15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
blogs.discovermagazine.com
blogs.discovermagazine.com
If you believe this, then doing a fifteen-minute writing exercise at the start of a fifteen week course in which you "write about your values" rather than a different fifteen-minute writing exercise where you "write about other peoples values" leads you to understand introductory physics significantly better at the end, if you're a woman, or understand introductory physics significantly worse, if you're a man.
I could start speculating on mechanisms for this, but I think it's better to wait until the same effect has been replicated in a different place and a different time (and let's hope that none of those future test subjects have read this article or else they'll know what's up).
On the other hand, if one were to repeat this experiment one would have to wonder whether it's ethical to force male students to do a writing exercise if you have reason to believe that it will hinder their ability to learn physics.
Update: My alternative hypothesis is that all the competent male students who showed up for a Physics class and were given a silly "write about your values" exercise got so offended by such a frou-frou exercise in what was supposed to be a physics class that they dropped out and enrolled in something else.
If so, then I think it is ethical, because all you're doing is challenging an incorrect stereotype that was unfairly giving men a slight boost and women a significant handicap.
The writing task was basically a luminosity exercise: making them aware of their own true knowledge and beliefs through introspection, such that they then had the confidence to take risks on questions they otherwise wouldn't have (assuming the tests were scored negatively on incorrect answers to discourage guessing.)
"One virtue of the affirmation is that it can be combined with instructional approaches that show promise in closing the gender gap, such as the interactive engagement approaches used in the present course"
so the course they are teaching isn't a standard physics course. They very well might be on to something, but I think it's a huge stretch to attribute the performance difference to a couple 15 minute writing exercises. (what is "interactive engagement" anyway? not explained in the paper)
Generally this just strains credulity. Telling yourself "I can solve this problem" goes a long way in math and physics, but there's also a feedback loop (the article even alludes to it) - successfully solving problems makes you better at solving problems. So how is it that over a decade of damage due to this effect can be undone with a single inspirational chat?
If you read the article it does not suggest that men did worse because of the affirmation excercise. These were two different groups of men, so presumably the control group happened to be a smarter bunch. Or maybe the other class took place at 8am and everybody was asleep, etc.
Of course it would be interesting to see this done on a larger scale with more details of statistical significance of the numbers.
In which case we can equally well say that the women in the non-control group just happened to be a smarter bunch. Even more easily, since the sample size of women was even smaller than those of the men. If the results aren't statistically significant I'm not sure why they were even published.
I can't say whether the results are statistically significant, but there are error bars on the graphs and the scientists who did the experiment seem to think the results are significant.
I'm going to go with "because there's a lot of money available for people that show that women are better at science then men"; doh, I mean "more equal" of course, not better ....
I am also very skeptical.
Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic.
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
But here's a hypothetical for you. You come to my company for a job interview.
When you come see me, I ask you what your favorite subject is and I let you talk about it for twenty minutes. Then we start talking about the job.
When you see Bob next door, he immediately starts drilling on topic.
Which interview do you perform better on?
Why do you doubt that? I did a bit of teaching during my PhD, though never an entire lecture course.
Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic
This concerns me less than whether or not it's likely to be true.
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
Ah, the old "unless you belong to group X you're not allowed to comment on this" line. I have nothing for this.
* But here's a hypothetical for you. You come to my company for a job interview. When you come see me, I ask you what your favorite subject is and I let you talk about it for twenty minutes. Then we start talking about the job. When you see Bob next door, he immediately starts drilling on topic. Which interview do you perform better on?*
I have no idea. It's possible that the stress of being judged on what my favourite topic is might cause me to stress out even more. In any case, it's a pretty nonequivalent situation.
There are two types of physics students... the ones who are really at university to learn something else, and the ones who are at university to learn physics. I was in the latter category. Going to my first physics class and having it being a hand-holding exercise instead of a "listen up you pricks, F = ma and you'd better not forget" lecture would have seemed like a waste of precious lecture time. Of course, a female student could easily have felt exactly the same way.
I keep hearing this "inferior to your male peers" bit, but oddly enough, when I was in high school, the higher-level math and science classes were mostly populated by girls. The more respectable the class was, the more female-skewed the sex ratio was. I think I was the only person in my physiology class with a Y chromosome. This was in the American Midwest, in a vaguely lower-middle-class area.
To this day, I still don't know what was up with that.
You're right that for the last couple decades, the life sciences have been increasingly dominated by women, but that's not what was being discussed.
I honestly don't believe this is the actual problem. Students of both sexes encounter negative attitudes during their schooling. It's just that women are more likely to take it to heart.
The average male physics student (I include myself in this) has something of an underlying belief that they understand the world better than everyone else. It's an expression of the extreme male brain.
I doubt you would find the same characteristics in male students studying, say acting.
I'm a woman. My undergad major is "Environmental Resource Management" and I have a certificate in GIS (a 2/3 male field and my classes were all about 2/3 male). I don't know if I am just oblivious or what, but it was the last week of GIS school before it dawned on me that the majority of women consistently occupied the last two rows of seats in class and a few other women floated around the classroom but I was the only woman who usually sat up front (assuming a seat was available up front, which it usually was). I occasionally wonder why I seem to live differently from other women and why I seem to not hear or not take to heart (or something) such "messages". Where are women hearing these messages? (Serious question -- I've wondered about this for years. What am I missing??) Anyone have any thoughts?
I've had practical obstacles to my success that were related to being female. Most of those disappeared with my divorce. But I really don't get where or how such brainwashing occurs for most women (even though it seems pretty clear it does occur).
You pose this question as if the answer were obvious, but I'm not only stupid enough not to see it, I can actually think of couple of reasons it could go either way, and they do not feel construed (to me, anyway). On several occasions I've asked people enrolled a couple years ahead of me about their favorite subjects and pet projects and whatnot, and while they were friendly and everything, they were uncomfortable reflecting about their schooling in front of a (relative) stranger, and they grew even more uncomfortable when I tried to coax them to discuss our discipline by talking about my own pet projects or struggles.
On the other hand, It's perfectly normal for interviewee to be nervous and underperform, and twenty minutes of chat on relevant and familiar topic would seem to dissipate impact somewhat.
Or maybe you're right, and male physics students are typically such pricks that having to think about feelings for fifteen minutes causes a semester-long depressive spiral. Could go either way.
I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth.
Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one.
Further, this is an introductory course.
The overwhelming number of top scientists are male. IQ tests (FWIW) also place more males at both the top and bottom ends, with females clustered more around the middle. One interpretation there is that nature can afford to take more chances with males, so there are more extremes.
I can think of at least one factor that is physical, even though it doesn't have to do with mental capacity per se. A major impediment to learning tends to be psychological laziness; anything that gets us to push past this means we are using more of our capacity. Testosterone increases risk-taking behaviors and reduces complacency. This drive to constantly seek out the new and challenge the old might be sufficient by itself, even if there are no relevant neurological differences otherwise.
I also don't understand this push to try to equalize gender distribution. Even if the ONLY differences are social, it doesn't follow that it's better to socialize females in ANY given arbitrary manner just because they're female.
Clearly any field should be open to any individual who wishes to pursue it. Trying to equalize the numbers, given the current disparity, means pushing a lot of females into pursuing subjects they aren't interested in. Even if we posit that these fields have been traditionally male-biased, the majority of males are not interested in them.
This has to be open on an individual level, and whichever way it shakes out with regard to gender, it shakes out.
It's profoundly unfair to cite social differences and then blame colleges who only get people after 18 years of social indoctrination.
I just thought more men preferred Physics.
Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them - like "damn that ToE is pretty compelling with great predictive powers and a beauty akin to the Maxwell equations but, y'know, we can't let it stand it's been formulated by a woman" ...
Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women. If you look through James D. Watson's book The Double Helix, you'll see dozens of disparaging references to Rosalind Franklin[1], inditing her for such crimes as not wearing enough makeup, and being a woman running a chem lab.
I think the flavor of a field can be tinted strongly by edge cases. Although it is a form of confirmation bias, I believe people can't help applying extreme behaviors by individuals to their understanding of the group. I'm sure if I heard the president of some college spouting racial epithets, I'd look a little more sternly on the college as a whole and question how it treats its students. I would make the association that if someone with these views was allowed to become an authority, if it had taken a number of people who shared these views to allow them to get there.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin Rosalind Franklin had an incredibly fascinating life, and most likely would have been credited with a Nobel prize for the discovery of the DNA helix if she hadn't died before it was awarded. She actually died of ovarian cancer, caused by the xray machinery she operated in investigating the composition of the DNA crystal.
They are simply reflecting the social mores of their day. IBM had the socks and garter police -- for men! In addition, men tend to tease each other much worse than ragging on someone for not wearing enough makeup.
Additionally, we all carry the evolutionary legacy -- or baggage -- of the past. EVERY species with sexual reproduction discriminates according to gender!
Sexual competition enters the picture unavoidably as soon as you introduce a member of the opposite gender to a single-gender group.
If I have 5 guys in a room working on a startup, and I add a "cute girl", it will immediately change the dynamic and become a distraction and likely become divisive.
You're NOT going to be able to counter both biological and social factors built up over time.
I would hypothesize that if you took any productive small startup, and swapped out a male for a female of equal ability, it would probably destroy the cohesion.
However it's a damn-near-impossible to do decent research on this question. There are only two possible answers, A and B, but if your results show A then you'll be lauded and become the subject of approving articles like this one, and if your results show B then you'll be condemned and possibly hounded out of your job like Larry Summers. When there's such an incentive to get the socially-approved answer rather than the scientifically correct answer, lousy research tends to proliferate.
Even if you start from a point of complete genetic equality in aptitude, all it takes is any kind of cultural or social bias to create a selection pressure which will lead to genetic difference.
Given the historically different roles of men and women, it would be vanishingly unlikely for there not to be genetic differences.
If being very good at a task leads to more reproductive success, and only one gender performs that task, then only one gender receives the benefits of that selection pressure (to the extent of sex-chromosome-specific loci).
On the flip side, there is evidence that being TOO much of an outlier is negative. The smartest people tend to be more socially marginalized, both voluntarily and involuntarily. So it's possible that the top people are essentially evolutionary mistakes (as they are LESS likely to reproduce), and as evolution seems to roll the dice more with males than females, more males will turn out like this.
In a post-Darwinian society, this all goes out the window. It's just a historical relic of not being able to tinker with our genome directly, and having to rely on sexual reproduction.
One of the more interesting things he went over from the book was the discrepancy between males and females in PhD in the hard sciences. While many claimed discrimination, what it turned out to be a slew of different issues. Except from his lecture, taken without permission:
Why Are Female Faculty Members Underrepresented at Research Universities Relative to Liberal Arts Colleges 1. Gender differences in preferences for teaching vs. research 2. Perceptions by female PhDs that research universities are not hospitable environments for them 3. Perceptions by female PhDs that there is more gender discrimination against female faculty at research universities 4. Actual gender discrimination against female PhDs in the hiring process and against female faculty in salary, tenure, promotion and resource allocation decisions at research universities 5. The difficulty of combining family and career at research universities
The remainder of my discussion is going to focus on the last explanation and discuss some policies designed to reduce these difficulties that have been implemented at the University of California. However, before doing so, I want to stress that issues relating to the conflict between family and career that professional women face are not unique to academia. For example, 1. Why are female lawyers underrepresented among the partners of large law firms? 2. Why are female doctors underrepresented among neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons and overrepresented among family practice physicians and pediatricians?
National Research Council Committee (that I served on) Survey In 2004-2005 the National Research Council Committee on Gender Differences in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics
Faculty surveyed departments in research universities in six disciplines – biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. A second survey surveyed over 1,800 faculty in these departments. Among its major findings were: 1. If a male and a female apply for the a position, the female is more likely to be invited for an interview 2. If a male and female are both interviewed for a position, the female is more likely to receive the job offer. Hence 3. Female under representation relative to their share of the new PhD pool is due primarily to their not applying for jobs at research universities as often as males do. Furthermore 4. Female assistant professors in these fields are more likely to leave their positions than their male colleagues prior to being considered for tenure. Given that they are considered for tenure, they are more likely to be promoted and receive tenure than their male colleagues, but their average time until receiving tenure is longer than their male colleagues’ average time 5. There were no differences in the probabilities of being promoted to full professor or the time it took to receive this promotion. Source: National Research Council, Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2009)
/end quote Granted, this does not directly apply to top scientists but I think many of you would agree that the fact that the volume of highly trained (read: PhD.) women scientists is significantly lower than that of men probably leads, in part, to the discrepancy among top scientists.
There is also the issue of having children. One article I read ascribed a great deal of disparity at the top simply to time: If you take time off from your career to raise children, you have thousands fewer hours to devote to your profession. Even if the male partner is willing and able to do the child-rearing, it doesn't follow that the female partner will therefore abdicate.
Assuming reproductive opportunities as a major driver of behavior, professional success leading to increased social status is a far larger differentiator in males. People are lazy and if they don't have to try hard in a certain category, they generally won't. This says nothing about males being smarter; simply that they try harder because they have to in order to get laid. (Or think they do.)
This is somewhat akin to an evolutionary arms race with predators and prey getting better each generation because their counterpart was better in a previous generation.
If a guy is a gamer, so what; everyone knows guys who are gamers. If a guy is a scientist, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. If a guy makes $100k a year, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. You have to do even better in order to stand out. (Note the attention you'd get, however, if you were a female in any of these categories.)
Likewise, nobody is surprised when Grandma can cook, to take a traditional gender example. But a guy who can cook like Grandma? Now that stands out.
So to some extent it doesn't even matter which gender did which thing -- divvied up randomly, whichever category is overrepresented may start a self-feeding evolutionary cycle within that category.
This could mean that something which was purely social ends up leading to a genetic difference. For example, male 3D spatial relation ability.
By the same token, I would expect female lions to be better at this than male lions!
By contrast, there is nothing about a female being predisposed to be a good scientist which would make you stand out as a good mate in, say, Saudi Arabia. And it could be downright dangerous in Afghanistan under the Taliban. If your abilities aren't recognized as a positive then they won't result in positive selection pressure.
All it takes is selection pressure and you eventually get a noticeable genetic difference. Social differences are a huge selection pressure, so it would be astounding if there WEREN'T genetic gender differences in aptitude for certain subjects.
Hmm, I think I just shot down the political correctness lobby by working from first principles.
This makes sense, especially as a number of people I know feel stupid because they have test anxiety. My wife included. "Non-"tests such as these seem like they could help quite a few, as they have the exact same physical location as real tests, but break the trend of habitual anxiety because little to nothing is on the line. Practice tests elsewhere don't share the classroom setting, and there's quite a bit of evidence that location influences memory / emotion, so it would seem they should be about as effective as they are at combating anxiety (ie: not much, and not for many (anecdotally)).
edit: <strikeout>Though, to be potentially inflammatory, this does seem to support the opposite stereotype of men having more control over (non-anger-based) emotions than women. Especially when you look at the original article (linked below by Locke1689: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596), and see almost no difference in score distribution for men but huge changes for women in the B and C categories (A had almost no change - surprise, surprise, the ones without testing problems showed no gain).</strikeout>
Although I don't have the source on hand, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece a few months ago reporting a similar effect in the performance of white basketball players relative to that of blacks in American high schools.
For a hard-headed introduction to this subject, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Women and men have different cognitive strengths: on average, women are more verbally fluent and are better at inferring emotional states from facial expressions and body language, whereas men are better at spatial rotations and abstract reasoning. Women do better or worse on typically "male" tasks depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles and the corresponding levels of androgens ("male" hormones) in their bloodstreams. Patients undergoing male-to-female sex-change operations do progressively worse on "male" tasks and better on "female" ones as the estrogen therapy progresses, with the opposite effect in female-to-male patients. And so on. While the bell curves substantially overlap, the notion that men and women are cognitively identical is scientifically untenable.
Perhaps the continuing disparity in the abstract sciences points to discrimination against women in those subjects. And yet, women make up approximately 56% of college graduates, with men at 44%—a 12-point gap. I find it telling that virtually no one decries this disparity, nor infers from it a systemic anti-male bias in higher education.
The authors of these kinds of studies clearly want there to be no gender gap. (The results of this study could reasonably be described as "the 15-minute writing test that boosts female learning and suppresses male learning".) When the political biases of the researchers are so evident, it's difficult to trust the results.
So basically females that think they are supposed to do poorly at physics, but affirm they are good at something, do better than ones that have no particular preconceived notion...
So we have to tell women they're going to fail at physics because they're XX and then at the last minute say "ha ha fooled you, you're really awesome". Then we'll have a well verified strongly supported ToE by next Christmas.
This is fantastic - now we can stop spending millions on "women in X", and instead spend the money on real science. Right?
I also noted it listed MEAN score instead of MEDIAN.
This would allow for a small number of people to spike the score. For example, a group of friends, or a study group. I have tutored students from a 60 or 70 to close to 100% in the space of a single math test.
If the divvying up happened to put a few more brainiacs in one group and a few more dullards in another, this could account for the entire swing.
The specifics of dividing up the groups is very important. For example, if one entire classroom got Essay A and another got Essay B, even if there were equal numbers of bodies, it would only take one good study group to account for the discrepancy.
What has this got to do with physics and why are universities so interested in students' private lives?
Speaking of control, writing about values in a physics class could cause people otherwise interested in physics to lose interest in the class.
(cheek <- tongue)
We are at a point where men are starting to realize that gender imbalance works both ways, where lots of comments decry the article's inattention to the male decrease in performance.
But there's still a taboo.
"[these days] a shape is being ascribed with very high content" - a phrase from a good movie about another society living an artificial reality - socialism of the Soviet Union 25+years ago.