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    Joined: Oct 2011
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    Originally Posted by madeinuk
    Actually I am talking about the Maths section of the SAT which is hardly far RH tail stuff.

    We're agreed, then.

    Originally Posted by madeinuk
    A vast gulf separates being able to code well versus being able to type in a sequence of syntactically correct statements to get the job done (elegant simplicity versus brute force).

    It would seem that women, with apparently stronger verbal skills, would be ideally suited to bridge that gulf. Coding is, after all, logic expressed through a given language.

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    Originally Posted by Quantum2003
    I have mixed thoughts on the issue of "girls only" encouragement in STEM and those thoughts have shifted recently more towards "less" as my own children have gotten older (my youngest are now in 9th). At this point, I really see what Nicoledad, Spaghetti, Old Dad, and Bostonian (RE situation where verbal ability far outstripping STEM ability in a high IQ female) are talking about.

    I think we can separate this into two distinct things:

    1) Encouraging girls to participate.
    2) Creating exclusive girls-only clubs for them to participate in.

    And I get the sense that your issue is solely for the second thing.

    My personal take is that I believe exclusive clubs exist for the same reason single-gendered schools exist. There's a school of thought out there that boys tend to be quite dominating, and this suppresses the ability of girls to get the most out of them in coed activities.

    As an example, DD's STEM lab group included a boy and one other girl. DD treated me to daily anecdotes of the boy trying to take over everything, and doing it all wrong. Supported by the other girl who saw eye-to-eye with DD, she repeatedly had to shout him down, and then the girls had to waste time and materials fixing everything he'd done. Their group returned the top results.

    Whether a girls-only activity is necessary probably varies based on the personality of the girls, but it would certainly seem to be necessary in many cases - see madeinuk's post on girl confidence.

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    Originally Posted by DAD22
    My experience is that people (teachers, administrators, HR departments, politicians, etc) are so excited to bring females into STEM that they will overlook a more talented male in order to provide praise and opportunities to a female. There's a red carpet waiting for anyone with two X chromosomes who can do math, and a journactivist with a camera dying to tell the story. I think a lot of females who are inclined to do engineering don't want the attention. I also think it sends the wrong message to anyone more talented who isn't getting the same attention. A male talented in STEM just isn't interesting to anyone these days.
    In general it's awkward that someone's career choice is politicized, and done so mostly by people who can't STEM.

    This is your experience? So you have specific examples?

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    Originally Posted by aquinas
    It undermines the quality of discussion here to be regularly inundated with off-subject messaging suggesting that females are simply innately too incompetent to excel in STEM fields. Properly distilled, this is the argument you are forwarding, and it is abhorrent.

    This is a forum for parents of gifted children sincerely seeking to improve the access to high quality gifted education for our families and others. Individual differences in abilities and outcomes exist, often with divergences between the two that merit exploration. We can do better than to categorically write off half the population with trite bro-science.
    You are being dishonest in caricaturing what I write. Certainly the distributions of ability in math and math-heavy subjects for males and females overlap. Some women excel and some men are poor. But it still may be possible that the distributions have different means and standard deviations. It is a scientific question and not a moral one. No one is saying that women should be discriminated against and "written off".

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    Originally Posted by aquinas
    The topic of the thread is the role of parents (fathers, specifically) in promoting interest in STEM among girls. You have indicated that you are not actively encouraging your daughter in the pursuit of STEM, and that she isn't showing an early leaning in that direction. Thank you for your contribution.
    I am encouraging my daughter, just not making a special effort because she is a girl.

    All of my children did EPGY (often while sitting on my lap) and now attend Russian School of Math. I often help my children with RSM homework and quiz them on math. My wife and I encouraged our daughter, now in 6th grade to attend the math club. She did for a while, but she never made the team in tryouts and has stopped going. She prefers other clubs, such as running, volleyball, gardening, and art. My two boys do make the math team and are enthusiastic mathletes. My daughter gets straight A's and will be in top track math in 7th grade, the first year that math is tracked. I expect that all my children will take AP exams in calculus and the natural sciences before graduating.

    You can expose children to things, but they will decide what they like and are good at.

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    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    Originally Posted by aquinas
    It undermines the quality of discussion here to be regularly inundated with off-subject messaging suggesting that females are simply innately too incompetent to excel in STEM fields. Properly distilled, this is the argument you are forwarding, and it is abhorrent.

    This is a forum for parents of gifted children sincerely seeking to improve the access to high quality gifted education for our families and others. Individual differences in abilities and outcomes exist, often with divergences between the two that merit exploration. We can do better than to categorically write off half the population with trite bro-science.
    You are being dishonest in caricaturing what I write. Certainly the distributions of ability in math and math-heavy subjects for males and females overlap. Some women excel and some men are poor. But it still may be possible that the distributions have different means and standard deviations. It is a scientific question and not a moral one. No one is saying that women should be discriminated against and "written off".

    PM me if you want to take the gloves off on this subject. I don't see any value for the forum in embarrassing you publicly on this subject.


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    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    Originally Posted by aquinas
    The topic of the thread is the role of parents (fathers, specifically) in promoting interest in STEM among girls. You have indicated that you are not actively encouraging your daughter in the pursuit of STEM, and that she isn't showing an early leaning in that direction. Thank you for your contribution.
    I am encouraging my daughter, just not making a special effort because she is a girl.

    All of my children did EPGY (often while sitting on my lap) and now attend Russian School of Math. I often help my children with RSM homework and quiz them on math. My wife and I encouraged our daughter, now in 6th grade to attend the math club. She did for a while, but she never made the team in tryouts and has stopped going. She prefers other clubs, such as running, volleyball, gardening, and art. My two boys do make the math team and are enthusiastic mathletes. My daughter gets straight A's and will be in top track math in 7th grade, the first year that math is tracked. I expect that all my children will take AP exams in calculus and the natural sciences before graduating.

    You can expose children to things, but they will decide what they like and are good at.

    Thanks for posting about your family, and kudos to your children for their accomplishments.

    It's interesting that your two boys are in the math club, but your daughter didn't ultimately participate. It would be valuable to understand some of the drivers behind that, given that she was exposed to (what sounds like) the same instructional approach as her brothers. How was socialization around math different, both at home and at school, if at all?



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    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    Certainly the distributions of ability in math and math-heavy subjects for males and females overlap. Some women excel and some men are poor. But it still may be possible that the distributions have different means and standard deviations. It is a scientific question and not a moral one. No one is saying that women should be discriminated against and "written off".

    When narrow differences in math ability are being used to explain enormous differences in STEM participation, the data does not support the hypothesis, so it's not a science question, because it's not science.

    If the narrow differences are being used to justify a social engineering outcome whereby one group is being subverted and undermined, then that is indeed a moral question.

    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    I am encouraging my daughter, just not making a special effort because she is a girl.

    All of my children did EPGY (often while sitting on my lap) and now attend Russian School of Math. I often help my children with RSM homework and quiz them on math. My wife and I encouraged our daughter, now in 6th grade to attend the math club. She did for a while, but she never made the team in tryouts and has stopped going. She prefers other clubs, such as running, volleyball, gardening, and art. My two boys do make the math team and are enthusiastic mathletes. My daughter gets straight A's and will be in top track math in 7th grade, the first year that math is tracked. I expect that all my children will take AP exams in calculus and the natural sciences before graduating.

    You can expose children to things, but they will decide what they like and are good at.

    This outcome would be consistent with the study I linked upstream (see response to aeh) which correlated the father's attitudes to math outcomes for the different genders.

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    Originally Posted by spaghetti
    There are programs that are designed for girls But, if you read the fine print, ANYONE can join.

    It's important for girls to see themselves as capable of things they are capable of and not limit themselves to things that boys or other girls or cultural pressures say they are capable of.

    I think there are several problems with this:
    1. Getting girls to go into a field that may not want them can be a rude awakening.
    2. Resentment of people that were "helped" vs those who did it on their own.
    3. If girls are on all girl teams in an area where they are very much the minority, they aren't learning teamwork in the same way as the boys are.

    Some girls do not want "girls in STEM" programming and feel it sets them apart and starts with the premise that they can't do it on their own.

    But there are a lot of positives too:
    1. Exposes girls to something they may have assumed they couldn't or shouldn't do.
    2. Increases the number of girls in STEM programming which will increase girls in the workforce and begin to force the change to a time when girls are accepted for their value without the girl caveat coloring things.
    3. Teaches boys to work with girls (if the girls are not fully segregated) so they are ready to work with girls in the STEM workforce.
    4. Builds a generation of change.

    I have a girl going into engineering and I'm really not sure engineering is ready for her. Lots of reservations on my part. I've worked with her on how to "handle" herself in various situations, but if some people will not accept a girl's participation, no matter what she does, she is unlikely to able to fully contribute her value.
    One thing she's doing is applying only to colleges that do not offer preference to girls in the engineering program. (DYS kid with very strong stats).

    Please don't take anything I'm about to say personally, because I wouldn't want this to be perceived as a mischaracterization of your views, which seem on the whole to be very fair (which is why I'm careful to quote your whole post, and not just select the part I'm interested in responding to). What follows is not criticism of you, but on the existing perceived social structures that you have observed.

    That list of "problems" is one that can easily be shredded, so we're left with no downsides:

    1) We're talking about fields who have given us the term "disruptive innovation." So, get ready for disruption. Next?
    2) Nobody accomplishes anything on their own. Everybody gets help. Next?
    3) Is that a bad thing? The First Lego League competition my DD participated in saw the trophy handed to a team formed by a local Girl Scouts troop. They must have been doing something better.

    Done. Bring on positive change.

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    There's some basis to the idea of environmental messaging around female STEM activity (the kind which makes "female" its primary objective, STEM secondary) being potentially damaging to female performance in those subjects.

    A quote from Virginia Wolf in "A Room of One's Own" summarizes the notion of stereotype threat (assessment of individual ability/performance as based on stereotypes for the group to which the individual belongs) as a contributory factor to female self-efficacy and performance in math.

    "There was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome."

    We haven't come far since the 19th century. Research by the Unviersity of Waterloo and Stanford (https://nuovoeutile.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Stereotype-threat-Spencer-1999.pdf) finds that:

    Quote
    "...lowered expectations in response to continued stereotype threat in a domain, and the demotivation this causes, may be critical precursors to disidentifying with the domain—that is, to dropping the domain as an identification and as a basis of self-evaluation."

    The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here's a Cole's notes discussion. Citations in the article on pp.24-26 link you to the source material for these arguments.

    Reasons the authors forwarded to explain the potential role of stereotype threat in the interpretation of gender differences in math (proxy for STEM) ability:

    1. Access to the same classes and curriculum doesn't equate to the same experience of education, or access to it, for boys and girls. Different classroom treatment of boys and girls, combined with societal socialization of females, could lead to wide differences in achievement for similar ability boys and girls.

    2. The experience of testing or assessment in various classroom, competitive, and professional settings may varies dramatically for boys and girls (and, later, men and women). High stereotype threat proximal to performance is expected to have a higher negative effect on performance of the stereotyped group. Situations such as high-stakes testing, admission to competitive STEM clubs, or open participation in classes by girls could feed stereotype threat.

    3. The impact of stereotype threat is positively correlated with the perception that an assessment is a fair measure of ability, as it links to self-perceptualization.

    (Side note: This could explain, in part, intra-family differences in STEM performance between male and female siblings who receive comparable instruction, and yet who are exposed to stereotype threat by a primary attachment figure. It may not be that girls "just aren't interested", but that they have been tacitly told, through subtle social cues, that outcomes in their performance are expected to be low.

    Conversely, it could explain high levels of STEM participation in girls-only schools, because of the envirionmental absence of stereotype threat.)

    4. These effects would be expected to persist and magnify as females enter expanding social environments, in which the likelihood of exposure to stereotype threat by a significant figure (a mentor, supervisor, or high-performing group of peers) increases.. This dovetails with the outsized incidence of impostor syndrome among high-achieving females and is consistent with continued female drop-out from STEM fields.


    Anecdotally, I attended an all-girls' school for middle and high school, and there was a disproportionate amount of female achievement in STEM and technical fields. Within my personal circle of friends are a female cardiologist who has published extensively before 30, a senior officer at the Federal Reserve Bank, an academic neurologist at an Ivy league school, several engineers who have been promoted quickly in their areas of specialization (cardiac medical devices, nuclear reactor design, fluid dynamics) or received tenure well ahead of schedule, and a prominent entomologist.

    There was, doubtless some serious selection bias at play in this example. But, it speaks volumes that these young women came from a graduating cohort of just over 60 graduates, from families that believed in female equality. (Most families had at least one parent in a quant field, with both parents actively supporting the daughter.) In this environment, the label "girls in [insert club]" was never appended to the activities, because of course it was only girls! In a mixed-gender environment it is difficult to replicate the elimination of exposure to stereotype threat sufficiently to produce similar results. My classmates and I graduated with the mindset that we were capable individuals, and this environmental messaging--at a critical developmental time in the formation of self-concept--seemed to disproportionately inoculate us from impostor syndrome later in our careers.

    Tying up this ridiculously long-winded post, it seems that activities which minimize stereotype threat would go a long way to supporting engagement of all of the most talented students in STEM, and ensuring that their achievement aligns well with their innate ability.

    *cough, tldr*


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