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."

Comments

Re:One thing I have noticed

[Karmashock]

entry level evolutionary psychology answers that question.

Women are psychologically uncomfortable with competing with men.

Argue with a women about something that your mutual power or status in the group. Women statistically shut off in these contests. Where as men statistically don't back down even if they have a good chance of getting pasted.

This goes back to our evolutionary roots in that men genetically DIE if they do not obtain status sufficient to obtain breeding rights where as women really just have to play it safe and they pass on their genes.

This encourages men to compete because if they do not compete they lose status, do not get breeding rights, and genetically die. And women both don't need to bother with that, their genetic priorities have nothing to do with their status or contests with males, and challenging males historically was dangerous because they could kill you if you threatened them with genetic death.

Thus in any competitive environment involving males, women do not feel comfortable or even motivated.

The idea from current education theory which has actually contributed to women doing better in a lot of subjects is to remote the competitive environment from subjects. Make things cooperative, turn the emotional intensity down a bit, and try to mellow things out.

This works really well for getting girls to feel comfortable.

The problem if you care is that in male evolutionary psychology, things that are not competed for are not worth anything. The male mind as programmed at a very deep level that it has to obtain status. If status is not being offered in something then it is probably pointless. If not only does it not offer status but it is hard and consumes a lot of time/energy/resources... then from an evolutionary perspective the male mind is programmed to see the entire thing as a threat to his genetic survival. He MUST obtain status and wasting a lot of his time doing something that doesn't get him what he needs means he'll have less time later to focus on that.

Thus you can't really educate girls and boys in the same school without shutting one of the sexes off... statistically.

If you have competition then the girls will shut off. If you don't then the boys will shut off.

This is basic and very very well understood and supported science at this point.

The problem is that its all political because there is this notion... which comes out of marxist theory... that people can be changed by their environments. I don't mean that in the way that you educate someone but I mean TOTALLY changed. As in your human nature can be entirely overridden and in fact the argument from a lot of people is that ALL human nature is a social construct.

So... gender itself is a social construct. A core belief of modern feminism is that there is NO difference between men and women mentally and psychologically. It is entirely a product of cultural and social conditioning. The theory from these people is that if you treat a girl like a boy you can make her identical to the boy mentally and psychologically. Indifferent to all the science that contradicts that.

Boys and girls are neurologically different. The brain structure can be told apart by neurologists rather easily. And psychologically boys and girls aver VERY different beasts.

The problem is that in many cases "science" is not politically correct. The left likes to think it is the party of science and reason. It is only that when science and reason either is convenient for the ideology or does not contradict it. But whenever it does... as science does in this case... they're as likely to be pigheaded on the subject as any bible thumping creationist.

And sadly while we recognize creationists for being what they are and largely exclude them from influencing the education system. We do not exclude marxist ideologues from influencing our education system.

Here some cute pink cheeked marxist dupe is going to contradict me. I welcome it. Come at me.