New study on gender gap in mathematics/reading

[Dojo]

Hmm we could discuss that but i think it would be screaming racist.

[TZF]

Observation Space: A medium suburban town in central Massachusetts (significantly more conservative than Boston)

My impression is that American society is more accepting of girls who pursue good grades (than of boys), but less forgiving of girls who pursue extracurricular math/science involvements.

This is supported by the fact that last year, the top 15 (I believe) GPA-ranked students in my local public high school were all girls (in a school of about 52% girls), while 7 of the top 10 members of the math team were boys.


Continued: OK, I'm probably going to put myself into some hot water with my comments here

What I find interesting is that while I've seen girls very well represented at science fairs (no, it's not just because of old male judges), I've seen relatively few girls entering mathematics projects. I would like to think that female entrants into the science fair must have overcome at least some amount of the "cultural influence", which makes me wonder why so many of girls go for the "The effect of <drop-down menu of chemicals> on <drop-down menu of organisms>", or other generic biology projects. Many seem to win points by being very particular in their proceedings and by maintaining nice lab notebooks.

Could this all be the result of the wide-sweeping "cultural influence"? To me, this suggests at least some degree of natural inclination; perhaps to the tangible over the abstract, perhaps to the "how" rather than the "what" or "why", perhaps to risk-averseness. But in any case, no matter what countless female researchers spit out in an attempt to advocate gender equality*, one has to draw the line somewhere. We can all agree that men and women are not the same**.



* - The one-line abstract of this paper and incessant usage of phrases such as "girls will have an absolute advantage" tend to make it more of a push to suggest superiority. While I am neutral on the particular issue (my girlfriend's brain beats mine on many counts), it bothers me when I see blatantly opinionated phrases injected into academic writing.

** -Observe that the Netherlands [14] beats the US [17]. I don't quite understand how sex-charged rap videos are labeled as sexist, while countries in which you can hardly walk down the street without seeing a pair of t*** in the window are viewed as being "gender-equal".

[JBL]

[TZF]

There we go. I knew I'd screw something up in the middle of the night.

So I withdraw my comment about the academic writing.

But.

That doesn't mean that the abstract doesn't bother me. If you've seen My Cousin Vinny, it bears striking similarity to Vinny's opening statement. It also doesn't mean that I'm going to withdraw any of my more general observations or concerns.


Question: Someone please tell me what these results are saying? Beyond what it says in the abstract (which I read quite quite thoroughly). I don't know what to make of these results. Specifically, I don't know:

(1) How mathematics scores are determined
(2) How meaningful their "gender-equality" index is

so I don't want to draw uninformed conclusions about any correlations involving the two.

[JBL]

[TZF]

Thanks

This page may be of interest, because it contains two sample questions from the actual test. The diagram is omitted, but it is pretty clear what it would actually be. More importantly, it gives a good idea of what they might be measuring when they say "mathematics". It's too bad that they won't publish a sample test.

[fedja]

Well, those two questions make sense at least. Of course, what is really tested on most standard school tests is the ability to think exactly as your teacher taught you and having neither less, nor more knowledge than you are supposed to have (One example of what I mean by the latter is the test question "Out of a crow, a rabbit, a squirrel, and a sloth, which one does not belong to the group?", to which my friend's daughter answered "Crow, because it is a bird and the rest are mammals". The answer was graded "incorrect"; the correct answer was "rabbit, because all others live on a tree". There was no way to convince the teacher that her answer made at least as much sense as the official one). On the other hand, being smart includes the ability to figure out what might have been meant in most such cases . Anyway, it is a digression from the main theme.

I agree that seeing the entire test or a representative portion of it would be really interesting.

[JBL]

[jmerry]

Especially since that's a percentile measurement- that tells you nothing about difficulty, just that Americans are about 60% as likely to score in the top 1% worldwide as everyone else. With recent policies directing resources heavily to low-performing students, this is not a surprise.

On the subject of bad test questions, I remember a bit on a standardized science test based on an alleged absorption spectrum for chlorophyll. The spectrum had a peak in the green range, exactly the way to make something not green.

Those sample questions aren't wrong, but I wouldn't like them either as a test taker or as a grader.

[splatyango]

[yenlee]

I'm glad that people are out there doing these studies in order to quiet the voices of sexism (as well the insidious voices of sexist "hypothesizing" a la Summers), but to me the results of the study are completely uninteresting and unsurprising.

Also, the idea of people on this board surveying their own experiences is irrelevant. If you asked the same question 100 years ago, survey respondents would say something like, "Everyone in my class who is at all good at math is male," leading to the "possible conclusion" that girls can't do math at all, with some rare exceptions. Today, we have people saying that girls and boys seem to be just as good at math at the lower levels, but at the higher levels, there are very few girls, leading to the "possible conclusion" that girls may be able to do math, but statistically speaking, they are less able at the highest levels. But unless you believe that the experiences of growing up male and female are essentially identical, the "possible conclusion" is in fact a STUPID conclusion.

Let's consider a science experiment. You have two different species of mice A and B, and you have four environments in which to raise the mice X, Y, Z, and W. In experiment 1, you raise 100 A mice in environment X and 100 B mice in environment Y, and then you run mice A and B in a race. The result is that that the A mice completely outperform B mice. In experiment 2, you raise 100 A mice in environment Z and 100 B mice in environment W, and then you run them in a race. This time you see that the A mice still outperformed B mice, but only slightly, and you notice that the biggest winners are still A mice. Pop quiz: What sort of conclusions can one draw from these two experiments? The obvious answer is NONE. In fact, a responsible scientist would not even *hypothesize* that A mice are inherently superior to B mice in race-running, because there was never any fixed variable. Moreover, one thing that you have *proven* is that the environment variable matters tremendously, making the "A is better" hypothesis a total joke. And yet...

Many seemingly rational people still harbor suspicions (i.e. a hypothesis) that men are inherently better at math than women (at least at the high-performing end, statistically speaking). The argument always has something to do with how male and female brains differ, etc. While that is true, our understanding of the brain is nowhere near strong enough to understand complicated phenomena like mathematical ability. (For example, the ability to mentally rotate objects is presumably a microscopic piece of that puzzle.) So would I be surprised if, 500 years from now, we discovered that males held a natural advantage in math? No, but I would be equally unsurprised we were to discover that females held a natural advantage. After all, would you be surprised if the B mice turned out to be better racers?

At this point in time, it is *already* apparent that females are being underutilized in technical fields such as science, engineering, and computer science, in the sense that their representation in these fields is much smaller than their share of students who are reasonably proficient in calculus. Therefore the emphasis should be on fixing this problem rather than trying to figure out, "So are boys better at math than girls or not?"

[durt]

[blahblahblah]

that's a depressing 'average trajectory for a successful scientist' -- a lot of graduate students are fortunate enough to be supported by some sort of fellowship -- i made more than 35k this year as a 21 year old graduate student without teaching a course and with only six hours of TAing a week, and most postdocs who reach the age of 35 have pretty depressing career prospects anyways

[TZF]

There are many programs that are trying to capture the interest of smart girls in math and sciences. A nearby university, WPI, runs lots of summer programs just for girls in the sciences, in business, and in other fields in which women are statistically underrepresented. I've the results of programs like these, and I think these are the most effective and productive way to go.

Analyzing results from an unpublished test, on the other hand, gets us nowhere.

[Sunny]

[TZF]

That is true; conceptually, I understand that it may feel weird to be pigeonholed into a group in general. I think, though, that this is more of an issue with girls who are already interested in math and science (who are "all set"), who feel awkward being treated as a minority, than with girls who are being drawn into a fresh interest.

I also sympathize with your concerns with the media. But again, it generally only bothers girls who are already interested, while raising awareness for those who are not interested.

It seems to me that the average girl around here very little before distinguishing herself as a female. And while I can't speak for the rest of the country, I can say that around here, a lot of girls would enjoy the additional attention.

[Sunny]

Yeah, that is an excellent point. It's great for attracting girls into things, but scares off the ones who are already in it heheheh. And I do know a few girls in the clubs here who LOVE that sort of attention and take it as an opportunity to point out everything that's wrong with the world, hahaha.

I know personal experiences aren't that great, but I have been to a math camp where there were eithr 4 or 6 girls out of 60...but I don't know, I've never been that bothered by the lack. Probably cuz I get along with males better in general than females, hahahaha.

[Sunny]

Sorry for the double post, but I'm posting a new article.

This one was sent to me by my supervisor at work.

Heather Mac Donald
Math Is Harder for Girls
. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.
28 July 2008

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/education/25math.html) by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

Lewin begins her piece with the mandatory mocking reference to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ suicidal speculations about why women are underrepresented on science and math faculties. She also manages to squeeze in a classic feminist trope for how our sexist society destroys girls’ innate abilities, invoking the infamous “talking Barbie doll [who] proclaimed that ‘math class is tough.’” Lewin implies that the new study blows Summers’ wide-ranging speculations on gender and math out of the water; all that holds women back from equal representation in MIT’s theoretical physics labs, it seems, is Mattel and other patriarchal marketers of gender myths.

On the contrary, Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.

Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)

The Science researchers themselves try to downplay the significance of the two-to-one ratio for whites—the vast majority of students—on the grounds that it should produce a 67 percent to 33 percent disparity in male-to-female representation in math-dependent fields. Yet Ph.D. programs for engineering, they say, contain only about 15 percent women. Therefore, the authors conclude, “gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some [science and math] fields.”

This reasoning is flawed, however, because the tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind act. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.

The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.

The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.” That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.

[jmerry]

I can't really take that analysis seriously. The basic facts are pretty clear- the gap is tiny if it exists at all at the level of ordinary students, and it's large among the elite.
There's no reason this can't be culturally driven just as much as everything else.

A question that might do some good: how do we recruit more girls into the joy of problem solving, when so many social forces drive them away?

[TZF]

I find that the following seem to apply in general:


1a. First impressions count. Bad math teachers early on make it harder to introduce problem solving later on. I know, I'm dreaming big here...

1b. Hit where it doesn't hurt; that is, where there is less social pressure. Again, this points towards the classroom venue. It also points towards summer programs and such, to an extent.

2a. A bit of inclusivity. The stigmatization of many interested in problem solving is not just a matter of non-math people separating out math people, but of math people separating themselves out. While people don't have to go out of their way to fit in, it's also quite repulsive to outsiders when people pride themselves in not fitting in.

2b. Make math less repulsive. For example, the word "mathlete" -- it drips lameness. If you tell people that they have to be a "mathlete" to enjoy problem solving, they just might run away. Hooray, unnecessary social pressure! Hooray for not doing our part!

3. Look for fresh talent. Like, this last year, I had my school mandate the AMC's for ALL students, and some kids were like, whoa, I didn't know I could do this stuff! Sometimes, due to social pressures, a student might not so much as realize that s/he has a talent/inclination towards problem solving. One decently well-written math contest just might provide the spark. Oh, and there has to be incentive too. Like missing a class. Prizes are trickier because people without confidence might just be like, whatever, I won't win.