Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Boys overrepresented at GT magnet

Interesting article, I am still absorbing it.

I would love to know the life history of the people from the countries where women were well represented.

People are not going to necessarily like this, but I believe identifying a person's future abilities at such an early age is part of the problem in the USA and Canada. By the time those who would have been gifted in mathematics would normally show these skills, they have already been convinced mathematics is not their strength by the early testing.

If Einstein had been evaluated at an early stage in his life, he would have more than likely been classified as a slow learner. This may have led him to feel he was not suited to academic endeavors later in life.

I wonder if these other countries put less emphasis on these early stages of life.

Very interesting - thanks for posting the link! I will read it when I have more time.

This excerpt makes me think of one of ds's classmates, a daughter of immigrant (Indian) parents who lives and breathes math and is being strongly encouraged to pursue it (and science) by her parents.

Thanks Ultramarina for the interesting article.

Even within Chinese community, it is relatively rare to have a girl choosing Math as a major. Plenty of girls select biology, chemistry, computer science or engineering, but math and physics are something else.

But these Chinese girls who do have something going for them: they are less afraid of math for some reason and they are willing to work extremely hard (trained by Tiger Moms :-)) For added incentive, there is reward on the other side. I told my DD17, you can work for CIA as a code breaker (this is her childhood dream), or very least, you can work for Goldman Sacks.

I volunteer each week in my son's second grade class (he tested last year into the 5th grade on the WJ test; he's fairly bored with the math).
I noticed overwhelmingly that the girls in the class freeze and get this "deer in the headlights" look when we do math. Even very simple math. The boys who are weak in reading still seem more confident and even better with math than the brightest girls. Several boys are very good at math, and I haven't observed any girls who are really good.
I guess it's cultural/gender-based. I got a 5 on my AP calculus exam back in the day- we had only 3 girls out of 20 in my h.s. AP calculus class, and I was the only girl to get a 5. Several of the boys did.

As anyone on this board knows, tests aimed at the middle do a poor job of measuring the tails. If the claim is just that on some tests of math which are aimed at the middle, girls and boys have similar average performance and variability, then that claim may be well supported. However, to disprove the notion that boys have a greater likelihood of extreme mathematical talent, which seems to be the claim, you'd need data actually measuring that area of the curve and showing the similarity.

I make no claims that the opposite side of this issue is proven either. I'm simply objecting to what looks to me like junk science, by which I mean claims made or implied which are well beyond the support of the data.

Mark, please read the study I linked above. It's open access and draws similar conclusions to the one that is behind the pay wall.


I am not talking about "tests aimed at the middle."

I suggest reading the actual research before dismissing something as "junk science."

Perhaps you are confused because I actually cited several different articles here. The data showing that girls' and boys' average scores do not differ on easy NCLB tests is from a different study; however, that study also looked at more difficult tests, as discussed here:

"Some studies have focused specifically on the mathematically talented. The best known example is the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) or Study of Exceptional Talent (SET), an ongoing study originally begun at The Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s (21). These researchers administer the SAT to children <13 years of age who have been identified as mathematically advanced. Their sample is voluntary, and the sampling frame is not well defined. It has also changed over time with respect to sample size and ethnicity, including large numbers of children of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia in recent years. In 1980�1982, they reported a very lopsided M:F ratio of 13:1 among students scoring &#8805;700 on the quantitative section of the examination (21). However, here too, the gender gap has dramatically narrowed with time. The M:F ratio was down to 2.8:1 by 2005 (22, 23). Thus, females now represent at least 1/4 of the mathematically precocious youth being identified in this U.S. talent search. This fairly rapid and dramatic change occurred coincident with enactment of Title IX, the second wave of the women's movement, and greatly increased immigration of Eastern Europeans and Asians to the U.S., points further discussed below. "

Scientific studies based on average results do have some validity, but what these studies are telling us is not as much as many people think. It is not that the scientific study is necessarily junk science, but a lot of the interpretation of what the results mean is poor critical thinking.

Mark is quite right that the curve can be very important in scientific studies. The shape of the curve can be very important in telling us what the results really mean.

I personally find a lot of the research involving human cognition is very badly done. Human cognition is a complex system and not an area of science where narrow focused studies will tell us much. It needs to be analyzed with many different areas being studied simultaneously.

In my opinion, there is so much poor science in the study of human cognition, it is throwing people off the good science. It is very politically driven with the nurture side being more wishful thinking than good science. In some ways it would be great if we were all born with the same brain and we all had the potential to be good at whatever we worked hard at. Science is about discovering the truth and we have to keep what we want the answer to be out of the equation.

Again, though, these studies looked far beyond the "average results" to extremely specialized and difficult math exams and competitions. I'm not understanding the criticism here. If someone has a more substantive comment, I'm interested in discussing it. FTR, although I am a writer, not a scientist, this is my field. I read hundreds of social and cognitive science studies a year for my job, so I'm pretty familiar with assessing the quality of a study.

I haven't read the whole thread, but a quick comment: I was involved a few years back with an international women in mathematics organisation, and it rather informally collected information about the proportion of women at various levels from undergraduate maths up to professor. We were struck by the variation in the figures; southern Europe was very noticeably better than northern Europe for example. One of my colleagues produced an aha moment in a meeting by noticing that what was happening was that proportion of women was low in countries where maths was considered a high-status subject, one many of the cleverest people would go into, and high in countries where it was considered a low status subject (e.g. apparently, in some of the southern European countries, it would be weird to go into maths if you had the ability to go into engineering). As far as we could tell, it wasn't that those of us who had fewer women students had higher quality students, either - IOW this really looked like a social, not an intellectual, phenomenon.

Another interesting phenomenon is the precipitous fall in the proportions of women entering computer science since computers became ubiquitous in schools (later, homes). It looks as though that made it a boy's subject, whereas before it had been fairly neutral.

Oh, very interesting! (And again supports the observation that the number of women in math varies wildly from country to country, which seriously undercuts any argument that men are biologically advantaged. As does another number I read somewhere, which is that 30% of math doctorates now go to women, up from a mere 5% in the 50s. Fascinatingly, the number had been much higher in the 1890s, IIRC.)