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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.
Non-progressive societies don't encourage girls to do things like science and math in the first place, they expect them to adopt 'traditional female roles'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
There seems to be a correlation with boys doing better too. Of course correlation is not causation, but anecdotally teachers say that girls being more engaged in maths helps the whole class.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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I have seen the data, yes girls do better in math in progressive societies, relative to boys, but they also do better in language and all areas of schooling relative to boys. In other words, girls do better in school overall and of course one of the measures of a progressive society is how well girls do in school. Thus they found that in societies where girls do better in schools, they do better in math also. What people should ask is how to get the best performance out of boys and girls and which countries have found a formula for that.
If this were The Register, this article would have the no-shit-sherlock icon posted all over it.
I bet research would further demonstrate that girls do better in pretty much everything, from STEM to driving, in more progressive societies. That's what happens when you don't treat females like cattle.
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.
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).
Why is it that you can only talk about the extreme minority of "raising rich men's kids"? Why is it that you can only paint being a parent as this pathetic lowly task? Is there any job more important than raising the next generation of humans? No, but people fall into the delusion trap because they are told that the only thing that matters is having stuff that you buy from a store.
You don't have to think very hard about the debate to figure out that someone, mainly the consumer class, has been getting fucked over by this rhetoric for decades.
Men are completely incapable of growing a baby inside a uterus and giving birth, they are also incapable of breast feeding that baby. Meanwhile women _DO_ have a choice of having kids and raising a family. They also have a choice of working and getting educated. Discrimination laws already exist, and have for nearly half a century covering all possible aspects of work and education equality. Men are the ones given no choice (because "biology"), yet they are consistently painted as the evil oppressor. Delusion is rampant in this country.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.