Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I go on all the school trips. The trips to the tech museum see lots of the little boys running around, fascinated by the science. Most of her female peers... meh. Given that they all have the same classroom experience it seems to me that the explanation is outside of the classroom, and it starts early.
Gender role reinforcement is still very big in US culture. Girls are steered in the direction of !science repeatedly by parents, by TV, by media role models.
Like I say, I don't have an answer, but it saddens me and I desperately hope that as she moves towards middle school, the peer pressure and anti-intellectualism that is teenage-girl-culture in the US doesn't overpower the decreasing influence I have as a parent.
These days, well for the past several decades, I would say TV encourages boys and girls to be high pressure, well dressed lawyers, or maybe high pressure, not perhaps not as well dressed doctors.
But even the Fringe like TV shows show scientists to be mostly dweebs represented by terribly beautiful and well dressed people with boxy bulky square hipster glass frames. (This is why I had to go into normal engineering and was always scared away from fringe pseudo-science science -- I wasn't as attractive and didn't have the wardrobe dollars or fashion sense.)
But, sticking with a Simpsons theme, far more of our media projects female role models closer to Jessica than Lisa.
http://www.roominatetoy.com/ http://www.laurenipsum.org/
And, you know, a zillion other things, but these are the two I'm most familiar with at the moment for girls at your daughter's age.
I am indeed familiar with lots of options for girls her age, and I work with her to keep her interest level high with this stuff. I think if you're an engaged parent it's easy to find ways to enjoy science and technology with a daughter and ensure she learns this isn't just "boys stuff".
But I also see her peers and their parents and I see a far bigger push towards less empowering role models and less science-minded interests.
Last month I went to a little girl's birthday party. The invitation asked for a damn toy-stove for present. I bought a tablet, filled with nice content for kids and gave it instead. The father was not pleased at all, said that it was a girl and her 'femininity' should be cherished and if his daugher wanted a doll, she was getting a doll.
I need to get back to blogging in general as I think there are plenty of anecdotes worth sharing of science & tech parenting and startup life.
Sounds like you're on the right track already.
The main thing is to answer questions honestly - even early. Don't feel you have to coddle or dumb them down too much. When I explain things I use scientifically accurate (though obviously simpler wordage) explanations. I talk to her about the wonder of science and its explanatory power. They're way more sophisticated in their thought processes very young than popular culture would have you believe and they're eager to learn.
I got the telescope while she was young and she marveled at the details on the moon (craters, rough edges), and how many more stars you could see. The microscope didn't capture her attention (not yet anyway) so I don't push it.
The solar eclipse was a great excuse to break out pinhole camera-ing and there's a great photo of her holding a piece of paper with the light disc of the sun on it with a big dark chunk bitten out of it by the moon. Took her to NASA for the transit of Venus so she got to see it through high powered cameras of enthusiasts.
Then mostly just followed her interests.
She had a couple of ideas for "Dad wouldn't it be good if..." websites/services. So I've promised her next hackathon that comes up she can come, and Daddy will build the product but she has to be the PM and tell me what goes where and how it works, and we'll practice her presentation in advance and she can be on stage to do the pitch (and if she backs out and gets anxious she doesn't have to, that's okay, because it's not about forcing her to do something if she doesn't want to).
Realized this is becoming a very long answer, but that's basically how I am dealing with it.
:D
This is a gross misreading of history. Summers didn't make a disparaging comment about women's mathematical or scientific aptitude, he merely commented on a theory that men and women have the same average IQ, but different standard deviations in their scores.
The theory is that men and women have the same average IQ, a view supported by much research, but men's IQ standard deviation (deviation from the mean) is larger, which means the population of men includes more individuals who are both smarter and dumber than women, but with the same average value.
The theory is discussed in some depth here (scroll down to "The Trait-Spread Theory"):
http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/index.html#Gender_Issue...
Graphic:
http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/graphics/population_cur...
Summers' comments on this theory were widely misinterpreted as suggesting that women were't as smart as men, Summers couldn't extinguish the resulting brush fire, and he was forced out of his post as president of Harvard.
In short, it seems Summers overestimated the intelligence of his audience. There was nothing disparaging about his remarks, but they were perhaps a bit too technical for a public presentation for nonspecialists.
† Any statement that can be easily interpreted or misinterpreted as offensive is a stupid mistake for a university president.
Edit: though if you mean politicians then you're right, they're definitely at the edge - just the wrong edge. Bzing!
Edit: hah, yes I agree on politics.
Separately, people tenured in STEM positions score well, but they don't have the best grades or IQs. They are often there because they knew the right people, can argue for grants (ie their own relevance and skills), and work their asses off writing papers. I wish they were the smartest, but more often I've encountered narcissists who try to put their names on everything because it's the only way toward promotion (don't blame the player, blame the game).
When it comes to women, many grew up being told that if they do poorly in math/science it's ok because they're girls - this is AWFUL both immediately and downstream. Girls become more likely to blame bad performance on their sex and give up whereas guys blame bad performance as a fluke. In STEM fields, you encounter failure ALL the time, it sucks and you feel like a complete idiot. You just have to fight through it, and you're more likely to continue to fight if you aren't told you failed because of your sex.
It's obviously a much more complicated issue than what I laid out. It's a very tricky area riddled with people too easily offended or who capitalize on misquotes for political gain. Like I said, whether or not trends are biological or environmental, people should be told to pursue their dreams (it's not like I would tell some white kid playing basketball that he shouldn't dream of going pro because he's not as well represented or if he fails it's because he's white). Yes, that's a false equivalency, but demonstrates societal expectations from seemingly biological premises.
For context I'll add that I'm a guy who majored in engineering at a state school while my girlfriend graduated top 5 in her class at princeton in chemistry - we get into debates about this stuff all the time.
I'm SO SORRY for using this as forum to rant. Please forgive me HN.
Think about it. If men have a wider standard deviation from the norm, that means there are more criminals and morons among men than among women. I think that's consistent with everyday experience, and suggests that women are more likely to be mentally balanced and law-abiding. Public records support this conclusion.
It's all in how you look at it. The theory says that, on average, men and women have the same mental abilities, but in the extreme, there are more criminals and mentally challenged people among men. That is also supported by public records.
> Society is run by people at the edge of the bell curve ...
No, it isn't. Look at the average politician, or military leader -- these people aren't in any way extraordinary, to put it diplomatically. These are the people who steer society, not scientists and Nobel Prizewinners.
> ... if you say that there are less women at the edges than you are saying that it's no big deal we have less women in high-ranking positions.
Very intelligent people don't get into "high-ranking positions". They don't because voters don't trust them. The last genuinely intelligent person who ran for U.S. president was Adlai Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956), but the voters rejected him largely because of his obvious intelligence.
Also, please, say "fewer women", not "less women". The latter describes physically short people of the fair sex.
And if anyone took that position, the argument might be valid. But no one has, for a very good reason -- the theory doesn't support it.
It obviously goes both ways. Deviate too far in the direction of lower IQ and you end up with exponential reduction in means, power and choices. Following your suggestion of a direct correlation between IQ and success as in financial success, it can certainly be argued that men are worse off (and therefore more disparaged by his comments): if you end up with a high IQ, great for you. Go the other direction and your live will be miserable.
So even if you take Summers bell curve references at face value, they're an argument for why there are so few female Einsteins, not why there are so few female Congressmen or CEO's. I think if 35% of NASA engineers and 40% of F500 CEO's were women, you wouldn't see the same consternation about the representation of women in these fields.
Look at the four countries to the right where the girls did best relative to boys and the girls scores: Kyrgyz Republic (340), Qatar (393), Albania (406) and Jordan (433).
Compare to the girls score in countries where girls are alleged to be failing: United States (495), Denmark (494), Netherlands (520), Liechtenstein (511), Chile (433).
Notice that girls are doing better in the countries the NYT thinks are bad, like the US, than in the countries the NYT thinks are good such as Jordan.
But when we look at how well boys do, we may find that boys in country B do even worse than the girls, which means that country B scores better for some form of equality.
If we score policies by this metric then we may well advise that country A do things just to knock down the boys' scores. This is probably the wrong lesson to draw. We don't improve life or results for girls just by making things worse for boys. At best, a disparity highlights a place to look.
So the point isn't that it is bad to compare countries to each other. The point is actually that this comparison should consider girls-to-girls across countries, not just girls-to-boys inside each country.
In a society where girls are pushed not to continue, the minority that does continue is likely heavily weighted towards the ones who would have done better than the average girl. Therefore girls doing better is evidence of the selection process that got girls into that sample, and not the average abilities that girls have.
This may be true, but not for the typical given reasons, ie., because of pressure on girls to avoid science.
There is an interesting 2010 Norwegian documentary, Brainwash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask) which explores nature vs. nurture in terms of gender preferences in Norway (and includes some of the research of Simon Baron-Cohen) that can be found on YouTube.
In that series, IIRC, and roughly paraphrasing, it was said that when people are in a culture that is on the higher end of Maslow's Pyramid, it frees up people of all genders to make their careers be reflections of what truly interests them.
In the NY Times article, it is said,
boys are more likely than girls to “see science as something that affects their life.
and
For girls in some Arab countries, education is the only way to move up the social structure,” Mr. Schleicher said. “It is one way to earn social mobility.
In Norway, the documentary tries to examine why when there is so much cultural encouragement for gender neutral behavior and gender neutral training why there is still, regardless, such an imbalance of women that go into nursing compared to men that go into nursing.
Is that because society says, "only women can be nurses?" Apparently in Norway, the answer would be no. And the researchers would claim that Norwegian culture is at such a high level in terms of satisfying people's needs, that this gender preferences reflects real innate biological preferences and not culturally learned preferences.
In the United States, my belief is that kids of all ages are discouraged from entering STEM fields.
We tend to romantizice IT because in theory a single person is free to follow their visions. Being a hacker at home working on fancy projects is indeed cool. However, most IT jobs are a drag, you spend most of your time motionless in front of a computer, more often than not in an office in the basement while the (mostly female) PR department has their offices on the top floor with a view on the skyline.
By contrast, between a third and a half of the peers that I run into are women; eg:
http://65.54.113.26/Detail?entitytype=2&searchtype=2&...
.. one woman, 91 diverse publications, most leading to working implementations of actual robots, hand sign reading vision systems, etc.
I guess you could say IT is boring, let's go make robots with lasers.
EDIT: I should specify I'm talking from an Australian perspective, maybe our sheilas have more of a kick arse take no prisoners attitude?
- In every country, there are as many boys and girls taking the science exam, and the girls get a better average. But the top n students are all boys.
- In every country, there are three times as many boys taking the exam, and the girls get a better average.
In both cases, we could conclude that the girls outperform the boys if we use the average as metric. But the first scenario would echo Larry Summer's comment on large standard deviation, and the second would be an instance of selection bias.
Another point that would be interesting to know is wether gender relative performances at age 15 carrie on to later years.
Which gets us to sex and and the fact that sex is an ancient, ancient behavior whose irresistable force will shape the patterns of behavior in any culture. If you want to know why things look a certain way, start with sex.
Teen-agers want the attention of the opposite sex. In America, pretty teen-age girls uniquely have the opportunity to acquire as much attention as they desire and they spend a lot of their time and agency acquiring it. And it is by no means a symmetrical arrangement. The girls seeking attention only want it from a much smaller fraction of the boys.
So, a bunch of girls are gathering attention instead of studying. For most ordinary people--not necessarily Hacker News readers--studying hard enough to be able to program computers or deeply understand maths is a lot of work. And a bunch of girls don't need to bother. On the other hand, a bunch of boys have nothing better to do and can only hope that studying hard will pay off in the attention of girls down the road.
[1] I'm generalizing because pretty much all cognition is for the purpose of generalizing and this discussion is definitely about generalizations.
For most ordinary people [...] deeply understand maths is a lot of work.
And a bunch of girls don't need to bother. On the other hand, a bunch
of boys have nothing better to do and can only hope that studying hard
will pay off in the attention of girls down the road.
Do not make the same mistake evolutionary psychologists make all the time in assuming whatever you see culturally is hard-coded into the human mind. This is probably hard to notice until you start looking at a lot of other countries, where some are even more restrictive but others are way more liberal than the US.
Girls being encouraged to do nothing but look pretty and dig for wealthy husbands is not the hallmark of a free society and it is not somehow justifiable by making a hand-wavy statement about the supposed nature of the sexes.
Girls in the US score 120 points higher than they do in Uruguay - a country about the size and population of Alabama. Singapore is a data point in favor of women though the difference in scores is less than 0.2% and it has the population of Metro Atlanta. Likewise, Iceland is a data point where men lead by one point. It has a smaller population than metro-Evansville Indiana-KY.
Counting countries is meaningless, except as an excuse for a linkbait title.
From my own experience in the UK, I went to school with many clever girls but I think only a handful actually went into STEM careers and even then the most notable example went into pharmaceuticals science which seems a more female friendly industry than say, physics or mechanical engineering (incidentally, the same girl was the only female in my physics class, with 15 boys... perhaps this put her off even more!). Most girls went on to study medicine, law or business.
This looks like journalists attempting to get screen-views by using some vague data to stir up battle-of-the-sexes arguments.
when there is another source of comparative data available from a different test, namely the TIMSS test, which was conducted more recently.
http://timss.bc.edu/timss2011/international-results-science....
Those tests are distinct in what they test in mathematics,
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts...
and following the links about the science sections of each test may reveal some meaningful differences about how they test science. Both international testing programs look at the issue of how scores of girls and boys differ in each country tested, and both are based random sample surveys intended to be representative of the general student population in each tested country or region. Checking each international testing program against the other provides a chance to reality-check some of the findings.
What I notice about what I take (subject to correction by more exact data) to be a cultural difference influenced by differing schooling practices is that in east Asia, the other part of the world I have lived in besides the United States, girls of high school age seem more willing to show what they know in a testing situation and to engage with academic material that is deemed "boyish" in the United States than girls are in the United States. I am the parent of three sons and a daughter, and my wife grew up in Taiwan, so I've seen this from both sides of the male-female divide and from both sides of the Pacific. As an active volunteer in organizations related to gifted education reform, I'm very happy to see examples of countries in which girls don't go "underground" about their abilities as they reach high school age. I've known girls with strong interests and practiced ability in science throughout my life, but especially among girls who themselves received or whose parents received secondary education in science in east Asia.
I don't think the OP's point was to show that females are just better than men at science, in which case, yes, a count of published papers by gender would be one metric.