This is one thing that worries me about the gifted magnet where DD will start in the fall. They are unbalanced WRT gender--it looks to be about 60/40 m/f. Somehow DD has been consistently in situations where boys way outnumber girls since toddlerhood, purely by happenstance, and here we are again. Was wondering if others experienced this, and if so, how it went for their girls.

I was wondering why this would be at the magnet, also. Aren't males and females essentially statistically equivalent WRT IQ? I seem to remember that there are slightly more PG males than females (also more profoundly developmentally delayed males than females), but why would one see a major discrepancy like this in a program that requires "only" 130 IQ to apply? Does this tend to be true of GT programs generally? Could it be that parents of boys think they "need" the magnet school more?

DD is not stereotypically girly--she enjoys math, science, bugs, and dirt, for instance, as well as fairies, butterflies, and drawing--but she hates war play and violence and is not into things like Star Wars and Legos. Her best friend is a boy, but the friendship is getting more and more tenuous as they age. She tends to gravitate to kids who are less wedded to gender-normed interests, generally.

Many GT magnet schools have a math and science focus. Does this one? If so, that could explain it, since there is some evidence that females have relative strength in verbal skills and males have a relative strength in math, including spatial skills.

No, it does not. And the math difference only appears at older ages, IIRC, and is quite small. I'm not sure exactly how this applies at the GT end of the spectrum, however.

Ah, just found something I have bookmarked about this (it's relevant to my job):

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2008/07/24-01.html?ref=hp

"Her team sifted through scores from standardized tests taken in 2005, 2006, and 2007 by nearly 7 million students in 10 states. Overall, the researchers found "no gender difference" in scores among children in grades two through 11. Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests."

Maybe you should just call the school and ask?

Val

You mean, call and ask why there are more boys than girls? I'm much too reserved to do any such thing, TBH. Anyway, they may not know themselves, although I supposed they probably know the gender breakdown re: children who are eligible vs. children who apply, are accepted, and decide to attend.

Interestingly, many other parents have expressed surprise about this imbalance, since their perception is that girls are better students than boys. (Good student not being equivalent to gifted, of course.)

We're all in as far as the school, in any case--no turning back now.

According to 2010 SAT statistical report at http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile-report-cbs.pdf , there were 65,606 males and 38,728 females with math SAT scores >= 700 . That is a large difference, and the male/female ratio is probably larger at higher math SAT thresholds.

For 12-year-olds, a math SAT >= 700 is much more unusual than for students in grades 11-12, and the male/female ratio has been about 4 for the past 20 years http://www.tip.duke.edu/node/945 . So the math difference appears by at least age 12, at least in the right tail.

My off the cuff guess is that a few different things could be going on. One, boys may be more likely to be the squeaky wheel by misbehaving when needs aren't met. Two, boys may be more represented in math which tends to impress the verbal, nonmath oriented people more. There is a clearer path of advancement in math. Three, some parents may an unstated belief that school is more important for boys and getting along is more important for girls.

At any rate to me 60/40 is no big deal and I wouldn't give it another thought. In much of life people won't always be in perfect 50/50 environments. More women than men go to college and at many small liberal arts college especially that plays out to 60% women and 40% men.

I don't think a 60/40 split is anything to worry about. Remember that in any given school, you aren't looking at a very big sample size, population-wise, so it is to be expected that the numbers of kids of each gender might be a bit "lumpy". If the numbers were perfectly balanced, I might suspect that some qualified kids were being denied services or that the cutoffs were being massaged in the name of gender equality, which would worry me a great deal more. I grew up the only girl in a family with five brothers, and most of my friends growing up were boys, and it doesn't appear to have damaged me in any way.

From my reading there is evidence that boys are more likely to be identified than girls, and boys are more likely to show disruptive maladaptive behaviour in the wrong learning enviornment, so it may just be that boys stand out and get selected for the schools more?

Not sure what that means for your decision though, sorry!

on this:


from the Science article:

"Does this greater variability translate into gender differences at the upper tail of the distribution (13)? Data from the state assessments provide information on the percentage of boys and girls scoring above a selective cut point. Results vary by ethnic group. The bottom table on p. 494 shows data for grade 11 for the state of Minnesota. For whites, the ratios of boys: girls scoring above the 95th percentile and 99th percentile are 1.45 and 2.06, respectively, and are similar to predictions from theoretical models. For Asian Americans, ratios are 1.09 and 0.91, respectively. Even at the 99th percentile, the gender ratio favoring males is small for whites and is reversed for Asian Americans. If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women. "

What's your explanation for the very different ratios among Asians? (I am going to guess that it's because Asian families value and recognize math ability in both genders. But I don't know.)

Also:

"In contrast to earlier findings, these very current data provide no evidence of a gender difference favoring males emerging in the high school years; effect sizes for gender differences are uniformly <0.10 for grades 10 and 11 (see table, top left, and table S1)."

The gap has apparently closed dramatically when compared to, say, 20 years ago because girls now are much more likely to take upper level math classes.

I should perhaps mention that the school requires only IQ test results, current GIEP, and report cards to apply. No achievement test scores. No other application of any kind. It's an interesting system. Anyway, they don't have much data about the kids' math ability on the ground, nor is there a chance to write some long impassioned plea about square peg and round hole, etc.

The ratio may be more skewed than 60/40. I didn't actually count. It was simply easily visible that there were more boys than girls, though it wasn't 80/20 or anything like that.


It's not that I think boys are damaging. However, I think it can be socially hard to be the minority gender in the early school years when kids self-segregate. We have already seen this in DD's life, on multiple occasions.

Also (I realize I am hijacking my own thread), on the question of boys having greater variability and more representation in the 95th-99th%, there is this study:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.long

"Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist in the general population? Do gender differences exist among the mathematically talented? Do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent? In regard to the first question, contemporary data indicate that girls in the U.S. have reached parity with boys in mathematics performance, a pattern that is found in some other nations as well. Focusing on the second question, studies find more males than females scoring above the 95th or 99th percentile, but this gender gap has significantly narrowed over time in the U.S. and is not found among some ethnic groups and in some nations. Furthermore, data from several studies indicate that greater male variability with respect to mathematics is not ubiquitous. Rather, its presence correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes. Responding to the third question, we document the existence of females who possess profound mathematical talent. Finally, we review mounting evidence that both the magnitude of mean math gender differences and the frequency of identification of gifted and profoundly gifted females significantly correlate with sociocultural factors, including measures of gender equality across nations. "

I personally am very suspicious of any supposedly "biological" difference between the sexes that has narrowed immensely in the extraordinarily brief period of less than 50 years. What on earth makes us think that okay, *NOW,* just at this very moment, we have suddenly reached the point of No More Bias, This is How It REALLY Is? Hubris.

ETA that I am now reading the entire article cited above and it's really very interesting. It punctures the Boys Innately Have Greater Variability and Greater Tendency Toward Extreme Math Talent theory pretty decisively. I have electronic access to the full article through my job; unfortunately, I am sure the full text isn't free.

Beautifully put. I've been thinking around this topic but never quite saw it as clearly as you've stated here.

I'm only chiming in here to say that I understand ultramarina's concern. I am very wary of educational situations where boys outnumber girls. I have read too much about how boys talk "out of turn", teachers call on boys more or answer their "shouted out" answers, and give their answers more examination then they do with the answers that girls give. It takes a lot of self-awareness for teachers not to fall into this trap.

herenow, I saw this quite recently at an informal event (a tour of an educational attraction) where my DD was the only girl among some assertive boys. The boys were all up in the front shouting out answers and very excited. DD, in the back, raised her hand every time but was called on almost never, because the (male--and wonderful in all other ways) guide always simply responded to the boys who shouted out. When I mentioned this to my husband and my friend, who has a boy, my husband had noticed but my friend had not.

This was rather more poignant to me because I know that she IS a shouter-outer by nature and has been extensively and successfully trained this year NOT to do it.

Also, thank you for the compliment.

We've been in situations like the one you describe with the guide; my girls are just too polite and they get lost in the shuffle.

I would think that the teachers they have at a gifted magnet school would be excellent, both in terms of keeping all the children interested and on topic, and also being able to manage a classroom's worth of behavior. The 60/40 split isn't that big a difference -- and it always comes down to particular personalities in the classroom.

The private gifted school in our city looked really good online, until I saw the photos of the high school class trip. I think it was about 15 boys and 1 girl....

My DDs current class is almost exactly 2/3 boys at this point. It's a private school that due to it's demographic attracts more boys than girls - people willing to pay the fees mostly believe boys should go co-ed and girls should go single sex. They send their sons to our school and their daughters to similar girls-only private schools near by.

Up until now we have been determined to send our girls co-ed because they have no brothers, but most of their close friends are boys. However, it seems like the school is really struggling to maintain their gender balance at the moment, which was already worrying me. Reading this thread has just brought up all my memories of being the "weird smart girl" in primary school and how badly that went down in a co-ed school. By the end of primary school I refused to go to school at all unless my parents found me an all girls school, of course retrospectively I was still weird and isolated, so I don't know if it helped.

My DD doesn't complain about the boys at school being dominant, so I haven't given it too much thought. Though I was pretty shocked at how separate the genders were at her birthday party last month and how poorly the boys behaved. It was certainly very different to how things have been in the past, leaving me wondering whether it's age related or whether her class is now too heavily biased towards boys.

How do you weigh an issue like this against a school otherwise being the ideal fit for your child. I honestly believe that the school has the best services and differentiation available in my city, perhaps there are one or two co-ed schools that may be equal but I don't think there are any better and as far as I am aware any of the others that are of a similar quality have the exact same issue maintaining balance. And all my reasons for wanting the co-ed remain, all girls might fix some issues but it introduces issues of it's own too.

Which is my long winded way of saying I understand your anxiety but have I no idea what to suggest.

Granted these studies are old, but this is from "How Schools Shortchange Girls".

"Teachers call on and interact with boys more than girls (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). This is probably not intentional. During the numerous teacher-student interactions that occur over the course of the school day, boys use creative and effective techniques to catch the teacher�s attention. Boys quickly raise their hands to respond or contribute to discussions, wave their hand around and up and down, change the arm they have raised when it gets tired, jump out of their seat and make noise or plead with the teacher to call on them. Girls, however, raise their hand but will soon put it down if they are not acknowledged. As a result, teachers call on boys and interact with them most of the time, while girls� passive, compliant behavior often means they are ignored. [...]

In addition to allowing boys more time to respond, teachers often extend boy�s answers by asking a follow-up question or by asking them to support their previous response. Girls are more likely to receive an �accepted� response from teachers such as �Okay� or �Uh-huh.� [...]Carmen�s answer prompted only the comment �Okay.� These behaviors send a very negative message about the importance of girls� contributions to class discussions. [...]

Teachers tolerate more calling out from boys than from girls. Boys call out answers (when the teacher does not call on them) eight times more often than girls do (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Teachers often respond to boys� calling out, thus reinforcing the behavior. When girls call out, however, teachers are more likely to remind them that they are not following the class rules. [...]

In one area females usually receive more attention than boys�physical appearance. Girls receive compliments more often than boys on their clothing, hairstyle and overall appearance (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). This emphasis on appearance also influences how their school work is evaluated (Dweck, Davidson, Nelson & Enna, 1978). Girls receive praise for neatness while boys receive recognition for academic achievements."

So while I acknowledged that it does all come down to personalities in the classroom, I think the studies link gender with behavior.

I'm really curious whether recent studies show this to hold true. I feel like girls are socialized a little differently these days...

Yes, I think there is research showing issues both for boys AND girls in terms of how they get treated in the classroom. It's a complex question, for sure.


Of course not--I completely agree. FTR, I also have a boy as well as a girl. My girl has some stereotypically "male" behaviors and my boy has some "female" ones, so my kids are not particularly "gender-typical" by cultural standards. However, it's been my observation that many kids do fit the classroom behavior stereotypes. But I am probably more concerned about social fit and finding friends than classroom dynamics. Maybe the magnet will be less gender-segregated, but at her present school, the boys and girls virtually never play together at recess.

ETA that I do also have concerns about DD being steered away from/turned off on math. The steering has already happened at her present school. Her verbal talents are very obvious, but IMO she has some awesome math potential. I worry that math may be more male-identified at a school that is already boy-heavy.

Are the boys shouting out answers and being loud because they are excited by the subject, rather than trying to be deliberately disruptive? If it's the former, ordering them to be quieter and more polite could also dampen their enthusiasm. There are pros and cons to various kinds of classroom management.

I think it may be less male-identified and more 'our school' identified at a boy-heavy school.

Every school has different dynamics, and it would be good to go in and observe what the dynamics at the particular school actually are. There are usually some talkitive kids who will be more than happy to answer this sort of question. Of course somewhere around middle school age, children once again participate in co-ed groups, at least for academics. By 8th grade my son's social group was about 50% female as far as lunch table friends. Very different from 4th grade.

Smiles,
Grinity

Not only do our bodies come in different sizes and shapes, so does our brains. Unlike the body, there is not a specific brain type handed out to a specific gender, but the proportions of different types of brains are definitely not equal between the genders.

The IQ test has been modified over the years to produce similar average results for both males and females, but it would be very difficult to design a test to produce an even gender distribution across the entire ranged of IQ scores. In order to have equal numbers of each gender having IQ scores over 130, they would have to specifically design the IQ test for this range. As some have said, there would still be school specific variations due to the relatively small numbers in this range.

One of the problems with IQ tests are they are a timed test of very basic questions. A lot of people think it is only common sense that in order to perform more complex work, a person must first be able to perform simpler work. In some ways, this is true, but not in the way most people think. What a lot of people judge to be more complicated work is not in fact more complicated.

Males on average are better suited to rapidly changing daily activities. A person in the early stages of a career are often put in roles where this is a valuable skill. Females on average are far better at long term planning. If this was understood, long term planning would be an entry level position for those who are born with the brain type suited to this particular skill. Instead, those who do the long term planning are often choosen by their skills in these so called entry level positions.

A brain type suited to one area of math is not necessarily suited to another area of math. An engineer does not necessarily make a good architect. The brain is a neural network and the way neural network design varies the strengths of the system is not at all similar to how we organize information or separate skills into subjects.

From the linked study:

I think that pretty much invalidates this data for judging anything about the right tail.

Yes, this is a valid point. However, the other study I linked addresses this very comprehensively. There are differences at the right end of the tail, but they are by no means consistent from nation to nation and have changed rapidly in a very short time. I am not arguing the fact that there is a currently a m/f imbalance at the 95th and 99th percentiles, but based on the evidence I do not believe that the current ratios reflect a biologically predestined difference. There may in fact be some small gender differences that are valid, but we are not yet in a position to judge what they are. If 99th% boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1 less than 20 years ago and now outnumber them only 2 or 4 to 1, clearly this question is in flux.


I'd be interested to see the data you are drawing this from.

Here are some summaries of the second study, whose full text is behind a pay wall:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/uow-cnb052709.php

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketsc...ven_by_social_factors_not_biological.php

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201002/girls-and-math-part-1

Girls being discouraged to even consider math at early stage is a real concern. That will close so many doors for them. My daughters were competing in Geo Bee and Mathcounts in middle school, so they knew quite well about male domination in certain areas. DD17 was county Mathcounts winner (only girl for many years). But she was hopelessly out-competed at CA State Finals. That was not a pretty sight for girls (all top 10 are boys and Asians). At some point of time in high school, both pretty much rule out match/science/engineering.

Fortunately that was not the end of the story. For some reason, both girls had a dramatic change of hearts at college. My older one DD18, more known as a pianist and writer, declared math major after trying out history/lit and Russian study. She still love writing as ever, just felt that she needs a degree that is more substantial. DD reported that Harvard Math department has about 20 students a year and one third are girls.

Younger DD17, to our amazement, declared Operational research and financial engineering major (actually more math than engineering). It is a hard major for sure, she complains about endless P-SET and projects every other days. But things are looking up as DD17 just landed an internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, quite feat for a freshman.

I base this first on a lifetime of observation, followed by years of trying to find the pattern of variation in human behavior, cognitive strenghts and weaknesses. Have done some work in coorelating what I have been doing to other studies, but this is still fairly preliminary.

Basically throughing out the odd idea to see how people react to it. Not necessarily suggesting the ideas are necessarily accurate, but sometimes throwing them out there can stir up some useful feedback. My primary goal however, is to make an attempt to communicate these ideas in a way others can understand them. More a communications exercise than anything.

Another area I am struggling with is to find a source of people who might actually understand the more unique areas I have been working on. This is not my real career, but I have at times in my career found myself the lone person working on certain types of projects within the organization. I don't personally consider the work I have often done in the past to be any more complex than what others do, but some of it has definitely been rather unique in nature.

I learned over the years it never hurts to throw out ideas into the places many people would least expect to get good information from. This forum has some amazing minds on it, so in my opinion, this is a place where I expect to find some real gems of information. My purpose for being on this forum is not related to throwing out these ideas, but I just couldn't resist the temptation.

Didn't have any intention of speaking of this, but since you asked where this is coming from, you now have my answer. The reason I am on this forum is the paid work I am doing is not really my cup of tea at the moment. Sometimes when I am running into difficulty working through this type of work, I do something interesting and suddenly I get paste my mental block. Some of the techniques I have used over the years to work through these problems came from recommendations on how to work with gifted children when they have similar issues.

I thought I might find some new useful techniques on here, but it turned out just communicating with all the interesting people on here has been working for me.

That is wonderful news, as your dds clearly have astonishing math talent. I hope that they are able to find professors to mentor them as they continue their studies. I wish them all the best.

chenchuan, I hope my daughter can achieve as much as she dreams or wants in math, science, or whatever. Good for your girls for perservering in male-dominated environments.

To be honest, I don't think a 60/40 ratio is really that bad. It would be different if it was 90% male. But if she is interested in math and science, she will be in college classes with a much higher ratio of boys, and may as well learn to deal with it now. I was very often the ONLY girl in my college classes, mainly because I chose a subject that attracts mostly men. Even in high school, when I took AP chemistry and Calculus, my classes were mostly male. I got used to it, as did the other girls in my classes. If you don't make a big deal of it, neither will she.

Thanks for kind words, Utramarina:

The CA Matchcounts state final was a strange experience. After all finalists were done with their written test, top 10 were called out doing their on-stage quiz. All of them are little 7th or 8th boys. After their rank is finally decided, the invited guest (I think that it is the director of Art of Problem Solving) gave a rah-rah speech about how bright their future is. Boys are all pumped up, chanting �MIT, PHD,�� A few girls and their parents left pretty discouraged. This arena clearly does not belong to them.

This experience probably negatively affected their assessment about their ability. They never go back to Math competition again in high school. Gifted girls tend to have multiple talents so they focus on something else that was more fruitful. It seems to me that girl� self-confidence in Math is both fragile and enduring. But given right environment and encouragement, it will bloom. My older daughter have had encouragements from several Harvard faculty members.

State Mathcounts in our state -- smaller, and not a powerhouse in math like CA -- looked similar. The countdown round of 16 had two white kids (both boys) and two girls. The four who advanced to nats were all boys (two Chinese and two Indian).

Ds noticed soon after he was picked to compete for his school in January that he was the only European-American out of the ten kids chosen. Parents of all the rest were born in Taiwan, India, Pakistan & Syria.

There was more balance in terms of gender, though: 6 boys and 4 girls.

It's also important to note that there is a phenomenon called "stereotype threat" wherein, under experimental conditions, people who are explicitly told that their group (women, minorities, whatever) performs poorly in (for instance) math will then score worse on a math test than people who are told there is no difference in group performance. If one extends these experimental findings to the real world, there are obvious implications...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

I wonder whether there's any effect in the opposite direction: if members of a minority believe that their group performs better than average in some subject, are their scores higher than those of people who don't believe the same?

The kids at ds's school -- Asian and non-Asian alike -- joke about the 'Asian invasion' they see at competitions. I don't know whether this reflects a belief in some innate Asian superiority in math; I'm guessing the adults at these events (and maybe their kids, too) are all aware that the Chinese and Indian parents whose children excel there mostly come from the upper tier of their home countries' populations in terms of education.

I don't know if the original study is more circumspect, but the linked summaries draw conclusions that aren't even close to being supported by the data. I don't claim to know how much (if any) of the right tail difference is biological, and I'm skeptical of the question itself, but the described data doesn't get us past the conclusion of "not all of it".

How so? Of course it's true that pop-sci coverage tends to overstate study findings.


I think the described data, which show that the "greater variability and more male math whizzes" argument simply does not hold in all countries or all groups, is pretty clear. Of course, it's true that it doesn't get us to a place where we know there is NO sex-based biological variability in math ability. That would be very hard to prove.

Excellent question! I wonder. This isn't the same question, but there is evidence that men consistently overestimate their IQs while women consistently underestimate theirs.

Having read the article, I think this point was well-supported.


This claim appeared weaker. One of the countries where the number of math-gifted girls equalled or surpassed boys was Thailand, which I wouldn't consider a bastion of feminism. But I don't even really care if this one is strictly true, because the prior claim is what interests me more.

There seems to be a lot of concern in regards to possible gender statistical differences in specific subjects. I was once a strong believer in the nurture side, but have since come to accept the nature side. This does not mean nurture does not have an affect, but nature may determine the ultimate potential and the difficulty in achieving a particular level.

If I had to choose which skills I admire more, I would choose the skills I see as statistically more common in females. This is not to say I don't admire the skills more statistically found in males. In my opinion, the skills statistically found in males are more often than not valued more highly from an income point of view. I am not so much bothered by statistical gender differences as much as by the difference in value between these in my opinion equally valuable skills sets. Another problem I see is we don't even attempt to recognize or measure these skills.

Have you ever had someone serving you food at a restaurant and they treated you as if they had known you for a very long time and yet you have only just met. The ability to intuitively interact with a large variety of people is an absolutely amazing skill, yet it is not tested on any IQ test. They test the ability to rotate 3d objects made up of a small number of simple polygons, yet do not test the ability to rotate more complex objects such as faces. I would be willing to bet if they had both types of 3d objects on IQ tests, in most cases, those who were good at one type would not be as good at the other type.

The way I structured the sentences and paragraphs in this post is what I would call my natural communication style. I am totally aware this style will cause a lot of people to have difficulty interpreting what I have written. The ability to deal with longer sentences and context changes in paragraphs is a skill more often found in females. Being able to carry on from where a conversation had left off from the day before is another communications skill more often found in females. In order to communicate to a more typical male, you have to first ensure they have switched the context of their brain to the current topic. Then you have to remind them of what had been said in previous communications. You can then move forward with new information. If you ever find yourself frustrated at technical meetings when they go over everything from the previous meeting and only have a small amount of time left to discuss new topics, then you probably have a more female typical brain.

FTR, there is also this article, which seems to be open-access:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf

"In summary, some Eastern European and Asian
countries frequently produce girls with profound
ability in mathematical problem solving; most
other countries, including the USA, do not. Children,
including girls, of immigrants to the USA
and Canada from some of the countries that excel
in the IMO are overrepresented among students
identified as profoundly gifted in mathematics;
USA-born girls from all other ethnic/racial backgrounds,
including white, are very highly underrepresented.
There exist many girls with profound
intrinsic aptitude for mathematics; however, they
are rarely identified due to socio-cultural, educational,
or other environmental factors."

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.)

This was more a general statement about areas of science where complex systems are involved. Not specifically a criticism. It is very difficult to explain why these types of studying can be lacking.

This particular study is not as narrowly focused as some studies I have seen. However, I would need to analyze the test questions on these various classes of tests to see how much variation there is in the complexity. How people view the complexity of testing is definitely a topic of debate.

I would say this particular study is definitely telling us further study is required. The information is interesting, but on it's own, it gives no indication as to why the results are what they are. At least the information tells us that the idea of males being better in math as found in other narrow studies may not be right.

Back in the 70s and 80s, we were constantly hearing how almost everything was found to cause cancer. The experiments were done using 2 control groups of rats. One group had none of the substance and the other group was given an extreme dose of the substance. Almost every substance tested was shown to cause cancer.

Later when much better science was used to test for the effects of cancer, many control groups were tested with each having gradually increasing doses of the substance. A graph where the incidences of cancer gradually increased as the dose increased were considered to be evidence the substance caused cancer.

In cases where no cancer appears to be caused by the substance until an extremely high dose is applied are considered not to be evidence the substance causes cancer. The graphs in these cases will suddenly spike at the high dosage levels. What this early poor science had discovered was that almost any substance can cause cancer at overdose levels. It was the interpretation of the findings which was flawed.

If I was to do a study to determine if one gender was better in math than another, I would first have to ensure the control groups were similar in almost every way other than gender. This study compares results between different cultures and this adds too many variables into the equation. You would also have to ensure as many factors as possible were the same between the male and females in the study. This is virtually impossible to guarantee.

A study specific to math ability would just have too many variables involved. Now if we can find the pattern of cognitive abilities across a wide variety of skills, this can remove a degree of error resulting from nurturing variations due to gender. This requires an understanding of how various skills are related to work, but I believe this is the minimum it would take to have anywhere near convincing evidence.

What I have been trying to do is come up with what I call the periodic table of cognitive ability. In chemistry, they had once tried to do chemistry using earth, wind, fire and water. The periodic table is what moved chemistry forward. I feel the same about analyzing human cognitive abilities using high level subjects like math and science. This is feel will not get us anywhere in understanding human cognition.

If you ask me who is better at math, I will tell you my answer is I don't know. If the question is which gender would statistically be faster at solving a Sudoku puzzle, I would take a guess it would be males. This is a specific enough skill, I have a fairly good idea of what neural mapping would suit this skill. Males on average have much more tightly wired neural mapping with greater localization of neural connectivity. For a very focused simple skill, this is probably ideal. For a more advanced skill, I wouldn't hazard to guess.

I'm hoping the cancer study info helps with understanding how the shape of the graph comes into play.

Don't take the cognitive stuff too seriously. Any statement I make regarding the brain are at best slightly educated guesses. I just don't want to have to say I think or speculate constantly.

Well, of course, this sort of thing is virtually never possible in the social sciences. Nevertheless, of course studies do control for such things as much as possible. But...neither of these studies are trying to PROVE that boys and girls are equal. Rather, they are trying to DISprove the Greater Male Variability Theory, which holds that it is a biologically immutable fact that boys have more variability in their math performance and are overrepresented in both tails of the bell curve. If this is true, then it should be true universally, since it's purportedly a biological, hard-wired difference. One's nation of origin should make no difference.

At the elite college I attended, there were lots of male Chinese math professors, but I do not recall any female ones. If the right-tail effect is not present in the Chinese, for example, where are the great female Chinese mathematicians? Similarly, I can think of many more great Russian male mathematicians than female ones. Can you name a country where there are as many top-notch female mathematicians as male ones?

The various links have included many conclusions drawn from tests aimed at the middle, and it is to those that I was referring. I did look at the AMS link, but it clearly didn't reach the same conclusions I was objecting to so I didn't feel the need to respond to it. I'll resist the urge to snark back here.

From the AMS link:
The earlier articles were claiming to have data that contradicted variability by looking at data which would be least likely to show it, whereas this article looks at the right kind of data, and explicitly says it remains an open question. These are not the same conclusions at all.

If there were data on the high end (IMO, USAMO, SET, etc) showing the split was 1:1 for at least some statistically significant areas, then this would be very convincing evidence against variability, but that data doesn't show 1:1, it shows 3:1 or more in many cases. This certainly doesn't prove variability true, but it also doesn't prove it false.

Arguing on the internet ... I'll leave the last word to you.

I made some very rough and probably highly inaccurate bell curves for both genders based on a figures from a number of scientific studies. Some of the variables were guesses as well, so I don't have a lot of confidence in the graphs.

The graphs were interesting in that there was a mere 4% shift of the bell curves between the genders based on the numbers from US studies. If this was in any way accurate and what my graphs represented from a neurological point of view is in any way accurate, then on average, there is almost no difference in the male and female brains.

Now this small shift in the bell curves did result in a very small portion of the population being in the autism spectrum with males being significantly in higher numbers. The autism spectrum in my opinion has extreme variability in how it affect cognitive abilities. In some portions of the spectrum it can result in severe disability, whereas in other portions, it can result in extreme talents in very specific areas.

Given that males are highly represented in this spectrum, I could see this as being the cause for Greater Male Variability at the tails of the bell curve related to IQ scores.

If you have ever heard of the Male Birth Order Effect, it suggests cognitive characteristics are altered according to birth order in males. From what I have read, first born males would be shifted more toward the female side of the spectrum and later born males would be shifted more toward the male end of the spectrum. if this is true, then the bell curves for male and females would be more similar if the average family size is smaller.

So if this Male Birth Order Effect has any merit, there could be regional differences due to cultural differences affecting family sizes.

Interesting theory, Jamie! However, first-born boys are still boys, you know? I don't think you can say "Boys are better are math," if your corollary is "As long as you leave out first-born boys" (of which there are an awful lot!)


Sure. But 20 years ago, it was 13:1. 20 years is an evolutionary microsecond! I'm willing to wager that the ratio will continue to decrease.

This goes to my earlier point about it being ludicrous to conclude that just at THIS very instant we have magically reached the point where the differences are all biological and no cultural issues remain. Surely you would agree that there remain many cultural stereotypes steering girls away from math?



The earlier study had several parts, one of which looked at NCLB-type state exams (which I agree do not disprove variability, though they disprove a generalized "Boys are better at math than girls, on average" belief, which IMO is held by 80-90% of the American public) and one of which looked at the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, where they give the SAT to kids under age 13. Perhaps some would argue that this is still not a high enough standard, but I think most on this board would agree that scoring over 700 on the math SAT at age 11 is indicative of giftedness in math.

Sorry, I'm not suggesting either boys are better at math or that biology is the only factor. I was trying to bring the nature side into the discussion. Also, I was also trying to bring forward the idea that cognitive ability is not subject specific. So a person good in aspects of math may not be good in other aspects of math.

I find so many people are focused on the nurture side, I figured this side is covered in most of these discussions. This is why I am bringing the nature side into it.

I know I need to let this go, but you keep putting up straw men and implying they are my position. Please go back and re-read exactly what I claimed.

I didn't actually mean that your personal position was that we have indeed reached that point; more that many people do. I was referring back to an earlier post.

I do take issue with saying a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is junk science without having read the full text. I suppose I expect a certain amount of respect for peer-reviewed science published in reputable journals on these boards.

Bostonian, did you read the open-access article I linked? As to why there are fewer female mathematicians, while it's possible genetic difference plays some slight role, there are of course MANY other better explanations. As is explained in several of these articles, even if we look purely at raw data among those who are highly talented, the ratios we see (3 or maybe 4 to 1 M:F, at present) do not represent the actual ratios of men to women in the field. Obviously, something else is at work.

Math and Physics are probably the last strongholds of male domination. But female mathematicians are coming.

If you look at the senior facuilty member of Harvard Math department, there is only two female professors (out of 26 listed there). But if you look at the junior facuilty members, there are 5 female professors out 18. So from the pipeline point of view, it is just a matter of time. Granted that most of junior faculty members may not make it at Harvard, they will go somewhere else and become a full profressor.

When I was 17, I scored at a 99.995 percentile in math. Rather than finding myself interested in math, I found it to not other much in the way of a challenge. Maybe I would have if I had gone a lot further in it, but I never had an interest in doing this. I also don't feel the questions on the provincial exam were complicated enough to really judge my ability to do any really advanced math.

Only one person in the province bested me in this exam and it just happened to be a female in the same class I was in. She went on to become a teacher, so she did not go into a field where advanced math is used. I was picked up by a scientific organization to work with flow system models (climate and other systems), but I wasn't the one doing the advanced math. The reason I say picked up is I didn't have a degree.

I consider myself to have more of a female personality. What really interests me is people. I really can't see spending my life doing math when people are just so much more interesting.

Now, I wonder if the reason females are not as well represented in math is they are far more interested in other areas. I thought I would give the perspective of a person who at least tested high in math at a younger age.

Certainly possible. I think one of the articles mentioned this. However, it has just been so easy for me to observe my DD being "guided" to showcase her verbal skills and away from math and science, perhaps because that is just what people expect from a bright girl. I do think math talent can be somewhat more difficult to assess in the early grades unless one is actively teaching the child at home, and maybe I will see the same thing when my boy is in school. It's just hard to ignore the fact that they give her books at her reading level (5th grade or so) in school yet maintain that she is doing "just fine" with the first-grade math curriculum (which she complains about to me--"boring baby math.") I mean, I suppose she is doing "just fine" in the sense that every test or worksheet is always correct. In K, her teacher remarked that she did not work ahead in her math book "like some other kids do" and chose to free-read instead during free choice, implying that she was not a "math kid." Well, the math book was K level...

Unfortunately, that argument doesn't always work - hence the phrase "leaky pipeline". I don't know specifically for US maths professors, but in many situations where women are in a small minority a situation where the proportion of women goes down as you go up the hierarchy has persisted for many years. I remember hearing a talk about how US academia (in general, not specially maths) was particularly bad at this, even compared to academia elsewhere, because of the tenure track system - the time of life when your system forces people to put work above everything else in order to get tenure is the same time of life when mothers or those who want to be mothers find it hardest to do that. There were some pretty shocking graphs showing, for example, how much more likely a women was to make it to full professor if she was childless than if she had children, and how this did not apply to men. This was in one of the most famous US universities, but I forget which one.

Yes, absolutely. I work and socialize in academia, and I can see this quite clearly. Few of the female professors have children, and those that do almost never have more than one. In fact, I actually can't think of a single female professor I know who has more than one--wow.

Wait, no, I do know one. She and her husband are both professors, and they have two children and split a position. So she isn't a FT professor (and neither is he). They did this on purpose BECAUSE of their children.

However, I know plenty of male professors with more than one child. Their wives almost never work full-time.

Having said that, there's my friend the full professor at one of the very top US universities who is about to have her fifth child! (There, I've probably uniquely identified her.) She's superhuman, though.

That is very true. I noticed that the math department of my local public university (Sonoma State University) has much higher female ratio. More than half of faculty and staff are women. This may have something to do with the more progressive culture in California as well as the fact that SSU is not a highly ranked university.

This makes perfect sense. Women's progress in math will not started at Harvard. So beating up Mr. Summer won't solve the problem. It starts from the lower ranking universities and works its way up. This may take decades to get to Harvard but the trend is clearly there.