Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
Does this not mean we have a gender bias towards females in STEM at the education level?
If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school.
It's disappointing because it takes away agency and becomes a form of control.
We know that by nature, men and women MUST have different interests on average, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in each other and our species would die :).
Can't we just accept that we make different choices sometimes and try as best as we can to make things progress to the best of our capabilities, regardless of how much each gender contributes to each human endeavour?
In third world countries, women reprensent 50% of the students in engineering classes ( for reasons that are easily understandable).
Actually, the bias observed applyies in countries where freedom of choice is given to everyone.
> claim is "sexism".
I disagree. The differences could be societal, cultural or biological. For example, I don't think it's contested that at least some women pick some career choices due to the want to have/raise children. People could argue indefinitely as to exactly how much influence each factor plays, but to call 'sexism' simply because there are gender differences seems incorrect.
That's how I understood it.
> If you suggest different reasons, you'd get in trouble if
> you worked at Google for example.
Unfortunately, it seems so. And this is the same most places I've experienced. In academia for example, you couldn't even pose the question in most places - there would be protests, your tenure would be under review, your funding would be cut - to name a few possibilities. If academics are nothing, they are overly cautious.
You have to ask yourself for example why the term "intellectual dark web" was coined [1]. They don't refer to them as 'wrong' or 'conspiracy theorists', they just pose different questions, and for that alone they were ostracized.
I refuse to live in a world where even posing the question is not possible. If Google won't dare hire me, I'll build my own theme park with blackjack and hookers [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Dark_Web
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-going-to-build-my-own-them...
I see it naively like this: life is a long process of eliminating options that don't meet your interests or best chances at success. Women in general have more options in life than men, career being only one aspect of that, which means that over time, any one of those options is going to be chosen less and less.
Sociology distinguishes itself from economics in the assumption that people's choices are the result of stupidity or victimization. I just looked up the top math student in my 5th grade class. She's a 5th grade public school teacher after attending an Ivy for Geography. I have not the slightest clue why one would ever study Geography in college, nor would I find it financially prudent in my situation to be a public elementary schoolteacher, but I also know this person to be quite smart and fully-capable of making her own choices. I talk to female H1B engineers that came here for a better life, which was not STEM work, so they often quit as soon as they get a green card. I see women retiring earlier to start new careers. Female attrition is a constant feature of the entire STEM pipeline.
If I try to be honest with myself, I will admit that I was not at all intellectually interested in my engineering degree. Computers were always about creation and expression and social possibilities to me, not the pedantism and rigor that I practiced for financial reasons. I think we all just saw it as a test to see whether we could make it, or how well we could do, a game. It might as well have been pinball, and it never ends. 30-year SWE veterans still play leetcode. I am constantly being told that the opportunity to unleash my creativity and wonder upon the world is just around the corner. I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
All the STEM greats quit this game early. That says something. If Gates, Zuck, Musk, Jobs, etc. had never taken DiffEq, would they have been any less capable or motivated? I doubt it. The women that abandon STEM may have more in common with them than we admit. They're probably doing something better with their lives.
Maybe women leave STEM because they can.
Because everyone is pushed into STEM, I believe that the bar for engineering has been lowered. I'm a SWE and over the last few years, I've realized that more and more of my coworkers don't have any idea how computers work. Most can't use a shell, don't understand unix, never wrote a line of C, are unclear what a pointer is, that sort of thing. It's no longer a requirement to understand computers and computer culture to be employed as a developer.
I think a lot of older SWEs probably recall stereotypes of women and minorities not being able to do computers because most of them didn't grow up with the culture. In the 80s and 90s, it was much less common for those demographics to have a computer in the home and to have internet access. We tried to fix that by promoting diversity, especially in the STEM pipeline. In reality, that diversity just killed the culture by sinking it to the lowest common denominator, which looks a lot like leetcode.
> I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
Then you'd be poor, which is why you didn't dispense with all of that.
> Maybe women leave STEM because they can.
I can't wait to join them.
!
1. Girls who are interested in STEM tend to abandon it at the high school / undergraduate level [factual]
2. That one factor in that may be a gender bias favoring males during this period in a students education. [well supported by academic research, though I presented the information casually and without citation]
If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
The sex/gender of the teacher didn't play a role at the middle school level though. I find it hard to keep up the narrative of "society doesn't want girls to go into STEM" when there's a lot of affirmative action, selective media representation, lots of programs etc. "But it's only to offset the invisible bias" I'm sure some might argue, but I think they overlook the possibility that there is nothing keeping them down and they just make different choices.
I didn't downvote your previous comment, but it did sound like you were a bit reaching for straws to turn an observation into the desired outcome by filling in the middle.
However, gender bias and lack of representation are, from anecdotal observation, the most cited reason in academic journals for the lack of women in STEM. Take that for what you will.
And by all means make a counter argument, edify me, cite sources, but burying a comment for even the nascent mention of a connection between gender bias and the lack of women in STEM seems to demonstrate a lack of willingness of some on HN to even engage with the idea, which, funnily enough, could give credence to the existence of gender bias against women in STEM.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976177417...
Obviously the validity of this is highly controversial.
This is according to this[1] report from Plan International Norway (whose author's "focus is on gender, technology and social justice"), which has the objective of finding ways to actually increase the participation of girls in STEM in Scandinavian countries, where their participation, paradoxically, is just about the average of the world at around 30% female, against 19% in the USA.
From the paper itself:
"More recently, Stoet and Geary’s (2018) paper on the «gender equality paradox» demonstrated that, perhaps surprisingly, the more «gender equal» a country is, the larger the gender gap in STEM education and careers."
Despite that statistic, the Scientific American[2] claims that this is NOT due to women choosing differently than mean, but because "Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM".
I don't know how they came up with this conclusion (they link to a paper[3] correlating student's mothers biases with the student's later choices - which is NOT what they had just claimed and seems to only weakly give the argument any substance), but that goes directly against the new research we're discussing, which seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion.
[1] https://www.telenor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Gende...
[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-l...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604569_Achieveme...
No, you can't infer this conclusion from that paper.
Yes, the paper claims that there exists some bias towards girls (from teachers' grading). And the sentence you quote claims that without that specific bias, the gender gap would be in favor of boys ("12.5% larger"). However, we do not know if this figure is free of bias (IMO, fair to say probably not). Therefore, there might be other biases in STEM in favor of boys that could explain the gender gap in their favor.
What is true is teachers overrate girl's performance earlier in school compared to boys, then girls catch up and overtake, often approaching their teacher's predictions. This might well be a case of matching expectations. Another, to me reasonable, explanation for the results is that teacher's grading includes potential, based on their experience. It's hard to know, and would be very hard to ethically test.
This area deserves more research, and less sgouty arguments, but there isn't a clear cut answer.
Before discussing this, I'd like to make sure I don't strawman the point you're trying to make: the only way I can interpret this, as of now, is that you think it's "reasonable" to believe that girls inherently have more potential than boys. And, even disregarding that, that it would be reasonable to grade based on "potential" than on actual performance.
I ask to make sure because there's no way I got that right. Mind you, some groups of people say stuff like that in earnest so I'm not sure if this is an instance of that or, I hope, I misinterpreted.
It could be one gender does have greater mental potential -- certainly one has greater physical potential, but the gap is much smaller and certainly not yet decided.
Well, since you also make clear that you believe such a thing only because you choose to and without evidence, I guess there's really no point in discussing it. All I can say is that I disagree, entirely, and this article (and many others with similar findings) are more than enough reason why.
It is true girls currently, on average, do significantly better at exams at many levels, in particular to get into University (at least, in the UK). Why is open to debate.
Actually being brilliant is much less important than if someone believes in you.
What surprises me is that, from what I've read, the IQ literature doesn't seem to take this basic compounding affect into account. So it seems like some skepticism should be held for the idea that IQ is ~50% genetics and ~50% environment. It could be 5% genetics that compounds into 50%. That would seem to be in line with the observation that the measured heritability of intelligence increases with age.
According to most of the IQ literature, a person's IQ does not significantly change over time, which means that any compounding effect you might find in academic or professional performance is completely unrelated to the person's IQ actually increasing because of that.
If you're saying that a person's environment (e.g. education) doesn't causally affect abstract reasoning skills (as measured by IQ), then that is not correct according to the currently available evidence.
"We looked at 42 datasets using several different research designs and found that, overall, adding an extra year of schooling in this way improved people's IQ scores by between 1 and 5 points."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180621112004.h...
My previous comment was simply in regard to holes in the analysis of IQ heritability data.
First of all, the additional year of schooling has not been shown to compound, i.e. it works for 1 or 2 years, doesn't mean it works for several years (if it doesn't, then as I had claimed, the gains are NOT very significant).
Second, the highest change (5 points per year) was for the cases where "Students who made an age cutoff to begin schooling were compared with students who had not.", which seems to me to imply the difference was of only one year (students who did not make the cutoff had to wait another year to get in), while the other cases, which are what we normally think of when considering years of schooling (i.e. students who were going to get the same number of years of schooling VS the drop-outs) the increase was only 1-2 points over a few years maximum... again, not really very significant (I would consider at least 10 points to be something significant in terms of changing possible outcomes for the person).
Here's where I found most of this information: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brainstorm/201806/...
Happy to be corrected if I misunderstand something.
I'd go so far as to say that the rising prevalence of test preparation is critically reducing the signal these tests provide. When one cohort routinely prepares for the aptitude test and another one doesn't, the latter is going to appear disadvantaged, but what's being measured is no longer what the test was designed to measure.
Top tier American universities have long been aware of this effect, which is why they negatively weight certain groups' test scores to balance out the bonus they are getting from test preparation. It's gotten so bad that the UC system is abandoning standardized testing altogether.
This is a convenient narrative, far more pleasant than the more likely explanation of pervasive racism against Asian Americans by admissions teams.
It's important to look at the mechanism here. I'd guess it's mediated by pushing those students harder. Which is a double-edged sword; there is a reason we don't just push everyone harder.
Girls overtake boys in terms of grades assigned by teachers, but they don't in terms of scores on standardized tests. You can make the argument that the grades are just another method of overrating girls' performance.
Raising the respect and salary of teachers would be a good starting point. Preferential hiring to balance the gender ratio of role models in a school may be helpful as well.
> I find that the gender bias does not differ by teachers’ gender in literature, and only marginally in math. In this subject, female teachers are less biased in favor of girls than male teachers
So adding more male teachers might marginally increase the discrimination rather than decrease it.
This is a societal / financial issue.
Societal because boys see education as a woman's job, which is reinforced through their educational experience of having mostly female teachers.
Financial because as much as Americans like to think that they live in a progressive society, males are typically expected to be the primary income earner. Education simply does not pay well; particularly when you consider the education and credentials required. Education in the United States has added increased prerequisites to become a teacher in a public school. In all likelihood, your child's teacher either already has or is working on their master's in education to maintain their teaching credentials. If they have aspirations of being an administrator they are likely working on a doctorate. This to earn a maximum annual salary of less than $100,000 and only after decades of working for a school district.
This is like the mythical pool of untapped female engineering talent VPs of Diversity and Inclusion imply exists.
It’s not really like software engineering where people have to know algorithms and do whiteboard exercises. It’s about credentials and desire.
You have similar gender gaps in nursing as well.
At the same time, the idea that mainly women should solve the problem of "young boys need positive male role models" seems ironic. I'm sure many women do care because they want their sons to thrive, but men want their sons to thrive too, right?
British teaching unions shot it down - said it was misogynistic to hire men as it implied women weren’t doing a good enough job. This logic of course doesn’t apply to tech.
It's no surprise that men are outnumbered in higher education too. There is always talk of increasing the number of women in STEM fields, but never any talk of increasing the number of men in the arts, English or the -ologys.
Don't get me wrong, I am very happy to see equal opportunity. I am glad to see the riddance of "toxic" environments that discourage people from fulfilling their objectives based on arbitrary characteristics. But I also look at the future young men of today with genuine concern.
It doesn't really make sense to "treat everyone the same", since different people have different needs. Not everyone needs a wheelchair, but some people do, for example.
That's a strange thing to pull out of my mouth, given what I said. If you're trying to say that gender shouldn't be a factor in determining a person's needs, then you're obviously wrong. Cis men don't need access to feminine hygiene products, for example.
You'd obviously want to take into account as many factors as possible when trying to work out a person's needs relative to someone else's. Socioeconomic background is a good start, but obviously doesn't capture all of the relevant variables. A trans person can come from a middle-class background, but be at a higher risk of bullying than the other middle-class children at a high school, for example.
On this particular point, I think it's because STEM-like fields are quite economically useful compared to the arts. On average, it would probably "hurt" men (in financial/power terms) to encourage more of them to go into the arts.
A lot of the male prison population usually have mental illness, sexual assault histories, were raised by a single parent (often the mother) or more generally a broken home. It's not ideal, but if we encouraged more male teachers into the early education system, perhaps young boys would have a good male role model to look up to.
Viewing it from the the frame of regenerative education though, this particular problem is lessened. In this frame, children are not taught from a curriculum that the adults choose. There are no standards, or grading. Instead each child chooses something meaningful to make a contribution. Children are given a framework in which they can understand whatever it is they set out to do. They learn how to problem solve, critically think, and reflect, as they go about trying to make meaningful, real-world contributions that have real consequences. Teachers are there as resources. The feedback doesn't come from teachers, but rather, when they are trying to accomplish something that has real world consequences. You're not graded by an external source against a standard, but instead, you evaluate whether the outcome was really what you set out to be. It folds within it "grit" and "growth mindset", but not for its own sake.
In such a setup, it is no longer about gender bias (conscious or unconscious), or even equal opportunities.
Furthermore, achievement is reframed from effort rewarded in external praise and material gains from society and inverted to what you meaningfully add to the community and society. What develops is intrinsic motivation and purposeful action. There isn't an exhortation to "apply yourself", or the "when you grow up and have to pay your rent and etc". The childhood dreams, aspirations, and imagination is redirected towards something meaningful, instead of being crushed by the grind of adult living. Your ambitions are not about getting your just rewards for working hard, or winning the lottery, or exploiting opportunities.
It doesn't have to be big things. There are ways to develop this from when a child is a toddler, starting with small contributions. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...