So Mrs. Obama says that her daughters had bad math teachers and so took themselves out of STEM, and this is "what happens to girls". Hmm...so what happened to the boys who had the same bad teachers?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/01/female-teachers-math...
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/01/436525758/how-teachers-unconsc...
(Both referenced articles talk about female teachers, who are the vast majority of teachers at that grade level, transmitting their anxiety about or dislike of math to female students)
Here's one change you may benefit from: exclude solutions that exclude a class of people. Otherwise, we'll need to wait for bad teachers to die out before a solution excluding them can really take hold & that's not a possible outcome because no system is perfect.
Edit: more specifically, we need to immediately start training teachers how to handle their anxiety,which means we probably need to qualitatively study their anxieties. Without shaming them or excluding them or threatening their livelihoods.
Physics is biased against women: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201604/grading.cfm
Elementary school teachers are biased against boys who do not socialize well: http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discrimi...
Indian teachers are biased against lower caste students: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/remahanna/files/discriminat...
In fact the paper the NPR article talks about actually says "We show that there is large variation within schools in this measure, and that it has a significant effect on the academic achievements of both genders during middle school and high school in math, science and language and also on the choice of the level of math and science study programs in high school" it also has this line "Math teachers' assessment in primary school, on the other hand, is on average gender neutral (0.01). However, these means hide quite a large heterogeneity among teachers."
They also say "In terms of effect size, these estimates indicate that increasing the average stereotypical bias against girls from zero to its maximal value of one will reduce girls' outcomes by 0.317 of a standard deviation"; which doesn't sound huge (given that's with the most amount of bias), but I guess it all adds up.
The physics one is perhaps the most interesting since it says that male German teachers had no bias, and hypothesized that anti-bias training worked there, which if true is a positive sign.
I'm sort of rambling without a point, I guess I was just surprised how directly you could measure this effect. I had always assumed it was much more indirect.
I'm reminded of Paul Lockhart's work as an example of the claim that contemporary mathematics education is broken across-the-board. And then there are lots of reports that say that the U.S. is doing considerably worse than other countries at teaching mathematics and other technical subjects. This is a theme that dates back at least to Sputnik and the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis
I think that forms of the Sputnik crisis have repeated themselves in subsequent generations, even if there isn't a single event that triggers this anxiety as dramatically as the Sputnik launch did.
It's hard to tell from this summary of the presentation how Michelle Obama felt that this interacted with gender (although maybe the recordings would make that clearer). One possible interpretation would be that girls' enthusiasm for mathematics is more fragile and easier to throw off-track through poor teaching. Another is that the bad teachers treated boys and girls differently in a way that discouraged the girls. A third is that boys and girls might be best interested or motivated by different teaching methods or projects.
"And there's something going on that is not just about the girls. There's something going on with how these subjects are taught."
In general, and on average, when asked questions, boys tend to just shout out answers, sometimes with no apparent care or concern as to whether they are right. They compete to be the loudest, most noticed, and to get the most reaction from the teacher.
In general, and on average, when asked questions, the girls will sit quietly and try not to be noticed. Those who are actively engaged with the subject will try to work out the right answer, and will still not react or respond when called on.
I keep repeating "in general, and on average" because some children behave according to the opposite characterisations, but these differences are over-whelmingly obvious to anyone who works with children and takes the time to notice. Proving it scientifically is hard, because society in general frowns on experimenting on children in ways that can potentially damage their progress. But the signs are there to be seen.
So yes, a bad teacher really can put children off doing STEM subjects, and this can happen depressingly quickly. What's more, it really does seem to affect girls more than boys. I don't know why that should be the case, but the same story is told over and over again. Your implied scepticism is most likely honest, but misplaced.
Edit: To whomever downvoted this: I just spent several minutes trying to share my experience after giving literally thousands of workshops in math with young people, and attending dozens of conferences on the question of how to increase and retain engagement in the STEM subjects. Given the submission, if you think such a response is inappropriate for HN then I'd really like to know why.
One has bs in math the other bs in another science field
Great comments
I could buy that I guess, but it's hard to believe that the schools that the Obamas sent their children too would have any bad teachers. Though I guess they were in primary school before he was president.
Still, if the most well off people can't find good teachers for their children, what hope does anyone have?
I'm also a little confused since she calls out the ages 8-11; I don't think I had any significant amount of math or STEM teaching at that age. I think all the math I knew at that point was how to multiply (and divide?) numbers.
Edit: according to Wikipedia her daughters are 19 and 16 years old - not too late to study a STEM related subjected, are they? Michelle, if you can't make your own daughters go into STEM, what message are you sending to young women of the world?
I feel sad when I hear anyone say they think forcing others into a career path is a wise or sustainable decision. Doubly so for their kids.
The message she's sending is she doesn't know what the solution is. And that's OK. The first step to resolving a problem is acknowledging you have one.
Denying the existence of gender bias both prevents the human mind from perceiving it and persists the problem, if there is one. Denying someone else's individuality and autonomy isn't a sustainable solution. In complex systems, it leads to pathological, extreme states/transitions.
See the US's political climate for perfect examples on both sides of the aisle.