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

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."