Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Male and female math whizzes in adulthood

Considering the lack of real chances of a career and tenure ship for academics these days I will not be encouraging my daughter in that direction, that's for damn sure.

The gender bias, whether or not it really exists in STEM academia is just noise IMO the real signal is is in just how few real academic jobs exist versus administrative positions.

Can you imagine hospitals where the surgeons are the poorest paid and treated staff members?

Erik Demaine is at MIT - http://erikdemaine.org/. He's a former child math prodigy who is won a MacArthur grant. He seems to be doing very well.

Madeinuk - I'm not sure the gender bias is fictional when it comes to maternity leave or a pregnancy. Last week MIT's student newspaper had something about the severe lack of parental leave for families, including faculty, with a pregnancy/baby and how this policy negatively affects women to a greater degree.

The gender difference already shows up at grade 1
http://www.mathkangaroo.org/mk/2014/2014_results_main.html
Not sure what are the causes though. Cultural bias is probably one.

Wait, you're basing this on the results of this one competition? (Also, with many of those names I can't tell if they are male or female.) I don't think this is a good idea. Competitions are self-selecting, based on all kinds of things. At DD's gifted school, the math team is overwhelmingly male, but I can tell you right now that the top math students in her class (DD is not one) are about 60/40 male/female...not that significant of a split.

Chess has a similar problem. Girls may show promise in chess, but when they see that chess club is 3/4 male, or more, they tend to drop out, especially at older ages. You see younger girls try it, but they don't stay in.

With this said, there is also research showing that moms talk to male toddlers more about math and numbers, and they also give them more blocks and building toys. These early experiences have been shown to matter.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/07-08/gender-gap.aspx

The math anxiety problem among teachers truly concerns me. I am not that strong at math (I have a lot of rote skills which are not very strong as far as number sense) and would never want to be a general "teacher" because of this. DD is fond of asking me theoretical questions that I can't answer ("But why..." "But is it true that..." ) and I do feel stupid. Doesn't matter the grade level! She has been asking me these since she was 5 or 6! And if I see her doing something wrong, sometimes I feel like I can't explain well WHY it's wrong.

What I don't particularly care for is all of the diatribe that purports to show that this coincidence is correlation indicating some sort of sinister male plot against females.

It is the mummies who choose to start the ball rolling on this and then later the majority female elementary school teachers that push the boys forward. Later, the young girls pick up on these patterns and actively engage in peer pressure to keep the 'sisterhood' pretty and dumb long before puberty and competitive sexual selection kicks in.

I see the pain that my daughter goes through - it is the girls that exclude her because she has the temerity to have some brains.

I have always encouraged my DD to think for herself and to see Maths as just puzzles that can give deeper insight into the world around you- Fibonacci tree branching etc. At 6 and a half she told ME that 3^2 + 4^2 == 5^2 and that it is funny how numbers work out like that sometimes after we had been discussion g squares. She is no child prodigy but she does have a solid grasp of the Maths that she has seen so far. I want her to stay learning and boy can she learn fast when not distracted, hungry or tired!

I am a humanist at heart and certainly not a feminist - not after trying the read some of the more extreme excrement masquerading as scholarship from that movement, 'movement' being the operative word here (literally) in the Eighties, la Andrea Dworkin et al. I do have a lot of time for Camille Paglia, though. Now there is an admirably sharp mind that tells it how she sees it.

The local chess club is more than 80% male and almost 90% Asian, although there are more whites than Asians in the schools. It may well be that children prefer to associate with their own sex (at least before puberty) and race and choose activities accordingly. The same mechanism may partially explain similarly skewed demographics of school math teams. I don't see what can be done to make participation more representative. You can't turn away interested children, and the level of interest appears to vary by demographic group.

I do think there may be a bit of elementary-aged children preferring to socialize with their own gender (although I also think that tendency may in part be influenced by the adults and environment they grow up with/in). Whatever the reason, I think we could talk around it from different directions forever and never really know for sure.

My kids aren't into chess and math comps aren't big around here at the elementary level, but robotics is. It's another place where you tend to see more boys than girls participating - at first glance. When my ds was in elementary school and participating it was definitely skewed to boys participating in a big way. I think a large part of that was that in order to just get a club going you had to have a parent sponsoring it, and that parent was often a dad. A dad looking for something to do with his son. The kids they reached out to tended to be similar to their own kid - male. The ratios were a bit different for clubs that started from *within* a school - sponsored by a teacher. They still typically had more males, but there were also a number of girls participating. Then a local girls organization started sponsoring an all-girls team - and that team grew to be HUGE - larger than any of the other teams competing. There were SO many interested girls. What it took to get them involved was simply reaching out to them and letting them know there was an opportunity to join in and participate. I think it's quite possible that there are subtle signs all over the place that we just don't recognized that turn kids off for whatever reason from joining in. Our school's chess club, for instance, is primarily male. When it was first formed, a few girls, including my dd, tried it out. They didn't last - not because they weren't interested in the chess, but because they didn't like the way the club was run by the teacher sponsoring it. Something about his style worked better with the boys than the girls. Either that or the parents of the boys refused to say "no" when the boys also wanted to quit Really I think there are all sorts of little tiny not-so-obvious ways that gender-bias still permeates our society here in the US

polarbear