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So, DD was in a camp for gifted students with STEM interests over Spring Break. Both the dropoff and pickup times were well within the normal 8-5 workday. And DD and I both made an interesting observation - nearly every parent at pickup/dropoff was male. I've never seen that in any other context.
So, what we have here are gifted children with a keen interest in STEM, so much so that they gave up part of their vacations, and potential evidence of a very involved dad in nearly every case (even if they didn't have to make special work arrangements like I did, they at least took the time to make the drive twice a day). Given that women were (and still are, to a lesser degree) actively discouraged from pursuing STEM careers in previous generations, this would seem to make sense - gifted children with involved dads would be more likely to be exposed to and be excited by STEM, since they're more likely to get that from their fathers.
I'm interested to hear your anecdata in support or refutation.
Dropping off DD13 at math camp last summer were Engineer Dad, Chemist Mom, and Mechanical Engineering Major older sister. So I don't know what to make of that.
Yeah, I am female, have a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering (and a JD), and dropped DS9 off at engineering camp last summer. I did not notice that there were more dads than typical there. It's possible that you were the one who experienced the aberration.
I didn't drop a daughter at any camp this break. My observation is that girls are overly encouraged to be in STEM occupations. Even The Big Bang Theory had an episode with the guys going to a middle school encouraging STEM jobs for girls. Our school District, and I'm sure others do the same, have a GEMS Saturday every year. As to guys dropping off kids I might have to agree with it being an aberration
My family history (extended, FOO, and nuclear) is counter to many STEM stereotypes regarding women, with many male and female adult role models for STEM going back several generations, so any anecdata I might present would likely be outlier data anyway, but I will offer this tidy little review of the research, which notes, among other things, that maternal stereotypes/views on women in STEM are more of a factor than paternal views:
I think by "overly encouraged" turns into telling girls what they should do. If I tried to encourage by daughter into a STEM career it will have the opposite effect. Sometimes saying nothing is better
I share aquinas' confusion, nicoledad, and your recent response hasn't cleared it up. Certainly nobody is forcing my DD's interests in STEM, but with enough of the usual social pressures, it wouldn't be hard to force her out.
We're talking about interesting, good-paying jobs, and in an economy where automation is forcing a lot of other people out of work, being in the business of automation seems like a pretty smart bet. There are more jobs than we have qualified people to fill them, so there's a labor supply crisis. And we know that women are self-selecting out of these careers in shocking numbers, so it seems pretty obvious where we could go to alleviate that shortage.
In short - why should we not be encouraging both boys and girls (and boys are already getting TONS of encouragement) to consider these careers?
To my daughter having GEMS suggests there is something wrong. Data means nothing to her. I disagree but she in a way is going to be what she wants to be.
In regards to boys she doesn't see the encouragement for example of boys being encouraged into non traditional male jobs.
My anecdata as a female engineer who's only sibling is also an female engineer. A quote from Dude's article that resonates with our experience - "Fathers' gender stereotypes are very important in supporting or in undermining daughters' choices to pursue training in math and science," Davis-Kean said.
I'd go further to say that it was both of our parents though. Both of our parents challenged the stereotypes in many ways. That combined with our attitudes of - 'if someone tells us that we can't do something or that something is too hard, it just makes us want to do it even more'. Times that by 100 if "for a girl" was involved. Not sure how much of that was innate or learned but we both have it in abundance which has served us well in our fields
In choosing that path we often joked that we did it just to tick him off (he dealt with the fallout from poor engineering decisions in his job and cursed engineers often). Joking aside, he was proud. That said, I was pretty much going to do what I wanted and as long as that involved being self sustaining and out of their house my parents were happy.
Just wondering Spaghetti, have you seen a lot of issues with women in engineering where you are? I am in one of the more male dominated engineering fields (civil), and I haven't seen much in the way of gender discrimination. I graduated in the late 1980s, and I encountered some age based discrimination - that went on for a while, since I looked younger than I was.
I understand why some folks see something wrong with the girl targeted STEM programs. It is fine to introduce girls (and boys too) to the many possible STEM careers, but there is no reason to force a certain group into certain careers. I'm not convinced that we need to "fix" this.
If certain folks - in this case females - don't want to go into certain STEM fields, don't force them to do so. We don't need every career choice to have employees who exactly reflect the percentages of gender, race, age, etc. that are in our society. If it turns out that way, great, but that shouldn't be the goal. Introducing students to all of the career possibilities, and then having them choose a path to a career which they like should be the goal.
To my daughter having GEMS suggests there is something wrong. Data means nothing to her.
What has your daughter said on this matter?
Originally Posted by nicoledad
I disagree but she in a way is going to be what she wants to be.
She will be what she wants to be, as a function of the environmental supports and attitudes to which she is exposed. Social proof matters. If she is passively presented with options in male-dominated fields and not offered a narrative that offsets the message that they are all-but-only male, she will discount those as viable options.
Originally Posted by nicoledad
In regards to boys she doesn't see the encouragement for example of boys being encouraged into non traditional male jobs.
This is where parental influence is critical. You can provide counter-examples to enrich her perspective. With the decline of the manufacturing rust belt, there are large-scale recruitment campaigns in health, education, and care-giving occupations for displaced male workers.
I think by "overly encouraged" turns into telling girls what they should do. If I tried to encourage by daughter into a STEM career it will have the opposite effect. Sometimes saying nothing is better
There is a difference between issuing a directive and providing information and support to bridge a culturally-derived gap.
Maybe you can help me understand if what you're experiencing is an anomaly. Where you are located, are STEM-streamed programs and extra-curricular activities requiring girls to pledge to matriculate in a STEM field to participate? Are there financial penalties associated with not pursuing STEM specific to females?
I don't think what nicoledad is experiencing is an anomaly. I see it around here too. Some programs for STEM are for both boys and girls, but others are exclusively for girls.
The message is we need more kids (and girls in particular) going into STEM fields. It is the future, everyone will need STEM skills, etc. - you hear it a lot. And when adults keep telling kids, "This is what you should do, this is the future...", many kids tune out. After all, it is like the famous quote:
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." - Mark Twain
NotSoGifted - Apparently the Engineering department at my DD's high school is a boys' club, because at orientation, one of the current students expressed his (positive) surprise at the idea of a girl joining.
Just wondering Spaghetti, have you seen a lot of issues with women in engineering where you are? I am in one of the more male dominated engineering fields (civil), and I haven't seen much in the way of gender discrimination.
I'm not spaghetti but I think this can really depend on the field and location. I had a 4 month placement while in university in the late 90's that was quite shocking. Not necessarily discrimination but more extremely inappropriate and violating pretty much any corporate sexual harassment policy. None of it was physically offensive or personally threatening but definitely cases that you hear about in sexual harassment workshops and think "who the heck would do something that ridiculous?". Luckily it was only 4 months and I knew it wasn't indicative of the whole profession.
Other than that I can't say that I've really encountered anything discriminatory. I've worked with some people that weren't exactly textbook behaviour models but they all seemed to be equal opportunity jerks so I didn't take it personally
Originally Posted by NotSoGifted
If certain folks - in this case females - don't want to go into certain STEM fields, don't force them to do so. We don't need every career choice to have employees who exactly reflect the percentages of gender, race, age, etc. that are in our society. If it turns out that way, great, but that shouldn't be the goal. Introducing students to all of the career possibilities, and then having them choose a path to a career which they like should be the goal.
I mostly agree (I'm especially for introducing and promoting a wider range of careers to both boys and girls) but then I also look at studies like this -
"Women are always less likely to choose a STEM program, regardless of mathematical ability. Among those who went to university, 23% women in the three highest categories of PISA scores (out of six) chose a STEM program, compared with 39% of men in the three lowest categories of PISA scores."
It makes me think about WHY they might be "choosing" other fields. If it is truly because they are not interested and that is based on a somewhat educated view of what it actually is then I'm fine. If it is because they feel like they aren't "smart enough" then I think they need to take their queue from the 39% of men referenced in the quote and just go for it.
Well, I can think of one big reason girls might choose other fields. Despite being in a very strong, well-regarded and I feel mostly progressive school district, my DD, a senior this year, has discovered that the AP physics teacher treats the boys and girls very differently from each other. I won’t go into details here, but despite liking the subject matter and having a natural aptitude for it, she loathes the class. She has multiple girlfriends who have openly cried in class, and many of them have confided that this class experience has made them question or change their decisions to persue science in college. DD has challenged him in public, and has been referred to the counselor by him for rudeness (if you knew my DD this would be kind of shocking, I believe). The counselor basically told her it was her problem, not his, they have never had any other complaints, she needs to learn to modify her behavior or she will be in trouble in college, etc. She is compiling a folder she plans to share with the principal at the end of the year, but I secretly suspect it is futile. It seems to be an open secret among many parents, but this man is the only AP physics teacher, and he coaches several of the high-profile academic teams, so he is valuable to the administration.
It is similar, thought not as egregious, as this example recently described in the Washington Post (sorry, but I am having trouble posting a link- you can google Washington Post and “In a Prestigious High School Math and Science Program, Alumni say #MeToo”). The first paragraph says it all:
“Years after they left one of the nation’s premier high school programs in math and science, hundreds of alumni have come forward to support allegations that a celebrated Maryland teacher sexually harassed and demeaned female students.”
In our situation, there was no sexual harassment. But the demeaning attitude and behaviors are devastating, and far-reaching. I’m not claiming this is common, but I am still shocked that it happens at all (though I shouldn’t be) and that it is so difficult for the girls to be heard and listened to by anyone in the administration.
"Women are always less likely to choose a STEM program, regardless of mathematical ability. Among those who went to university, 23% women in the three highest categories of PISA scores (out of six) chose a STEM program, compared with 39% of men in the three lowest categories of PISA scores."
It makes me think about WHY they might be "choosing" other fields. If it is truly because they are not interested and that is based on a somewhat educated view of what it actually is then I'm fine. If it is because they feel like they aren't "smart enough" then I think they need to take their queue from the 39% of men referenced in the quote and just go for it.
Since women's relative strength is verbal compared to mathematical ability, for a given level of mathematical ability, a woman is likely to have more verbal ability than a man and thus to choose a humanities major where verbal ability is more important. In other words, women who are very good at math are more likely than men who are very good at math to also be very good at other subjects and therefore to have choices other than STEM.
Sorry, Bostonian, but your obsession with genetics aside, the differences in STEM participation do not match any distribution of assessed math or spatial ability, and the vast differences between the two distributions have almost entirely social explanations.
Most notably, those differences have grown significantly wider over a very short time, so we can be absolutely certain that evolution had nothing to do with it:
"Women are always less likely to choose a STEM program, regardless of mathematical ability. Among those who went to university, 23% women in the three highest categories of PISA scores (out of six) chose a STEM program, compared with 39% of men in the three lowest categories of PISA scores."
It makes me think about WHY they might be "choosing" other fields. If it is truly because they are not interested and that is based on a somewhat educated view of what it actually is then I'm fine. If it is because they feel like they aren't "smart enough" then I think they need to take their queue from the 39% of men referenced in the quote and just go for it.
Since women's relative strength is verbal compared to mathematical ability, for a given level of mathematical ability, a woman is likely to have more verbal ability than a man and thus to choose a humanities major where verbal ability is more important. In other words, women who are very good at math are more likely than men who are very good at math to also be very good at other subjects and therefore to have choices other than STEM.
You're making a Ricardian argument that women are following their comparative advantage and choosing the skill set in which they are best qualified. Although the actual basis for that argument is flimsy, I'm going to run with your assumption and demonstrate why the line of thought presented is invalid.
Comparative advantage isn't blind to compensation. Average STEM salaries in the U.S. exceed humanities salaries.
Women make an expected value calculation and are still over-represented in humanities, despite having comparable quantitative skills to their male counterparts, on average. (Read chay's quoted piece from Statistics Canada for some substantiation from a relatively pro-female market).
If talent isn't the impediment, something else is restricting women from accessing STEM as a viable option. Given that women are, on average, compensated less than male counterparts (after controlling for tenure and qualifications), the female STEM-humanities compensation gap closes, and the relative benefit to accessing a STEM career for a woman declines relative to humanities.
Another possibility is that a non-financial variable is driving women's decision not to enter STEM. If there are non-pecuniary barriers to entry (social, cultural, relational) that penalize women in STEM disproportionately to men, then women will also consider that cost in the calculus of career choice.
You have spoken in previous threads about the need to feminize your daughter with accultured female interests and, conversely, have opined on the value of sports knowledge and male cultural currency to be successful in various male-dominated fields. These are exactly the kinds of barriers that perpetuate gender imbalance. Though, I suspect, not all audiences here prefer the idea of equality.
So basically, boys bad at math will continue on to become bad programmers, and girls good at math will drop the interest and do something else, instead of becoming good programmers.
You have spoken in previous threads about the need to feminize your daughter with accultured female interests and, conversely, have opined on the value of sports knowledge and male cultural currency to be successful in various male-dominated fields. These are exactly the kinds of barriers that perpetuate gender imbalance. Though, I suspect, not all audiences here prefer the idea of equality.
Given that men in business settings often discuss sports to break the ice, it could help both men and women to know a little about sports to fit in in industries where men currently predominate. Is it sexist to say that?
My wife is a doctor. Her nieces are training to become doctors. Nothing is stopping women from becoming engineers, mathematicians, or computer programmers, but if they don't, that's not a problem either.
Let me first qualify what I am about to say with the fact that my 13 year old daughter is a DYS and a participant in SET ( based on Maths score) I have always, from birth, treated her as a human being not a girl.
From the time that it was obvious that she was able to grasp things quickly I encouraged her to follow STEM pursuits. Science camps, SG Maths, AOPS, CTY and a state university G&T outreach program. So far my daughter has excelled and continues to be enthused.
But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.
I do not think that STEM careers are for average people nor do I think that college is for average people. There are plenty of trades that will provide secure income for non academic folks. Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.
I do not expect anyone here to agree but I am a born heretic and have an almost pathological aversion to echo chambers preferring the Way of the Cynic in all things.
Given that men in business settings often discuss sports to break the ice, it could help both men and women to know a little about sports to fit in in industries where men currently predominate. Is it sexist to say that?
Depends on what you mean by "help". If help means that they will be able to engage in meaningless small talk, sure go for it. If "help" means that they need to do it so they won't be passed over for a promotion because they can't name the starting line up and spout sports facts then I'm going to go with that being sexist (unless you're talking about a job in the sports industry).
madeinuk - I'm not talking about "forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls". Just letting the most talented of EITHER gender have those places. See the stat I posted above about men in the bottom of the rankings entering STEM at a higher rate than women at the top.
But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.
We're not talking about the far end of the tail, though. The latest examples are about programming, and you don't need to be a math genius to write code. Most of those jobs only require an understanding of high school Algebra. If that's not average math ability, it's not far from it.
Given that men in business settings often discuss sports to break the ice, it could help both men and women to know a little about sports to fit in in industries where men currently predominate. Is it sexist to say that?
I don't see how this has any bearing on the conversation.
Given that men in business settings often discuss sports to break the ice, it could help both men and women to know a little about sports to fit in in industries where men currently predominate. Is it sexist to say that?
Depends on what you mean by "help". If help means that they will be able to engage in meaningless small talk, sure go for it. If "help" means that they need to do it so they won't be passed over for a promotion because they can't name the starting line up and spout sports facts then I'm going to go with that being sexist (unless you're talking about a job in the sports industry).
The way it works, of course, is not that people are promoted in non-sports companies directly based on sports knowledge, but that people who are more popular and who have bonded with their co-workers are more likely to be promoted to leadership positions. In some environments, being able to talk about sports (and playing sports such as golf or being on the company softball team) helps accomplish that.
The way it works, of course, is not that people are promoted in non-sports companies directly based on sports knowledge, but that people who are more popular and who have bonded with their co-workers are more likely to be promoted to leadership positions. In some environments, being able to talk about sports (and playing sports such as golf or being on the company softball team) helps accomplish that.
I guess I should count myself lucky that I've always been in companies that promote people based on their technical and managerial competencies instead of shared interests. I don't need my manager or subordinates to understand and discuss my interests to develop a great professional relationship with them. If we bond over sports, fine but surely that can't be the only way especially for someone with great interpersonal skills and leadership capabilities.
But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.
Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.
Perhaps there's a failure of imagination here.
Overall, "math talent" is and has been defined by men for a very long time. Highly capable tends to mean really good with a certain skill set, like solving problems quickly on competition exams. Or being able to shut up and calculate and not waste time asking questions about why it works (google it). Perhaps this skill set is something men do well. Perhaps there are other skill sets in mathematics and physics that women do better at. Perhaps these skill sets would lead to new discoveries.
Now, at this point, I suspect that some readers are snorting and thinking, "Math is the most objective of all disciplines. It's obvious what's important."
To this I ask: important to who? And how is this defined?
Sure, shut up and calculate has led to amazing new technologies. But it hasn't led to a single revolutionary-type discovery that breaks the old model. It can't, because by definition it sticks to the existing model. New discoveries come from strange and mysterious places.
There are giant glaring holes in physics (and in math IMO) that won't be solved by keeping your gob shut and solving the differential equation. Yet we stick to this approach, reward its master craftsmen, and dismiss anyone else as lacking the requisite "talent."
Also, lots of things have been obvious, from the earth's position at the center of the universe to the fact that women can't be doctors or much of anything beyond nurses, teachers, and mothers ... or the eternality of [insert dead movement].
But you argue, "None of that stuff was based on empirical data! It was all based ignorance and prejudices!" To which I reply, how do you know that you aren't suffering from the same problem? And where is the empirical data showing that an approach to mathematics that rewards a certain skill and ability set is the only way? Because, right now...it is the only skill set that will get you anywhere, as those who don't have it are "less able."
In general, when one group sets self-serving standards for X, it's dishonest to claim that people in another group don't qualify to do X. But it's a good tactic for maintaining position as the alpha group, which is a common human trait. Prejudice is eternal, and it's always easy to create another reason for why the other group isn't as good or is just plain wrong. Just ask the anti-vaxxers. They're experts at being ignorant (though they don't know it).
But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.
Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.
Perhaps there's a failure of imagination here.
Overall, "math talent" is and has been defined by men for a very long time. Highly capable tends to mean really good with a certain skill set, like solving problems quickly on competition exams. Or being able to shut up and calculate and not waste time asking questions about why it works (google it). Perhaps this skill set is something men do well.
A very different manifestation of math talent is creating new math -- proving theorems, which mathematicians do. Almost all of the great mathematicians have been men. According to what definition of math talent have women been as accomplished as men?
In all the history of dog racing, very few cheetahs have won, therefore dogs are faster than cheetahs?
No, Dude. The cheetahs have merely been running in a style that doesn’t approximate accepted “top dog-ness”. Kindly disregard the notion of their superior speed and individual predatory capacity in the wild, as “real” predatory superiority is based on a construct wholly dissociated from actual predatory skill that supports survival. Silly Dude, it’s all about the mechanical rabbit.
But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.
Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.
Perhaps there's a failure of imagination here.
Overall, "math talent" is and has been defined by men for a very long time. Highly capable tends to mean really good with a certain skill set, like solving problems quickly on competition exams. Or being able to shut up and calculate and not waste time asking questions about why it works (google it). Perhaps this skill set is something men do well.
A very different manifestation of math talent is creating new math -- proving theorems, which mathematicians do. Almost all of the great mathematicians have been men. According to what definition of math talent have women been as accomplished as men?
By the definition of “creating new math”, there aren’t many male mathematicians, either, and that’s under a legacy of female under-education or outright suppression of education. That’s hardly a compelling argument in favour of male math supremacy.
I suppose there aren’t many illustrious female Popes, either, so case closed!
Sorry, Bostonian, but your obsession with genetics aside, the differences in STEM participation do not match any distribution of assessed math or spatial ability, and the vast differences between the two distributions have almost entirely social explanations.
Most notably, those differences have grown significantly wider over a very short time, so we can be absolutely certain that evolution had nothing to do with it:
American students take math throughout their twelve years of schooling, but instruction in computer science is much more limited. My eldest son has been programming since he was about 8 and knows Java, Javascript, C, C++, Python, and Octave. He has completed his first MOOC on machine learning (by Andrew Ang -- good course) and will soon start a second. He has installed and run Linux and built computers in collaboration with his male friends. He has gotten to gold level at USACO and will take the AP Computer Science exam this year as a 10th grader. He has been a TA for a programming class and interns as a programmer. He has attended computer camps in the summer. At one camp where there probably about 50 students, he said there were no girls. He did have a roommate from Russia.
There are many students of both sexes who will not have had much exposure to computer science upon reaching college. My middle son and my daughter have done little so far. But of the students who have been tinkering and learning for a decade before starting college, I bet the vast majority are male. People considering CS as a major in college may be discouraged by the presence of classmates with far more experience than them. I don't see what is stopping more girls from doing the kinds of things my eldest son has, other than a general lack of interest, but they are not, in large numbers.
Paul Graham, founder of successful start-up accelerator Y Combinator, said this:
Quote
Does YC discriminate against female founders?
I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. You could argue that we should do more, that we should encourage women to start startups.
The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.
If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.
It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.
Bostonian, all you've done is prove that you didn't bother to read, and that Paul Graham isn't informed on the subject, either. Because I gave two links upstream that already answered this question. The title of one of them: "Silicon Valley’s gender gap is the result of computer-game marketing 20 years ago." So it seems pretty obvious that one way you get 13 year old girls interested in computers is to market games to them. And if Paul were hanging out with 13 year old girls, he would know that, unlike when Paul and I were teens, they're already playing them.
Rather than let you continue to hijack the thread with bad arguments in defense of an untenable position (Archie Bunker was a buffoon even in his own time), I'm more interested in anecdata, as I described in the OP. As you've already outed yourself as proto-human, please share with us how those attitudes have shaped your own children's confidence and interests (or lack thereof) in STEM pursuits.
Rather than let you continue to hijack the thread with bad arguments in defense of an untenable position (Archie Bunker was a buffoon even in his own time),
You and others have hijacked the thread with personal attacks on someone you disagree with.
Rather than let you continue to hijack the thread with bad arguments in defense of an untenable position (Archie Bunker was a buffoon even in his own time),
You and others have hijacked the thread with personal attacks on someone you disagree with.
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.
Dude is the original poster of the thread. He has attempted to corral the discussion to the original topic, with incremental levels of patience, and he has substantiated his initial query with outside resources. His interest is in the role of environmental factors that elicit female interest in STEM, and he is soliciting feedback to optimize his support for his DD. That is not hijacking, it is the purpose of the forum and, specifically, this thread.
It was your post (#241857) which initiated a discussion of biological determinism of female math skills, which is a redux of a long and open disagreement on the forum. I am hereby posting a thread in which it is appropriate to discus biological determinism and the genetic component of various abilities, as this seems to be a subject of considerable interest to you, so that we have a side valve in which to release these unnecessary--and wholly unproductive--frictions.
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.
Rather than let you continue to hijack the thread with bad arguments in defense of an untenable position (Archie Bunker was a buffoon even in his own time),
You and others have hijacked the thread with personal attacks on someone you disagree with.
Speaking of terrible arguments, the notion that I can somehow hijack my own discussion.
As a bit of a tangent to the OP, according to this article and studies, the more gender equal a country is, the less women are interested in STEM careers. The less gender equal or the lower the income for women, the more women are interested in STEM careers.I just found it interesting, you may too.
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. As a bit of a background, DH is STEM while my undergraduate is STEM but my terminal degree/career is not STEM. I have boy/girl twins whom I strongly encourage in STEM throughout childhood. DS naturally had strong interest/talent while DD had zero interest but some talent so I really had to "encourage" her much harder with far less "results". DD is a talented writer/artist, who really came into her own by late middle school, winning multiple contests with significant prizes/money/recognition, by which point I accepted/assumed she would/should not pursue STEM although I still told her to keep all her options open. DD decided against an elite art magnet for high school last year and is currently planning for a bachelor plus terminal degree that has nothing to do with her greatest talents. In the schools in our area, there really is too much stress on STEM, particularly for girls, regardless of their talents/inclinations. DD still has zero passion for STEM but is thinking only about the money/prestige/stability. I am concerned that her considerable talents will go to waste and she will be miserable in the long term.
We have both male and female children. In each gender, there is a child who is noticeably talented in one or more STEM-related skills, and also in one or more artistic fields. The parents in our family unit are also individuals with skills in both STEM and artistic areas. I find it fascinating that, as much as children of both sexes are encouraged to pursue and develop their STEM and artistic talents alike in our family, I think male children generally are more likely to be discouraged from pursuing artistic careers, if they have the option of STEM. So it may be that there are factors having to do both with differential encouragement/support (or, perhaps, effectiveness of same) of both STEM or artistic careers in boys and girls. I am not citing any data in this case, just a small sampling of observations unanchored by documentation.
...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
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.
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.
I don’t think anyone here is advocating tokenism—quite the opposite— so let’s put that straw man to rest and save the more politicized red pill narrative for other online outlets. Fair?
What’s been your approach in your parenting vis-a-vis inculcating STEM skills for your children, particularly your DD? (IIRC, you have a DD and a DS.)
But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.
We're not talking about the far end of the tail, though. The latest examples are about programming, and you don't need to be a math genius to write code. Most of those jobs only require an understanding of high school Algebra. If that's not average math ability, it's not far from it.
Actually I am talking about the Maths section of the SAT which is hardly far RH tail stuff.
Also, while it is true that one doesn't need to be very clever to 'code' as much as have the ability to think like a moron (the computer) one does need to be pretty sharp to code well.
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).
I have personally observed that gulf many times over the 30+ years I have worked in system development.
The truth is that many otherwise smart people cannot code (or architect systems) well.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
"...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.
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."
[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."
A meta-analysis found that stereotype threat is not hurting the performance of girls in stereotyped domains:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25636259 J Sch Psychol. 2015 Feb;53(1):25-44. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2014.10.002. Epub 2014 Nov 13. Does stereotype threat influence performance of girls in stereotyped domains? A meta-analysis. Flore PC1, Wicherts JM2. Author information Abstract Although the effect of stereotype threat concerning women and mathematics has been subject to various systematic reviews, none of them have been performed on the sub-population of children and adolescents. In this meta-analysis we estimated the effects of stereotype threat on performance of girls on math, science and spatial skills (MSSS) tests. Moreover, we studied publication bias and four moderators: test difficulty, presence of boys, gender equality within countries, and the type of control group that was used in the studies. We selected study samples when the study included girls, samples had a mean age below 18years, the design was (quasi-)experimental, the stereotype threat manipulation was administered between-subjects, and the dependent variable was a MSSS test related to a gender stereotype favoring boys. To analyze the 47 effect sizes, we used random effects and mixed effects models. The estimated mean effect size equaled -0.22 and significantly differed from 0. None of the moderator variables was significant; however, there were several signs for the presence of publication bias. We conclude that publication bias might seriously distort the literature on the effects of stereotype threat among schoolgirls. We propose a large replication study to provide a less biased effect size estimate.
KEYWORDS: Gender gap; Math/science test performance; Meta-analysis; Publication bias; Stereotype threat; Test anxiety
A meta-analysis found that stereotype threat is not hurting the performance of girls in stereotyped domains:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25636259 J Sch Psychol. 2015 Feb;53(1):25-44. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2014.10.002. Epub 2014 Nov 13. Does stereotype threat influence performance of girls in stereotyped domains? A meta-analysis. Flore PC1, Wicherts JM2. Author information Abstract Although the effect of stereotype threat concerning women and mathematics has been subject to various systematic reviews, none of them have been performed on the sub-population of children and adolescents. In this meta-analysis we estimated the effects of stereotype threat on performance of girls on math, science and spatial skills (MSSS) tests. Moreover, we studied publication bias and four moderators: test difficulty, presence of boys, gender equality within countries, and the type of control group that was used in the studies. We selected study samples when the study included girls, samples had a mean age below 18years, the design was (quasi-)experimental, the stereotype threat manipulation was administered between-subjects, and the dependent variable was a MSSS test related to a gender stereotype favoring boys. To analyze the 47 effect sizes, we used random effects and mixed effects models. The estimated mean effect size equaled -0.22 and significantly differed from 0. None of the moderator variables was significant; however, there were several signs for the presence of publication bias. We conclude that publication bias might seriously distort the literature on the effects of stereotype threat among schoolgirls. We propose a large replication study to provide a less biased effect size estimate.
KEYWORDS: Gender gap; Math/science test performance; Meta-analysis; Publication bias; Stereotype threat; Test anxiety
Suggest reading the inputs into the study cited, as well as the study itself for an understanding of the inputs to these numbers. One of the feeds into it (linked below) identified instrumental variables--including ubiquity of stereotype threat--that weren't captured in the methodological design of your linked article.
It is important to note that it's not properly understood whether stereotype threat in this context is global (within a domain) or local (specific to an event), and within which range of critical values. This matters enormously in model specification and conclusions reached. Omnipresent stereotype threat is much more difficult to empirically isolate to generate significance, as it makes modelling collinearity a beast; but absence of evidence of an effect in a poorly specified model is not evidence of absence.
Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects during childhood and adolescence. Three activation methods were used, ranging from implicit to explicit. Across studies, we found no evidence that the mathematics performance of school-age girls was impacted by stereotype threat. In 2 of the studies, there were gender differences on the mathematics assessment regardless of whether stereotype threat was activated. Potential reasons for these findings are discussed, including the possibility that stereotype threat effects only occur in very specific circumstances or that they are in fact occurring all the time. We also address the possibility that the literature regarding stereotype threat in children is subject to publication bias.
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.
I don't have a problem with 1) and actually don't often have a problem with 2) either. I think overly "dominating" boys may be worse in middle than in high school. Stereotypes exist for a reason, but interestingly my kids probably had more experiences with overly "dominating" girls than boys during the elementary and middle school years. DD is quiet and soft-spoken and has often been a magnet for overly "dominating" girls but by late middle school found effective ways to insulate (with lots of friends) herself most of the time.
Actually, my greater issue (at least recently) is the sometimes overwhelming "encouragement" of STEM for everyone. I get that we need STEM workers to maintain competitiveness and that STEM careers have great financial potential but we also need humanities people - artists, musicians, and writers.
Dude, my kid would say those problems are problems. Social acceptance is important. When your coworkers resent you and believe you were "given" what they are working hard to achieve, they resent you.
I thought we were talking about men. This kind of tantrum-throwing victim-playing is not masculinity as I know it. Suck it up, buttercups.
Besides, we're not talking about giving away jobs. We're talking about giving women the proper opportunities to earn them, and giving them the respect they deserve when they do. If a man is unfit to do the second thing, that is most definitely his problem, and his organization should ensure that this is so.
Originally Posted by spaghetti
]For those girls who dropped out, would they have anyway? Or would they have found their true passion in STEM if given gender support earlier? Seeing a female role model, seeing peers who like STEM? Being respected by teachers and boys as capable?
All good questions. Your experience with your DD does indicate that at least one more would have dropped out and never made it to differentials if not for special intervention.
Originally Posted by spaghetti
Are all girl groups the answer? I don't think so, but they may be a step for tentative girls who are struggling with their identity to find that they can be a true girl who does STEM.
Agreed.
Side note - I recently asked my DD what she would do if she began those engineering classes and found herself as the only girl in the room. Her response was that she would recruit her friend, whom she knows to have strong STEM interests, into the class. Peer pressure to force the counter-culture outcome? You lead, girl!
Dude, my kid would say those problems are problems. Social acceptance is important. When your coworkers resent you and believe you were "given" what they are working hard to achieve, they resent you.
I thought we were talking about men. This kind of tantrum-throwing victim-playing is not masculinity as I know it. Suck it up, buttercups.
Besides, we're not talking about giving away jobs. We're talking about giving women the proper opportunities to earn them, and giving them the respect they deserve when they do. If a man is unfit to do the second thing, that is most definitely his problem, and his organization should ensure that this is so.
If a tech company that has a programmer workforce that is 10% female announces (perhaps due to pressure by the government or activists) that 50% of new programming hires will be female, even though the fraction of new female CS graduates is far less than 50%, people will inevitably wonder if standards were lowered to fulfill a quota.
If the allegations in the lawsuit below are true, some Google hires were the beneficiaries of a policy that excluded men, whites, and Asians.
A former recruiter for Google is suing the tech company alleging it used discriminatory hiring practices that put whites and Asians at a disadvantage to other groups — and that it fired him after he complained about it.
Arne Wilberg, who filed the lawsuit in late January in California Superior Court in San Mateo County, claims that Google carried out policies for the past several years “reflected in multiple bulletins, memorandum, charts and other documents” that favored Hispanic, African-American and female job applicants and were against white and Asian men, according to his lawsuit.
Wilberg, who recruited candidates for engineering and technology positions for YouTube and parent company Google, also alleges in the suit that for several quarters Google would not make employment offers for technical positions to applicants “who were not ‘diverse,’" which the lawsuit alleges Google defined as women, black and Latino.
The lawsuit said Wilberg complained about this to his managers and HR. He was fired in November for, among other things, “not meeting goals” and “talking too much in meetings,” reasons that the lawsuit called “pretextual.”
“Plaintiff was an exemplary employee and received positive performance evaluations until he began opposing illegal hiring and recruiting practices at Google,” the complaint asserts.
In an email, a Google spokesperson said the company will vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.
“We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” the spokesperson said. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
The lawsuit asserts that Google carefully tracked each applicant’s race and gender in its technology workforce, allegedly using this information to decide whom to extend offers of employment to and whom to reject.
In one instance in April 2017, Google’s Technology Staffing Management team was allegedly told to immediately cancel all interviews for software engineering applicants with zero to five years of experience who were not female, black or Hispanic, court records said.
The team was also allegedly instructed to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline,” a request with which Wilberg said in his lawsuit he did not comply.
Before that in January 2016, Wilberg said he had reached out via instant message to the staffing director, asking for a meeting about YouTube hiring practices, according to his lawsuit.
The suit said he told the staffing director that many employees on the hiring team felt uncomfortable with YouTube’s “Diversity Hiring Practices,” believing that they were discriminatory.
“Wilberg described another recruiter’s feedback around this ‘diversity’ hiring program where the other recruiter told other recruiters that she felt the way the team talked about black people in team meetings was like we were talking about black slaves as slave traders on a ship,” the lawsuit asserts.
Wilberg’s suit alleges discrimination in violation of California government code and failure to take reasonable steps to prevent discrimination and retaliation. It also claims he was terminated and treated differently because of his race.
The suit asks, among other things, for unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, as well as a temporary and permanent injunction “prohibiting Defendants from implementing, using, distributing, and training its employees to use their discriminatory profiling.”
Wilberg’s lawsuit follows another one filed in early January in California state court by a former engineer who wrote a sexist manifesto disparaging Google’s efforts to close the gender gap and who was subsequently fired.
In it, James Damore and another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, argued that Google has an "open hostility for conservative thought."
At the time the suit was filed, a Google spokesperson said, "We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court."
Google also faces a lawsuit, filed in September, that accuses it of gender-based pay discrimination against women. At the time that suit was filed, a company spokesperson told The Associated Press that they will review the suit, but "we disagree with the central allegations." A hearing in that case is scheduled for the end of March.
Chalk up another win for selection bias, because you found one person who believes Google discriminates against men and whites, while copious industry surveys, independent studies, and now the federal Department of Labor have found otherwise.
Widespread sexism, racism, and bullying is driving people out of the tech sector, in a survey of 2000 people who left Silicon Valley jobs in the last three years. To which I would add, this is not a phenomenon that begins in the workplace.
Specifically at Google, that bullying took the form of a sophomoric anti-female screed by a male employee that was distributed to 40,000 coworkers.
The US Department of Labor has found what it calls an "extreme gender pay gap" specifically at Google, who is refusing to cooperate with the investigation amid cries of being too poor to spend $100k to extract data (the very thing it was founded to do).
Originally Posted by article
Reached for comment Friday afternoon, Janet Herold, regional solicitor for the DoL, said: “The investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”
Herold added: “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.”
But for counterpoint, here's an op-ed from a woman who worked in a tech role at Google with hiring power, is dedicated to diversity, and yet only 3% of her hires were women, for some of the same reasons you're concerned about. And yet, if you read it to the end, you find that the reason is because there aren't enough women in the pipeline, because systemic bullying and harassment in college:
Originally Posted by article
I’ve worked with many young women in high school and college, encouraging them towards pursuing computer science and getting a tech degree. Many of them have opened up about the hostile environments they face even in progressive schools such as UC Berkeley and have thanked me for the support and encouragement. Now that is where we must bring change.
And the only way in which I would disagree with her is in that I find it obvious that the bullying begins well before college.
James Damore has said that he became motivated to write a memo after attending an unrecorded Google diversity program, whose rhetoric he described as largely "shaming and 'no, you can't say that, that's sexist'".[7] The memo was written on a flight to China.[8][9]
Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to hold that all disparities are due to oppression, and that it is "authoritarian" to correct for this with reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that the gender disparity can be partially explained by biological differences between women and men.[1][10] According to Damore, those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, that women tend to be more social, more artistic, and more prone to neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).[11] The memorandum also lists multiple suggestions on ways to use those differences in order to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination.[1][10]
The memo is dated July 2017 and was originally shared on an internal mailing list.[12][13]
...
Responses from scientists who study gender and psychology reflected the controversial nature of the science Damore cited.[49]
Some commentators in the academic community expressed broad support, saying he had gotten the science right, such as Debra Soh, a sexual neuroscientist at York University in Toronto;[50][51] J. Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto;[7][52] Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University;[53][54][55] and Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico.[54] David P. Schmitt, former professor of psychology at Bradley University;[54][56] said that the memo was right about average group differences, but one could not use it to judge individuals.
Others said that he had got the science wrong and relied on data that was suspect, outdated, irrelevant, or otherwise flawed; these included Gina Rippon, chair of cognitive brain imaging at Aston University;[57] Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania;[58] evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin;[35][59][60] Rosalind Barnett, a psychologist at Brandeis University, and Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University.[61]
I read the memo and don't consider it bullying. If we are going to discuss why a sex or race is under-represented in a certain occupation and what (if anything) should be done about it, all explanations for the under-representation with data behind them should be considered.
No, you wouldn't. That's not a problem with my interpretation of the memo, though, nor of the interpretations of the overwhelming majority of commenters from within his own organization as well as without. It really just says a lot about you.
A Google executive, Yonatan Zunger, who left the company for unrelated issues after 14 years, commented on the memo publicly too. He says that the idea that engineering is not a cooperative, people-driven field is false.
"All of these traits which the manifesto described as 'female' are the core traits which make someone successful at engineering," Zunger says in a Medium post. "All of which is why the conclusions of this manifesto are precisely backwards. It's true that women are socialized to be better at paying attention to people's emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones."
Zunger also says that the comments hurt Google. They damage the reputation of Google and also create an environment where women question their ability. "I am no longer even at the company and I've had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you've made. I can't even imagine how much time and emotional energy has been sunk into this, not to mention reputational harm more broadly," he says.
"You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment."
In his previous role at Google, had the author been in his reporting chain, Zunger says, he would have called a meeting with the author of the memo to inform him that his behavior was not acceptable. That meeting "would have ended with you being escorted from the building by security and told that your personal items will be mailed to you."
I read the memo and don't consider it bullying. If we are going to discuss why a sex or race is under-represented in a certain occupation and what (if anything) should be done about it, all explanations for the under-representation with data behind them should be considered.
But the problem is that any explanation put forward needs to be true.
Examples of pure garbage in his memo:
Originally Posted by Damore memo
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
Okay, he needs to cite the study where boys were castrated at birth, raised as girls, and then identified as males later.
Problem: it doesn't exist. Can you imagine the consent form? "Parent agrees to castration of male infant for the purposes of assessing gender identification later."
He most likely read about David Reimer and generalized from there, so he gets an F for that piece of "data" analysis. Given his job, he would have known better. He was making stuff up. Irrelevant stuff.
Or, take this:
Quote
This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support
I note that Google is facing more than one lawsuit over pay discrimination, extending all the way to its childcare workers. They're refusing to release their data on the subject, which is not a good sign.
But...Damore says that women tend to have a negotiating problem and therefore it is awful that men are left without support. He wants it both ways: Google has a left-wing PC monoculture regarding women. But pity the poor fellow who can't negotiate as well as his brothers while the women get something called "Stretch." Well, I don't know what that is, but it hasn't helped much. And if Google knows there's a problem, Google should be dealing with it, not every single woman acting on her own.
These are only 2 examples. Overall, the memo is sloppy and doesn't cite a single source supporting its claims (or a summary of why study results often contradict each other). IMO, it's a juvenile and self-serving distortion of facts at best and is essentially a tantrum.
Again --- back to the college tuition thread --- when you want to push a given idea, you can make up any kind of alternative fact. But others have to stick to the narrow path where the actual facts are, which makes the job of someone like Damore, an anti-vaxxer, or a tuition-debt-serfdom-denier that much easier.
Last edited by Val; 04/09/1803:11 PM. Reason: Irrelevant stuff.
All explanations for the under-representation with data behind them should be considered
I assume you mean all plausible and evidence-based explanations should be given due consideration. For instance, conspiracy theory themes such as the following should be discounted without further investigation:
Originally Posted by Val
These are only 2 examples. Overall, the memo is sloppy and doesn't cite a single source supporting its claims (or a summary of why study results often contradict each other). IMO, it's a juvenile and self-serving distortion of facts at best and is essentially a tantrum.
Bravo. See external source above.
If workers are actually talented, they should earn their positions irrespective of whether half the workforce is excluded or not. If male workers feel threatened by the possibility of equally talented women joining their professions, such men should excuse themselves to the nearest male-supremacist "safe space" and rub their favourite Hugh Hefner talisman to offset the disruption in the ether, then hand in their man cards. The sexes are not in competition.
Well, 'cause if they were, eventually there wouldn't be any people left...
But seriously, unless you're planning to be an ascetic or survivalist (and even then it's questionable), collaboration and social-emotional intelligence are vital in every form of employment, whether STEM or otherwise. Even if one achieves a certain level of career success or functionality without them, the experience will be far less satisfying, and likely also less successful even on metrics with less emotional loading, since effective collaboration allows one to leverage not only one's own strengths and skillsets, but also those of others.
I would agree that part of changing the trajectory of females (and other under-represented populations) into STEM fields is re-defining what good engineers and scientists look like not only literally, but in terms of their critical skills. We've historically tended to call some of these "soft skills", but other names for them might be collaborative, team-building, management, resource development and integration, rhetorical (in the classical sense of presenting a convincing argument), leadership, etc.
...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
What’s been your approach in your parenting vis-a-vis inculcating STEM skills for your children, particularly your DD? (IIRC, you have a DD and a DS.)
Good memory. I try to influence both my children to do STEM, logic, and strategy activities equally. My DD is gifted in just about every area, and all signs indicate that she could have a career in STEM (years from now) if she were inclined. She picks up a lot of algebra concepts easily at the age of 9. But she's also a gifted writer, artist, and musician. Lately her interests are in the area of biology. Although we have a duoscope, she spends a lot of time doing art projects. Meanwhile, her brother is playing chess and building legos (almost obsessively). I showed my daughter how chess pieces move, and she just wasn't interested in playing. My daughter has lego sets too but she's not obsessed like her brother.
In the end I follow their interests, and will help both of them optimize their happiness to the best of my ability (and the highest salary career doesn't necessarily lead to the greatest happiness). I wont be over-bearing and force them into something they don't want to do. DD is phenomenal at book learning, and gets 100s on the vast majority of her math work, but she doesn't show the inclination towards math and engineering that her brother does. DS doesn't fair quite as well at school (though he is still at the top of his class), but anyone who has ever seen him build is immediately impressed. It's hard to imagine he wont have a career designing things.. but then again I'm an EE and at the age of 7 I was obsessed with horses.
These are only 2 examples. Overall, the memo is sloppy and doesn't cite a single source supporting its claims (or a summary of why study results often contradict each other).
I guess this is what happens when "news outlets" decide for some reason to strip the memo of its sources.
Where I live some middle school girls participate in Technovation, mentored by a high school girl.
Quote
Technovation offers girls around the world the opportunity to learn the skills they need to emerge as tech entrepreneurs and leaders. Every year we invite girls to identify a problem in their community, and then challenge them to solve it.
Girls work in teams to build both a mobile app and a business plan to launch that app, supported by mentors and guided by our curriculum.
Technovation's curriculum takes students through 4 stages of launching a mobile app startup, inspired by the principles of design thinking:
My DD14 went to TechNights, weekly meetings on technical topics for middle school girls, at Carnegie Mellon. Then she decided she wanted to stop, and I was fine with that. Then she started attending a weekly math series, also at CMU, and I support that. I'm encouraging her to look at the STEM areas, but allowing her to make her own decisions.
Her older sister enjoyed science and engineering when she was young. Then it was Theater. Then music/music therapy. I encouraged her to invetigate all of them and decide what she really liked. She ended up founding he Womens Engineering club as a Junior in HS and is now an engineering sophomore at a top 10 school. If she had decided theater was her thing, I would have supported it the same. [with multivariate Calc and Thermo next semester, let's see if she decides Theater actually wasn't all that bad. ]
As noted early in this thread, there's a difference between exposing/informing and mandating. Having girls miss out on something they would enjoy because they don't know about it is similarly bad to forcing them to do STEM when they don't want to.
The U.S. Education Department has opened investigations into whether scholarships and professional networking groups intended to support women at Yale University and the University of Southern California violate federal law by discriminating against men.
...
The government dismissed parts of Mr. Pekgoz’s complaints, including concerns about Yale Women in Business and USC’s Gender Studies Program and its Center for Feminist Research, after finding that they don’t exclude or discriminate against men. But it will investigate Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, Yale Women Innovators and five other groups or programs at that school. It is also looking into USC scholarships and fellowships that are advertised as being open only to females, and a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.
But it will investigate Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, Yale Women Innovators and five other groups or programs at that school. It is also looking into USC scholarships and fellowships that are advertised as being open only to females, and a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.
...
Sanctions against USC or Yale are far from certain, and the Education Department’s investigation could yield no findings of discrimination. But Mr. Pekgoz said he is hopeful about his proposal to phase out what he called “affirmative action for women.”
“I think the current administration promotes a fairer approach that takes into account the interests of all students,” Mr. Pekgoz said.
Mark Perry, an economics and finance professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has filed similar complaints with school officials at his university and at Michigan State University.
“There was this huge double standard,” said Dr. Perry, a faculty affiliate at Flint’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Women are “still treated like they’re underrepresented, like they’re weak and victims and need all this support.”
In 2016, Dr. Perry filed a state civil rights complaint against Michigan State, alleging the school discriminated by offering a women-only study lounge. Michigan State opened the space to all students that summer. And starting this year, the Flint campus agreed to open to all faculty five awards that previously were available only to women or to minorities.
Dr. Perry said he is still awaiting response to his inquiries about roughly a dozen other University of Michigan initiatives, including graduate fellowships and scholarships and a program for freshmen women interested in computer science.
The U.S. Education Department has opened investigations into whether scholarships and professional networking groups intended to support women at Yale University and the University of Southern California violate federal law by discriminating against men.
...
The government dismissed parts of Mr. Pekgoz’s complaints, including concerns about Yale Women in Business and USC’s Gender Studies Program and its Center for Feminist Research, after finding that they don’t exclude or discriminate against men. But it will investigate Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, Yale Women Innovators and five other groups or programs at that school. It is also looking into USC scholarships and fellowships that are advertised as being open only to females, and a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.
But it will investigate Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, Yale Women Innovators and five other groups or programs at that school. It is also looking into USC scholarships and fellowships that are advertised as being open only to females, and a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.
...
Sanctions against USC or Yale are far from certain, and the Education Department’s investigation could yield no findings of discrimination. But Mr. Pekgoz said he is hopeful about his proposal to phase out what he called “affirmative action for women.”
“I think the current administration promotes a fairer approach that takes into account the interests of all students,” Mr. Pekgoz said.
Mark Perry, an economics and finance professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has filed similar complaints with school officials at his university and at Michigan State University.
“There was this huge double standard,” said Dr. Perry, a faculty affiliate at Flint’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Women are “still treated like they’re underrepresented, like they’re weak and victims and need all this support.”
In 2016, Dr. Perry filed a state civil rights complaint against Michigan State, alleging the school discriminated by offering a women-only study lounge. Michigan State opened the space to all students that summer. And starting this year, the Flint campus agreed to open to all faculty five awards that previously were available only to women or to minorities.
Dr. Perry said he is still awaiting response to his inquiries about roughly a dozen other University of Michigan initiatives, including graduate fellowships and scholarships and a program for freshmen women interested in computer science.
An interesting collection of opinions. I assume you posted this quote in this thread because the gentlemen quoted are fathers of daughters in STEM fields, and their opinions bring to bear information about how their views shaped their daughters' STEM careers. Do they comment elsewhere on how their views have informed their own daughters' STEM progress?
Meh. It’s a WSJ opinion piece, and should be treated as such.
My personal take is that they mis-ordered their acronym. SJW is more appropriate. Galloping to the defense of that pathetic and downtrodden minority, the wealthy white male.
No, Dude and aquinas, the WSJ piece is from the news section, not the opinion section.
Meh. It’s a WSJ opinion piece, and should be treated as such.
My personal take is that they mis-ordered their acronym. SJW is more appropriate. Galloping to the defense of that pathetic and downtrodden minority, the wealthy white male.
No, Dude and aquinas, the WSJ piece is from the news section, not the opinion section.
Meh. It’s a WSJ opinion piece, and should be treated as such.
My personal take is that they mis-ordered their acronym. SJW is more appropriate. Galloping to the defense of that pathetic and downtrodden minority, the wealthy white male.
No, Dude and aquinas, the WSJ piece is from the news section, not the opinion section.
I have been encouraging my daughter and younger son (ages 12 and 13) to learn programming. She has done some Scratch, and this Memorial Day weekend, has tried the EdX MIT Python course for beginners. It is free unless you want a certificate. Her older brother registered her for the class and installed Anaconda Python 3.6 for Windows on her laptop. Anaconda bundles the Python interpreter with the Spyder development environment. She has watched the lectures and done some of the exercises, which are graded online. Her math level is about Algebra I (through the Russian School of Math). She likes it so far.
Middle school children may hit a wall at some point in a course intended for MIT students, but they can come back later if so.
Does anyone project that there wil be too many people pursuing STEM careers? I don't see a point in encouraging an entire generation to pursue STEM. I'm encouraging my son to consider skilled trades and agriculture, I think all the STEM jobs are going to be filled, and student debt will make trade and agriculture unattractive to those who pursued STEM. JMO. I will be curious what happens in the next 10 - 30 years.
Does anyone project that there wil be too many people pursuing STEM careers? I don't see a point in encouraging an entire generation to pursue STEM. I'm encouraging my son to consider skilled trades and agriculture, I think all the STEM jobs are going to be filled, and student debt will make trade and agriculture unattractive to those who pursued STEM. JMO. I will be curious what happens in the next 10 - 30 years.
Interestingly, in my circle, agricultural careers are considered STEM. :-)
I think encouraging more people to have STEM skills is a good goal, but agree that it's a little silly to think everyone is well suited for any particular type of career.
Does anyone project that there wil be too many people pursuing STEM careers? I don't see a point in encouraging an entire generation to pursue STEM. I'm encouraging my son to consider skilled trades and agriculture, I think all the STEM jobs are going to be filled, and student debt will make trade and agriculture unattractive to those who pursued STEM. JMO. I will be curious what happens in the next 10 - 30 years.
Interestingly, in my circle, agricultural careers are considered STEM. :-)
I think encouraging more people to have STEM skills is a good goal, but agree that it's a little silly to think everyone is well suited for any particular type of career.
Wow! I haven't heard of agriculture presented as STEM. I wonder if living in a rural area affects that? Around here, there is a small STEM project-based charter school one district over. And the local middle school has a STELM classroom for top 10th percentile students, which covers cryptography, LEGO robotics, 3D printing, and a couple other topics. Oh, and there's a private tutor that teaches computer coding (Scratch, Tynker) about 15 miles away. So we're not seeing much change for all the talk about STEM. Privileged families and identified-high achiever-high IQ children have limited access to STEM. Nothing for anyone else.
Does anyone project that there wil be too many people pursuing STEM careers? I don't see a point in encouraging an entire generation to pursue STEM. I'm encouraging my son to consider skilled trades and agriculture, I think all the STEM jobs are going to be filled, and student debt will make trade and agriculture unattractive to those who pursued STEM. JMO. I will be curious what happens in the next 10 - 30 years.
Interestingly, in my circle, agricultural careers are considered STEM. :-)
I think encouraging more people to have STEM skills is a good goal, but agree that it's a little silly to think everyone is well suited for any particular type of career.
Wow! I haven't heard of agriculture presented as STEM. I wonder if living in a rural area affects that? Around here, there is a small STEM project-based charter school one district over. And the local middle school has a STELM classroom for top 10th percentile students, which covers cryptography, LEGO robotics, 3D printing, and a couple other topics. Oh, and there's a private tutor that teaches computer coding (Scratch, Tynker) about 15 miles away. So we're not seeing much change for all the talk about STEM. Privileged families and identified-high achiever-high IQ children have limited access to STEM. Nothing for anyone else.
Farming, no, but other careers in agriculture are considered that in my region (plant science, agricultural genomics, animal sciences).
On an absolute basis, girls and boys in rich suburban school districts are doing better than the national average. It looks like greater opportunities overall do not lead to more equal results.
In much of the country, the stereotype that boys do better than girls at math isn’t true – on average, they perform about the same, at least through eighth grade. But there’s a notable exception.
In school districts that are mostly rich, white and suburban, boys are much more likely to outperform girls in math, according to a new study from Stanford researchers, one of the most comprehensive looks at the gender gap in test scores at the school district level.
The research, based on 260 million standardized test scores for third through eighth graders in nearly every district in the country, suggests that local norms influence how children perform in school from early ages – and that boys are much more influenced than girls.
“It could be about some set of expectations, it could be messages kids get early on or it could be how they’re treated in school,” said Sean Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who conducted the study with Erin Fahle, a doctoral candidate in education policy there, and colleagues. “Something operates to help boys more than girls in some places and help girls more than boys in other places.”
The study included test scores from the 2008 to 2014 school years for 10,000 of the roughly 12,000 school districts in the United States. In no district do boys, on average, do as well or better than girls in English and language arts. In the average district, girls perform about three-quarters of a grade level ahead of boys.
But in math, there is nearly no gender gap, on average. Girls perform slightly better than boys in about a quarter of districts – particularly those that are predominantly African-American and low-income. Boys do slightly better in the rest – and much better in high-income and mostly white or Asian-American districts.
In the Montgomery Township district in New Jersey, for example, the median household income is $180,000 and the students are about 60 percent white and 30 percent Asian-American. Boys and girls both perform well, but boys score almost half a grade level ahead of girls in math. Compare that with Detroit, where the median household earns $27,000 and students are about 85 percent black. It’s one of the districts in which girls outperform boys in math.
In Montgomery Township, the interest in academic achievement is high. “The students are very, very interested in their progress,” said Christopher Herte, the district’s math and science supervisor for Grades 5 to 8. “The biggest thing is family expectations and parents as role models. They don’t have to look far to see somebody who went to college or who’s doing extremely well.”
Boys are much more likely than girls to sign up for math clubs and competitions, he said, to the point that the district started a girls-only math competition this year, the Sally Ride Contest.
The gender achievement gap in math reflects a paradox of high-earning parents. They are more likely to say they hold egalitarian views about gender roles. But they are also more likely to act in traditional ways – father as breadwinner, mother as caregiver.
The gap was largest in school districts in which men earned a lot, had high levels of education, and were likely to work in business or science. Women in such districts earned significantly less. Children might absorb the message that sons should grow up to work in high-earning, math-based jobs.
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell
An implication of this new paper is that girls (and boys) who score well on the AMC but not well enough to advance to the next round (the AIME) should be encouraged to take the AMC in future years. I think some selective schools such as MIT do look at AMC scores.
I don't see where the full paper is freely available.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24910 Dynamics of the Gender Gap in High Math Achievement by Glenn Ellison, Ashley Swanson - #24910 (ED)
Abstract: This paper examines the dynamics of the gender gap in high math achievement over the high school years using data from the American Mathematics Competition. A clear gender gap is already present by 9th grade and the gender gap widens over the high school years. High-achieving students must substantially improve their performance from year to year to maintain their within-cohort rank, but there is nonetheless a great deal of persistence in the rankings. Several gender-related differences in the dynamics contribute to the widening of the gender gap, including differences in dropout rates and in the mean and variance of year-to-year improvements among continuing students. A decomposition indicates that the most important difference is that fewer girls make large enough gains to move up substantially in the rankings. An analysis of students on the margin of qualifying for a prestigious second stage exam provides evidence of a discouragement effect: some react to falling just short by dropping out of participating in future years, and this reaction is more common among girls.
