Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Stereotype threat: girls and chess

I don't think anyone has a duty to defy or fulfill traditional gender roles. People should make their own decisions based on their abilities on desires, not what someone else expects of them.

But...there's another side to the coin you've described. You make it sound so wonderful that you made a personal choice and you're so happy and it's all great. But what about the wider consequences?

It's well known that a lot of women enter graduate schools, professional schools, or jobs knowing or considering that they're going to leave the workforce when they have children. Unfortunately, this practice is so common, it leads to hiring managers getting cynical, as in, "She'll quit as soon as she has a baby." So maybe they don't want to hire or promote other women of childbearing age because of fears of making a bad investment. And then there is the question of the grad and professional schools allotting scarce places to women who, ultimately, won't be really using their educations.

Yes, I know that you can teach your kids and etc. etc. But that's not the same and it doesn't require a graduate or professional degree.

I understand that some people have NO CHOICE but to quit a job because something about the child demands it (e.g. health reasons). This is very different from deciding --- AFTER a lot of resources have been invested into you --- that you want to opt out. And I understand that people change their minds. But I think it's important for women in general to understand that every time a woman talks about how happy she is to have left the workforce after a lot of education, there are consequences for others. And the stereotypes we're talking about here are among them.

The last three men nominated to the Supreme Court have all been married and, among them, have seven children. The last three women — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers (who withdrew) — have all been single and without children.

I strongly reject the idea that boys are inherently better at chess than girls. I cannot even believe any credence is given to that position in 2014.

The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about part-time and flexible work, too.

I'll also point out that the findings on girls' superior verbal skills haven't seemed to translate into most famous authors being women (and the world vociferously defending that as the natural order of things). Hmmm. It seems this "natural superiority" thing isn't destiny, eh?

I simply gave reasons why it is plausible based upon a widely accepted difference in spatial ability between boys and girls. And the response I have gotten back is that you think the studies are invalid. Possible, but wouldn't there be numerous recent studies pointing the other way by now?

No, for the simple reason that it's just not possible to control for all the cultural factors, so you can't do a study using a control group that does not exist.

However, we DO know that cultural attitudes about gender stereotypes have been changing over time, and we've seen that the performance gap changes over the same time period. We also know that cultural attitudes about gender stereotypes are different from culture to culture... and sure enough, we find that the performance gaps reflect those different attitudes as well.

So basically, we've proven beyond reasonable doubt that stereotypes play a significant role in gender differences in math, and in chess. We know that as attitudes skew closer to equality, the performance also skews closer to equality. That's a closed case.

All that's left now is to hypothesize about an imaginary culture in which no gender stereotypes exist, would some biological factor pre-select males for dominance at the very highest echelons of math and chess?

My hunch is: no.

The problem I have with deacongirl's statement is that, as educated people, these statements should not be off limits, but instead should be evaluated on the basis of evidence.

Your assertions are open to discussion; we're discussing them now. I fail to see how they're off limits. They have been evaluated on the basis of evidence, were found lacking, and the conversation is moving on to more fertile topics.

What cognitive tasks show sex differences?

Some spatial tasks such as mentally rotating 3D objects show the largest sex differences, favoring men by ∼0.5–1 standard deviations [26]. Much research has understandably focused on spatial tasks that show large sex differences, but this focus does not address how typical male advantages would be on a fuller range of spatial tasks. For instance, despite their presumed demands on spatial processing, geometry problems on mathematics tests typically show small-to-nonexistent sex differences 13 and 77.

Task characteristics influence spatial sex differences. For instance, male advantages in mental rotation are larger when the task involves 3D objects versus 2D objects [26] and has strict time limits versus no time limits [25]. However, other task differences are less well understood, such as why mentally rotating objects shows sex differences but mentally folding paper does not reliably (see Figure 1 in main text) 26 and 112. For instance, Harris and colleagues recently reviewed comparisons between mental rotation and mental folding, finding evidence for many similarities in the underlying cognitive processes [112]. That review paper speculated that the differences in male advantages may reflect task differences in requiring rigid versus non-rigid transformations of objects, but noted that current evidence is limited.

At least one spatial task (remembering object locations) moderately favors women [22]. This finding aligns with small to moderate female advantages on some memory tasks such as remembering object identities, faces, and lists of words and numbers 11, 18 and 22. Some other memory tasks show more mixed findings 17, 19, 20 and 21. For instance, when described as a test of geometry ability, a task involving recalling an abstract spatial diagram showed differences favoring boys (d = 0.51) [20]. However, when described as a test of drawing ability, the task showed differences favoring girls (d = 0.50). This study (n = 199) [20] replicated two earlier studies [19].

Sex differences in average mathematics test performance tend to be small to nonexistent 13, 16 and 77, although boys outnumber girls among high performers (e.g., top 1% or higher) in most but not all nations 9, 10, 16 and 78. These differences often do not reliably differ by task characteristics (e.g., geometry versus non-geometry problems), although girls sometimes slightly outperform boys on problems requiring algebraic solutions or short-answer responses 13 and 77. These small female advantages for algebra and short-answer problems align with findings regarding verbal tasks. For instance, girls outperform boys in reading across the globe (∼0.2–0.6 standard deviations) 11, 16 and 79. These female advantages are larger among lower-performing students 16 and 79 and are even larger for writing tasks [11].

Research conducted in the 1970s to 1980s suggested an alarming finding that boys outnumber girls 13 to 1 among American students with exceptional mathematics talent [9]. However, this tail ratio has dropped to about 2–4 to 1 in recent years, according to both self-selected [9] and nationally representative samples [10]. Sex differences in average mathematics test performance also decreased during the 1970s to 1980s 11 and 12 and have since remained small to negligible 10 and 13.These changes over time have led some scholars to conclude that cognitive sex differences are disappearing. However, the data indicate nuanced trends. For instance, the overrepresentation of males among high mathematics performers decreased during the 1980s, but has not been decreasing since the 1990s 9 and 10. Since at least 1990, girls have earned higher mathematics grades by approximately 0.1–0.2 Grade Point Average (GPA) points [14]. Other data also indicate complex findings. Earlier meta-analytic evidence suggested few sex differences in verbal abilities [15], but recent analyses of large-scale international assessments call for reexamination of this claim. In an analysis of 1.5 million children's reading achievements, girls outperformed boys in all 75 nations in all testing administrations (in total, 213 independent samples) [16]. These sex differences were moderately large in 55% of cases (0.36 ≤ d < 0.65) and may be increasing over time. Small-to-moderate female advantages are also consistently found for some but not all memory tasks ( Box 2) 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22. Male advantages are found on some but not all spatial tasks ( Figure 1) 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26; cross-temporal trends on spatial tasks are mixed