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Girls From Progressive Societies Do Better At Math, Study Finds (sciencecodex.com)
An anonymous reader writes: (edited and condensed)Research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has found that the 'maths gender gap', the relative under performance of girls at maths, is much wider in societies with poor rates of gender equality. Published on Monday in the American Economic Review, the research shows that the performance gap between girls and boys is far less pronounced in societies that hold progressive and egalitarian views about the role of women. The researchers analyzed the relationship between maths scores of 11,527 15-year-old living in nine different countries and the Gender Gap Index (GGI) in their country of ancestry. The GGI measures economic and political opportunities, education, and well-being for women. The researchers found that the more gender equality in the country of ancestry, the higher the maths scores of girls relative to boys living in the same country. The findings were significant and robust even when the researchers controlled for other individual factors that may affect youths' maths performance. In particular, the results show that an increase of 0.05 points (or one standard deviation) in the GGI is associated with an increase in the performance of girls in maths, relative to boys, of 7.47 points -- equivalent to about one and a half months of schooling.
Huh? Of course, there is... The average duration of marriage in a country and the number of children born to single mothers is quite well documented in most countries. In fact, it is probably better documented, than the pupils' Math-achievements.
A number of such studies have been done, in fact — but all I'm hitting are "paywalled" results, for some reason. As a matter of fact, TFA does not link to the actual study either... Khm...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Stereotype much? My wife decided to stay home. She isn't unfulfilled. Her main complaint with doing so is it makes it harder to afford things. I'd encourage her to return to employment if she wasn't finding fulfillment staying home, but I'm not going to tell her to go drudge away for a nicer car or a bigger house while she pines away at the time missed with the kids like I do. Society nor I should tell her that she has to stay home, but they can f#@$ off telling her how to feel if she makes that choice. Especially when the pressure on that choice is an attempt to draw twice as much profit from the things my grandparents had with just one salary.
I took my nephew to volleyball practice last week. There were only 3 boys in the class, and for whatever reason the instructors put them into their own group during practice. Their group performed the worst at practice - the three of them goofed off, fought with each other, didn't listen. The girls' groups OTOH went smoothly, with the instructor hitting the ball to a girl, her hitting it back, then moving to the end of the line so the next girl could hit.
Then practice was over and they played a game. I was surprised to see that the boys were focused and played together well as a team. The girls meanwhile spent a lot of time talking with each other, and three of them ended up being hit by the ball because they weren't even watching it.
It's just one anecdote so I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. But I'm starting to form the opinion that girls do much better in structured educational environments where the kids sit quietly in place while the teacher dumps data onto them, while boys do better in immersive, chaotic trial-and-error environments where they learn by doing and experiencing. Unfortunately, it seems schools are busy eradicating the latter type of instruction in favor of the former.
I was gonna post pretty much the same thing. It's pretty common that boys outperform girls at math, but girls outperform boys at reading. I assumed summary was just repeating an interesting highlight from a general study, and read TFA only to find out that was the extent of the study. I think it would've been more insightful to see if the boy/girl inequality in reading mirrored the pattern for math, or if it followed a completely different pattern.
As any systems engineer can tell you, weighting one control function (affirmative action) can help return a system to a desired state more quickly (in this case, equality between boys and girls). But this by design creates an underdamped system which will overshoot your desired state, or even arrive at a stable state offset from the desired state. You have to be ready to remove the weighting when the system begins to get close to the desired state so as not to overshoot, and allow it to quickly stabilize at the desired state.
Unfortunately, that isn't happening. TFA is another example - taking one of the few (only) areas where girls still lag behind boys and highlighting it as something which needs to be corrected, while ignoring that girls have far exceeded boys in all other areas. There's always going to be some natural variance with any system. If you insist that one group in that system never lag behind another group, that's not going to result in equality. You're going to end up with a DC offset where that first group never lags because its average is so much higher than the other group's average. i.e. You're going to create a huge inequality opposite the one you were originally trying to correct. That's pretty much the state we're currently in, with girls far outperforming boys in all aspects of education except math. These educational programs favoring girls should've been dismantled two decades ago (date on the CBS article is 2002).