Slashdot Log In
No Gap Found In Math Abilities of Girls, Boys
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Jul 25, 2008 12:05 PM
from the anything-you-can-compute dept.
from the anything-you-can-compute dept.
sciencehabit writes "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference. 'Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.' But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
What! (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a boy, and I've met girls who I'm better at math than.
Therefore boys are better at math than girls.
Heh, stupid girls probably can't even follow simple basic logic like that ;-)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
The Important Question.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Important Question.... (Score:5, Funny)
Thus, I hereby suggest hiring a transsexual robot to lead the next survey.
Parent
Re:The Important Question.... (Score:4, Funny)
No you insensitive clod, because if it was done by men the quantification would be way off!
Parent
Real Story is (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Real Story is (Score:4, Interesting)
How does correcting an unfair imbalance equal hamstringing? More attention was paid to boys, and they did better. Now that teachers are giving more time to girls and teaching in a more gender neutral fashion, the scores are becoming more equal. If I give you something that I don't give to others, and then I take some of that away from you in order to more fairly distribute it, I am not hamstringing you.
Its sad, so many people have gotten used to having unfair advantage, they consider it their birthright. White males tend to be the worst whiners.
Parent
Re:Real Story is (Score:5, Interesting)
As mentioned on 60 minutes [cbsnews.com], "Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school".
Does that sound very equal to you?
It goes somewhat against the grain of this report, but what this study seems to indicate is that, relative to their performance in other subject areas, girls aren't doing well in math.
Parent
Re:Real Story is (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in public school in the 80s and 90s none of my math teachers were men. Typically, a quarter to a half of our grade would be 'homework checks' or art posters where you draw a picture of issac newton and an apple. I was never in a class that you could even pass by just being able to understand and perform math.
So in my day girls had huge advantages in math classrooms, with sypathetic teachers and rote learning and grades based on following the rules -- and guys still did better in math. I can only image how hostile the classrooms are now. Judging by your id, back in your day maybe there was a bias for men but that has long since been overcorrected for.
Parent
Re:Real Story is (Score:5, Insightful)
How about not formulating the teaching style based on what's between someone's legs and instead teaching to the individual. Splitting up kids and teaching boys and girls differently is just going reinforce the same cultural stereotypes that created the disparity in the first place. Aggressive girls and passive boys who don't live up to western heteronormative ideals are going to feel even more singled out.
Parent
Re:Real Story is (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Conflicting results? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait so:
result 1: While previously it had been believed that boys solved harder mathematics questions more adeptly, that trend has been reversed.
result 2: Our standardized test material contained no hard mathematics questions.
Does anyone see anything wrong with this? Their results may be true, but that doesn't mean the study was valid.
Re:Conflicting results? (Score:5, Insightful)
result 2: Our standardized test material contained no hard mathematics questions.
In a room with a low ceiling, a high percentage will jump the same height.
Parent
Explanation (Score:5, Funny)
The math in this study was done by girls.
Almost in MN (Score:5, Funny)
I was just commenting about this with a coworker this morning, and how the Minneapolis Star Tribune indicates Minnesota high school girls are still lagging behind boys. I said we just need to bump down the high school boys' performance a couple notches and we'll be good: no child left behind!
A girl answered a math problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been sort of disheartened by the quality of math instruction in the US lately, and it's got nothing to do with gender. It certainly seems like newer students lack a lot of the critical math skills that were drilled into my head years ago, based on my limited exposure to new people entering the job market/taking the occasional class here and there.
obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
Pregnancy Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pregnancy Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Fallacy of the Irrelevant Conclusion [wikipedia.org]. Neither boys nor girls can ever become pregnant at age 10, but they can have mathematical ability which can be measured. Since these measurements are central to this debate, your analogy is inappropriate and misleading.
Further pregnancy, as a characteristic of the of the sexes, can in fact be said to define what "boy" and "girl" actually stand for, making your statement a tautology [wikipedia.org].
Though droll, your argument is invalid.
Parent
easy deduction: (Score:5, Funny)
white boys should breed with asian girls, creating an uberrace of math chomping supergenius kids
i for one welcome our eurasian einsteinchan overlords
A root cause you'll never hear about (Score:5, Insightful)
Other girls.
Seriously. Anyone who has dated a geek girl knows that misogyny is a drop in the bucket compared to the problem that girls geared toward science and math face from other girls who will be absolutely VICIOUS in putting them down.
The reason this never gets debated is simple. It would blow apart the entire "sisterhood" myth of feminism. To admit that there are a number of women who use "girliness" as a cudgel to beat the tar out of intelligent women, while there are a number of men who actually want an intelligent, educated mate, would be to force them to admit that women, not "the patriarchy," are really what's keeping the culture stagnant.
Re:A root cause you'll never hear about (Score:5, Interesting)
I ahve an 8 year old daughter, and I see this behaviour in girls a little older then here.
I ahve been talking to a lot of my female coworkrs about girl behaviour.
So far I ahve this conclusion:
Girls are fucking mean.
They'll intentionally talk smack about some when they know they are listening but not part of the conversation.
what the hell is that about?
Girls will build someone up just to bring them down. Seriously, WTF?
As a guy we said what was on our mind and sometimes tossed some fists around. The it was done.
None of this planning to revenge some slight for days.
Parent
No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Girls have more fear of math. They are not worse at it. The typical observation is that girls do not dare try it, while boys perform badly and do not mind. This is a cultural problem, not a capability issue. Same is, incidentially, true ofr technology: Girls are afraid to touch it, while boys break it.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
So the real headline should be (Score:5, Insightful)
Girls just as good as boys at today's easier math?
Frankly, I've never bought that old CW about girls being worse at math than boys... especially since I met and married my math-major wife in college, who has always been much better at math than I am. It may be true that boys are more _interested_ in math than girls, and thus pursue it and are successful at it more often, but that's a completely different thing from saying that girls are somehow innately "worse" at math.
SEX DIFFERENCES IN MATHEMATICAL APTITUDE (Score:5, Interesting)
Until puberty (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was in 5th grade, there were 2-3 girls in my computer class that were much better programmers than I. Much better.
Fast forward to today. They're housewives. I'm a Software Engineer. It's sad and disheartening. I wish there were more women in my field.
It's like puberty fried their brains completely. If it weren't for that I could easily envision them being much better at what I do than I am. But something happened in the intervening years. The only thing that makes any sense is puberty. Until that point the differences between boys and girls are superficial, but prior to that they were much better at it than I was.
I'd like to see the results of this experiment re-run on the same people when they're in their late 20s or early thirties.
What I've seen (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I've seen reported on the study, the authors were looking at averages being the same. That's what I've seen over the years as well. What I've also seen is the standard deviation for boys is greater. Boys are usually at the bottom, the middle and the top with the girls usually clustered in the center. Admittedly, my sample sizes are small and I'm looking at a self-selected group.
I've coached a Middle school math program called Mathcounts [mathcounts.org] for the past 12 years. I coach in a Mathcounts region just south of the Silicon Valley. The program is organized around annual competitions that are structured as a hierarchy: school/region/state/national. Winning at one step gains a student, or group of students, access to the next level of competition. We've managed to do well at the regional competition and have sent at least one kid to the state level 10 out of 12 years.
At the regional level, gender has never been an issue - we send as many girls as boys to state. At the state level, gender is most definitely an issue as the top 16 kids out of the 150 or so regional winners are overwhelmingly boys. You'll usually see a 2 to 1 ratio [mathcounts-ca.org] and sometimes the boy's will sweep the top 16. In the sample I cited, I counted 6 girls out the top 38 contestants. Remember, I'm talking about the top 1% of middle school children in California. Most of the top kids are Asian which means anybody from India to Japan.
A key difference I've seen between my Asian and non-Asian students has been their parents. If I have a strong Asian student, strong odds are that the kid's parents are first-generation immigrants. First-generation parents tend to emphasize excellence far more than parents who have been here awhile.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but what they're trying to emphasize is that gender is not the discriminating factor. Rather, culture is. So your statement is kind of misleading in that it emphasizes gender as the discriminating factor, and subjugates "western world" into a circumstantial factor.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The title shouldn't be "Girls = Boys at Math", it should be "Boys better than Girls at maths, but for cultural reasons, not gender related reasons."
I imagine that this title would never be chosen because it's either not politically correct enough, or not attention grabbing, regardless of it's accuracy
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
My sister (we're twins) consistently kicked my ass at math and just about everything else, right up until we got to 10th grade or thereabouts. Then she turned into a vacuous fashion fiend with god-awful grades who liked hanging out with other vacuous fashion fiends.
I think peer pressure has a lot to do with how kids perform at things like math. Math is not cool, therefore if you want to be cool then you have to suck at math, or generally just suck at school.
I always got good grades, but I was also good at sports and generally avoided the "jock" scene and the do-nothing i'm-so-cool rich kid crowds. I'm kind of proud at having been able to achieve that balance.
Thankfully she grew out of it eventually, but not in time to do rather badly in high school. It's just as well she didn't need a scholarship to pay her way through college (where she did pretty good).
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Americans are better at counting than Brits, as Brits seem to think there is more than one math.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
It also says boys do 7% better in the maths portion of the SATs, but writes it off as a statistical illusion due to more girls doing the test (they don't know how averages work?).
I bet it wouldn't be a statistical illusion if the girls where the ones getting 7% better.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
It also says boys do 7% better in the maths portion of the SATs, but writes it off as a statistical illusion due to more girls doing the test (they don't know how averages work?).
They wanted to do the statistics and provide figures. But the study was done by a group of 5 women - The math was too hard. =)
That's why a 7% gap with 1.5 million participants is just a "statistical illusion". If their confidence boundary with that many data points equates 7% with "Zip. Zilch. Nada.", their standard deviations must have been huge.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what happened is that achievement got redefined in a way which favors women.
Things like group work and lessening the impact of the critical thinking skills which used to be standard. Combined with in many places mixing the math courses up into a jumble so as to have "integrated math."
It might not be that way everywhere in the US, but the reason why girls have pretty much all of the high scores these days has more to do with changing the rules than anything to do with women.
I'm not suggesting that girls can't do math or that there's any reasonable conclusion to be drawn, but pretending that all the money being taken from educating boys to be used educating in a female friendly way has consequences.
At some point, there just needs to be a disparity. If women for whatever reason don't want to take engineering CSC or some highly technical course of study, I'm not sure why that needs to be "fixed."
Seriously, I might have misunderstood feminism, but I thought the point was to increase choices and achievement not force new equally restrictive constraints on women while also screwing over men to achieve it.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, I might have misunderstood feminism, but I thought the point was to increase choices and achievement not force new equally restrictive constraints on women while also screwing over men to achieve it.
> Seriously, I might have misunderstood feminism, but I thought the point was to increase choices and achievement while also screwing over men to achieve it.
There, fixed that for you. :)
Parent
Re:What does it mean for boys to be better? (Score:5, Insightful)
My problem with this article is that it writes off a 7% difference as an illusion. And doesn't actually give any of the figures, just results (which I can't really trust without figures, especially after how the one figure they do include contradicts the article headline)
Parent
Re:I don't understand this gender difference swing (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Can it be time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Can it be time? (Score:5, Interesting)
You, sir, are outcho goddammed mind.
The intelligent people in developed countries are being outbred [wikipedia.org] by the people of lower intelligence [wikipedia.org].
I know it is not science, but sheesh, haven't you seen Idiocracy [imdb.com]?
Parent
Re:Can it be time? (Score:5, Insightful)
Boys were given boys toys and shied away from doing 'girl things.'
Well first of all, that wasn't what I asked. But since you brought it up, I'm sorry that some parents buy toys their children don't want, but for most children, studies show [google.com] that they do prefer those gender-specific toys, and that these aren't "perceived" roles, as you put it, but inborn preferences. Men and women are different because of our genes.
The question I asked, which nobody has answered yet, is if anyone can give an example of girls being told they not supposed to be interested in IT. I can give you an example of the opposite:
Think about what it means to be a geek. If you're a guy, the joke is that you'll be a virgin until you're 30, and you'll live in your mother's basement. What's it like for a self-identified geek male in highschool? You're a social outcast. Society tells you that you're a failure, and to be a real man, you need to do manly things and the most important thing for you to do is to get a girlfriend. Being a geek or a nerd as a male is a death sentence.
Now look at what it's like for a girl. Geek girls are awesome. Many girls self-identify as geeks even though they have no real knowledge or propensity for computers. It's just so great - it's considered so cool, that they actually lie about it. Anything that you want to do, as a girl, is encouraged.
So that's the world as I see it. Boys feel tremendous pressure to avoid being labeled a geek, being associated with computers, etc. But for girls, anything they do, and everything they do is just super. Wow, you go girl! Girl power! Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them, right? There are no examples of girls being told they're not supposed to be in the IT field because that's just ridiculous. That doesn't happen in the western world. A girl who wants to be in the IT industry is fawned over. She's so special, so awesome, we just love geek girls. But for a guy, it's a hard, lonely life.
And yet, even in this climate, more boys than girls choose the IT field. It is clear to me that this happens in spite of culture, not because of it.
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
So in your mind the geek community is exclusively male...? I think I see the problem here...
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Interesting)
Never in my life have I encountered a serious situation where the system favors girls or women over me. Not in school, not in business, not in anything beyond women getting to order first in restaurants. While girls have very slightly higher average scores in grade school and a slight majority when it comes to overall university attendance, the "advantage" is both very small and in my opinion caused by the fact that most girl-focused subcultures are more compatible with academics than are those focused around boys.
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
Yeah, real equal. Women average better than men in most school subjects and more women than men go to university. There are loads of female dominated jobs and academic subjects, yet no affirmative action for us. When women want to work a 25 hr week in a career that's "rewarding", the feminists complain that women average lower salaries.
That's feminism: When men are doing better at something "Men and women are equals, the men must have had an unfair advantage!". When women are doing better, "Men and women have different brains and are good at different things!"
When will the geek community use their intelligence and realise when that they're being shafted?
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that any blame in this imbalance has to fall on anti-intellectualism among boys.
I wholeheartedly agree. Look at the difference in culture here. Girls have feminism. All their lives they're told that they're wonderful and special and have this innate power and value that comes from being a woman. Look at all the role models that women have in popular culture. In every movie and TV show, and especially in advertisements, women are always smart, always strong, always winners.
What are boys told? They are innately bad. Members of their sex are responsible for all the world's ills. Boys fall back on their instincts - they value themselves in terms of sexual conquests. They fall back on their instincts to achieve those. And the instincts serve them well all through high school, and they manage to feel okay. It's ok to cut school, ok to put all your time and attention into some stupid car (for example) because that gets you sex, and that makes you worth something.
Basically it's like you said, anti-intellectualism.
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
Never in my life have I encountered a serious situation where the system favors girls or women over me. Not in school, not in business, not in anything beyond women getting to order first in restaurants.
I recall at the end of high school, when I was looking at scholarships to fund my higher education, that there were plenty of scholarships available that had a gender or racial requirement, making me ineligible. That is a situation where women had a real advantage over me. One of the universities I was applying for also had a quota for both races and genders, which meant women with lower test scores were admitted aver men with higher test scores. Again, that clearly favored women over me.
Now it is entirely possible that other social factors provided males an advantage over women, like math teachers who wrote recommendations that subconsciously took into account their prejudices about gender. Still, if you didn't see anything that did not clearly favor women, either times have changed or you were independently wealthy.
I'd also note that while participating in hiring a technical writer for a tech start-up I worked at, we hired on a woman who was clearly less qualified than one of the male candidates. This might be because all the other writers were women, but I also overheard comments from a higher up manager about our company "needing more women" as we were mostly men simply because the field we worked in is mostly dominated by men. We actually went out of our way several times to hire women when possible, but most of them ended up being less than competent and were eventually let go. Whatever the case, women were given preferential treatment in several cases.
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have data to back up that claim?
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
Parent
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Informative)
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
I don't think you are correct. I remember reading a study a year ago that compared men and women's salaries for the same jobs and levels of education and experience and the results were women paid 15% less overall (25% less when one only looked at the private sector).
I don't recall who the study was by and Google does not turn it up right away. Do you have a source for your claim?
I'd also like to note that even if there is reliable data showing men and women make the same amount for the same job (with the same qualifications, experience, hours, etc.) that does not necessarily indicate equality as it allows for it to be harder for women to get high paying jobs. For example, if you look at all the people who are CFO's for fortune 500 companies and determine that the men and women make about the same, but 90% of those CFO's are men, that could very easily be an indication that it is harder for women to get those jobs because of discrimination. Alternately, it could indicate that for social reasons women are less likely to go into a career track that would lead them to such a position. The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
Parent