say six months, and the scores could be equalised. Or you could just accept the "diversity".
However maths is a special case. Unlike all other areas, boys are a bit in front on average. More interestingly, the standard deviation is substantially larger, so there are more boys at both the bottom and top of scores. The higher the score band, the greater the disparity in numbers. (And again - only in maths) So it is no surprise if >90% of the olympiad-level students are male. If it was equal, something would be seriously wrong in the selection process.
Data can be seen here: http://reports.acara.edu.au/Ho...
Select domain:numeracy and subgroup:sex
Note the M/F numbers in the first ("exempt") and last columns.
Project that as a normal distribution, and it will predict that the Maths Olympiad is a sausage-fest. Mathematically.