No Gap Found In Math Abilities of Girls, Boys 701
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."
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one.
Ok then, so in most of the western world, boys are better than girls at maths...
The Important Question.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Real Story is (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Although they may be able to say that there is a statistically significant difference between the performance of white boys and white girls, they can only say this is true for the U.S., not for the entire western world. Similarly, it would be incorrect to say that in all "Asian" countries that girls are better than boys at math from the results of their study.
Re:Conflicting results? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does seem like the study was designed to reach a predetermined conclusion, doesn't it?
obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
dumbing down (Score:2, Insightful)
"But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."
So in other words they dumbed down the tests, just like in every other field. Reminds me of the military when they lowered the standards to allow women in the eighties.
Seems kind of biased to me.
Re:I don't understand this gender difference swing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Real Story is (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Conflicting results? (Score:2, Insightful)
1. The study doesn't concern itself with hard mathematical questions. It is based on common math tests, aka No Child Left Behind mandated state tests.
2. The fact that the standardized test material contained "not many" (different from "no") hard mathematical questions is an aside from the point and conclusion of the study.
3. There is no trend reversal. It just shows that mathematical proficiency with respect appears to be very dependent on cultural factors. The study still shows that boys are better than math, just only among whites.
There might be problems with the study, but if so, they are a lot more subtle than you seem to believe.
Re:Conflicting results? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least they half acknowledged that by lowering the overall standard the results were no longer valid, even if it was mentioned only in passing and not the focus of the article. Now, if it wasn't for the misleading headline and all that text...
I don't doubt that girls can be equally good at math as boys, but I've noticed that the interest is often just not there. And that's the real reason why men outnumber women in the math-intensive fields of science. Not because we're better at it, but because we're actually interested.
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)
Re:Maybe because (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe we are all equally capable at math and cultural factors hold us back rather than propel us forward (example, technology). If anything, our ability to rely on technology is holding us back - as an example, its a culture shock for a lot of freshman college students to not use calculators.
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).
Re:A root cause you'll never hear about (Score:3, Insightful)
That women--under the burden of this construct--also assist in perpetuating these divisions, is an argument IN SUPPORT of its existence and its ongoing effects; NOT of it being "made up" to "sell" "feminism".
Just how foot binding, arranged mariages, and bride-burning are all strongly enforced by the women (most older women who experienced such things when they were younger) in the patriarcal cultures that practice(d) them. You don't have to be a dude to buy what the patriarchy is selling.
Re:Real Story is (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there's not enough information in TFA nor in the research.
If you give more of math to boys, and they develop better at it, do you know if you've challenged them and developed them to their maximum? If you take some away and redistribute it to the girls (or across racism/cultural/religious/socioeconomic/etc) then are you still challenging -any- of them to their maximum?
I'm white, and I'm whining because I don't want to see more dumb people.
Re:Real Story is (Score:3, Insightful)
There is evidence that boys and girls learn better in different sorts of environments. Early one one claim was made that girls were too intimidated to participate in class because boys were loud and rambunctious, tending to interrupt, shouting out questions or answers. The "solution" was to force the boys to sit down and shut up so that the girls wouldn't be intimidated and therefore could learn better. the problem is that it now appears that this has been actively detrimental to boys' education because it is contrary to THEIR learning style. One solution is sex-segregated classrooms.
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Real Results (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this study conclusively shows that:
there's no difference in outcomes based on gender.
Any other questions go unaddressed.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing further research based on the theories that there exist better teaching methods for both boys and girls, exploiting the respective differences in brain organization (I know, that kind of heresy gets you Larry Summers'ed.) We've trended towards LCD on those, from what I've heard folks in the field say. One researcher I heard recently was talking about how mental agility exercises used by the elderly can be adapted and customized to benefit younger individuals, even in specific subjects. Whether boys or girls would perform better on math, on average, with an optimized curriculum, I believe is an open question. And so what if a boy does better? There are a heck of a lot of things girls are better at, IMHO, and math isn't necessarily the pantheon of human knowledge. And, so what if a girl does better? Why do we care, again?
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.
Re:I, for one (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
So in your mind the geek community is exclusively male...? I think I see the problem here...
Pregnancy Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I, for one (Score:3, Insightful)
It's predominantly male.
Obviously, you think that men are the only people who would be interested in fairness in this issue? Sounds like you've got a lot to learn.
All BS (Score:3, Insightful)
We think that since we discovered what DNA is and have a caveman's understanding of how genes work, we can be an omniscient god and figure out each individuals pre-determined fate. I think that, especially in the science crowd, the Nature aspect is way overblown compared to the Nurture part of it.
You're certainly not gonna convince me it's nature by some craptastic standardized math test.
Easier test questions - no child left behind (Score:4, Insightful)
Add some financial incentive via state and federal funding and it's now become important to not only the teachers but the schools to turn out students that excel on those standardized tests.
Being creative people, the school administrators found that the best and easiest way to obtain those high scores on the tests was to make the tests easier. The companies providing the tests were happy to comply with the wishes of their best (and only) customers.
Combine this with high school classes where half or more of the final grade is based on attendance (!) and what kind of education do you think our children are really getting?
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.
Re:Real Story is (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point, I was going to mention that. It's actually more complex, people have four different primary learning styles, and most schools only teach to one or two. It isn't just gender.
People can learn through hearing something, reading something, watching something, or doing something. Most schools only teach through lecture and books, with a relatively few demonstrations and lab activities for the other learning styles.
Re:I, for one (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can it be time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real Story is (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, snark aside, the point is: this is a lame argument. Boys doing poorly because they are inherently unable to sit down and pay attention is a) not really true (because, um...in the super-strict classrooms of days gone by, boys apparently did well) and b) if it were true, misbehavior is not an impulse that should be encouraged anyway. Please try again.
Re:Can it be time? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you point to just one example of someone telling women they're "not supposed to be interested" in IT?
Because I'm calling bullshit on your comment.
Re:What! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I, for one (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I, for one (Score:2, Insightful)
If I gave a fuck about that I wouldn't be much of a man would I?
I'm not here to worry about female or male feelings when I post. I'm here to discuss topics and rant on them at length. And to maybe find that nugget of knowledge that shows through now and again in the comments here. The good stuff.
Also, the fact that you assume that slashdot moderation is somehow a group consensus shows a real lack of understanding.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
According to TFA more girls than boys do the SAT, doesn't give whether more boys than girls did other tests, but the article implies girls outnumber boys. 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
Orrrrr, you could read the next sentence of the article: "You're dipping farther down into the distribution of female talent, which brings down the score," Hyde says.
What he's arguing - right or wrong is unknown, but we'd have to look at the data instead of just a summary - is that the group of girls taking the test goes from, say, the 40th percentile up, while the group of boys taking the test goes from, say, the 60th percentile up [numbers greatly exaggerated for clarity]. Because of more boys saying, "bah, I'm only at the 50th percentile, it's not worth taking it and doing poorly," fewer boys take the test and the average for boys is higher... This actually is a statistical illusion, if you believe his premise - that the smaller pool of boys taking the test is smaller because it doesn't include the lower-ranked students.
This premise does make some sense, too - due to gender-bias in our society, there are more blue-collar fields in which men can make a good living: carpentry, plumbing, electricians, auto mechanics, etc. Women are pressured away from those fields, so if they want a chance at a career, even if they have the same academic ability as the guy who gets a GED and goes on to be a successful plumber, they're going to try to go to college. No one hires a secretary, nursing or dental assistant, etc., without at least an associate's degree these days.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Orrrrr, you could read the next sentence of the article: "You're dipping farther down into the distribution of female talent, which brings down the score," Hyde says.
What he's arguing - right or wrong is unknown, but we'd have to look at the data instead of just a summary - is that the group of girls taking the test goes from, say, the 40th percentile up, while the group of boys taking the test goes from, say, the 60th percentile up [numbers greatly exaggerated for clarity]. Because of more boys saying, "bah, I'm only at the 50th percentile, it's not worth taking it and doing poorly," fewer boys take the test and the average for boys is higher... This actually is a statistical illusion, if you believe his premise - that the smaller pool of boys taking the test is smaller because it doesn't include the lower-ranked students.
This premise does make some sense, too - due to gender-bias in our society, there are more blue-collar fields in which men can make a good living: carpentry, plumbing, electricians, auto mechanics, etc. Women are pressured away from those fields, so if they want a chance at a career, even if they have the same academic ability as the guy who gets a GED and goes on to be a successful plumber, they're going to try to go to college. No one hires a secretary, nursing or dental assistant, etc., without at least an associate's degree these days.
Re:A root cause you'll never hear about (Score:3, Insightful)
Somehow we're supposed to believe that men and women are physically different in nearly every way -- except for the brain.
If you believe men and women are physically different in nearly every way, you've missed out on a lot of biology, anatomy, and genetics.
On the other hand, consider this, just to introduce some controversy (:D) -- there is no case where the world's best female athlete can beat the world's best male athlete at any physical sport. Could this truth also apply to certain narrow cases of neurology? [either male or female].
Absolutely, since it's not a "truth" at all. Aside from all the physical sports that women can compete equally in - fencing, for instance - when you standardize by scale, disparities frequently disappear.
For example: Florence Griffith-Joyner is 5'6-1/2" and holds the women's world record for 100m at 10.49s. She ran 5.64 times her height every second. Leroy Burrell, the men's world record holder, ran the 100m in 9.85s, but he's 6' tall. He ran 5.55 times his height every second, or 2% slower.
But wait, you say, I shouldn't correct by height, the gender is the important difference. Fine... Let's find a 5' male runner and see if he can outrun Flo-Jo.
Incidentally, this applies in other sports - the 1500m freestyle women's record holder did her record at .949 times her height per second, while the men's record holder only did .926 times his height per second.
So, yeah, I'm sure your 'truth' applies as equally well.
Re:A root cause you'll never hear about (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I don't understand why there is even any debate that men and women are different. Somehow we're supposed to believe that men and women are physically different in nearly every way -- except for the brain. Evolution clearly decided to make the brains identical for political reasons.
How exactly do you arrive at "physically different in nearly every way?" Smaller with an outside-in penis and very minor differences in hormone balances really isn't even close to every way. Seems like a very distinct, very small minority of ways to me. We are all made of the same stuff, we all have the same body temperature, we all have the same shape, our muscles all work on the same principles of physics, we eat the same foods, inter-sex blood transfusions and even organ transplants are common enough, etc, etc.
I think it is a gigantic leap of logic to say that very minor physiological differences should necessarily translate into differences at a level so much more abstracted from the physiology than simple physical tasks are from physical size and muscle density.
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.
ok, but how inheritable is IQ? (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, sure, it seems quite reasonable that people of lower intelligence have more kids.
But it's probably been that way for a very long time. I'd imagine that some illiterate peasant bog-farmer had more kids than, say, Sir Isaac Newton, for example. (don't know if that's actually true, but you see where I'm going, right?)
What keeps us from already being in the grips of an Idiocracy type situation is that there's minimal link between your IQ and that of your parents. Yes, there is a link, but there's a lot of environmental factors that matter much more.
And there's lots of evidence that there's a whole lot of brain development that happens in the first 5 years of life or so. The difference between living in poverty and not, living in a stable household and not in those initial years has been shown to have a dramatic effect on success (however you wanna define it,) in later life.
Given a chance to flourish, good nutrition, a stable emotional environment, intellectual stimulation, decent schooling, etc., a kid born to below-average IQ parents might not be another Einstein or Gauss, but they'll do just fine.
People are different from each other. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure there are gender biases and cultural biases and racial biases and income level biases.
The source of the social problems from all this is that we refuse to look at the individual differences and insist on making the statistical biases the rule. That's turning statistics, logic, all reason upside down.
We should quit saying, women do poorly at subject C, therefore, Miss Q, you should avoid subject C at school.
Yeah, if we follow this path of logic very far, we end up down a road where standardized schooling becomes impossible. But I think that could be a good thing. Standards shouldn't be used as a straightjacket, they should be used as ladders and ropes for climbing and swinging on.
Re:Conflicting results? (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, it doesn't say whether girls are good at maths.
It just says that girls are not any worse at the simple maths that everyone is expected to learn.
Then there's this little gem:
"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." No, you can't infer that cultural reasons is the cause without begging the question.
In other words, they have already decided that there are no differences between genders, nor between races, and based on these presuppositions, they draw the conclusion that the discrepancy is cultural. Um....
The data shows that for white people, there is a higher variance for males than females, while "Asian" males don't display the same variance. It says absolutely nothing about the cause of that variance. This difference may be cultural, but it may also be linked to any number of other causes -- lactose tolerance, for example. We don't know, and jumping to conclusions like this is silly.
What studies have shown before and again show here is that white males are far more likely to be at the extremes (wiz kids or failing) than either white females or Asians of either gender. Disregarding this doesn't do anyone any favors. Is enough done for the white males who lag behind, or are they left behind? Is enough done for the white males who excel far beyond their classmates? Those who fall in the middle don't need any extra support -- it's the exceptions that do.
Re:Can it be time? (Score:2, Insightful)
When I was interested in become an astronomer in my freshman year in high school I got strong vibes from everyone, including my parents, that I shouldn't go into that field because it had some odd hours and I wouldn't be around to raise a family properly.
I had a computer teacher my same freshman year who never thought anything of any of my work. He would only ever talking to the guys in my class about getting jobs in the IT industry. When he found out I wanted to get into The University of Michigan he told me that it would be very hard and that they only took 4.0 students (which I was). He then told an old buddy of mine that he could get in easily. This buddy is, frankly, something of a moron who did not even have a GPA of 3.0.
Yet another example is an old boyfriend I once had. He told me that girls suck at math and I shouldn't even be in the same math class as him (Trig, Functions, and Statistics). The first time he said this I thought he was joking. The second time he said that I shouldn't think about going into anything science-y because it would be to hard for me to be able to do I kicked him in the balls and broke up with him.
As for it being cools for girls to be geeks I can assure you its not, at least not in high school. Where I went to school there where no teachers who catered to you and no one cheered you on. The only teacher who ever showed interest in helping me learn more was the physics teacher who did the same thing with all the guys. I just think he was delighted to have a female student that want to go into a science.
Re:Can it be time? (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep in mind that the celebration of the girl geek is a fairly new social development. This certainly wasn't in place back when I was a teenager (I'm 30 now). Let's wait 20 years or so before we make any conclusions as to how this has affected the interest of girls in more scientific pursuits.
Additionally, I think that girls largely base their self-worth on the opinions of other girls, and girl-geekery, I suspect, is not celebrated largely within the female community just yet.