Study: Women performed better on a math test when using someone else's name

Here is the gist of it: The differences in participation and performance in math between women and men are due to cultural and environmental reasons, it has very little to do with intellectual capacity.

There seems to be a huge reluctance to give up this prejudice, it's always some sort of "there are exceptions, but women and men are different" and whatnot. They really aren't, not nearly to the degree indicated by the gender gap. Same with race.

I taught [remedial] maths in college where the girls outperformed the boys (I suspect because they tried much, much harder), so this topic always piques my interest.

I recall reading in several places that both genders do worse when one is primed (boys and girls do worse at math when you say 'boys are better at math'), but I couldn't find the studies.

Does anyone have a link to the study/studies that show both genders do worse when one is primed?

(While searching, I found some interesting criticism of stereotype threat due to "publication bias,"[0] which seems even more fascinating to me.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism

It would have been interesting if there was a 3rd leg where they issue the tests with an "anonymous id number" instead of having them write a false name...

I wonder if the effect is equivalent of a) writing a fake name vs. b) claiming anonymity will be maintained with a pre-printed number

The author seems to take this for granted with this statement; "At the most practical level, they speak to the benefits of using non-name identification procedures in testing," but writing a fake name precludes a lot of testing, so it would be helpful to know if the benefits extend to IDs.

I suspect that although there is clearly no reason to believe that women are less capable than men, there are psychological differences on men's and women's willingness to spend time on different type of subjects. Also, on how they evaluate their accomplishments.

Think of the mythical pizza-and-coke-debugging-nights in your own project no-one will ever use.

It made clear that boys and girls are motivated by different factors when learning. So I have a problem when I read this article and the first line is:

"There's an unfounded gender stereotype that says women aren't as good at maths as men."

Someone may have taught this writer that opening up with something "controversial" makes for good prose, but I think it just undermines the purpose of the article. There are plenty of statistics that show that technical fields, including math, are heavily male-dominated. Why would someone post something in hacker news that basically implies that this history is not real?

This gender gap certainly may not be because of latent gender differences in potential math skill. But if on average, women tend to be less interested in math, they will reach their mathematical potential less often. And based on the article I linked above, there are at least statistical differences between the motives of male and female students.

> Research finds the threat comes in two flavours. Women can fear their poor performance will be used to bolster the "women are weak at maths" gender stereotype (known as "group-reputation threat"). Or they can fear that their poor performance will be taken as proof that they conform to the stereotype ("self-reputation threat"). Both can undermine women's ability to fulfil their true potential.

Surely you can use that same logic to say that men are under the same fears and pressures to outperform women. Trying to argue a psychological handicap like the above -where the author cites two contradicting examples that are dependant on the individual- doesn't seem fair when it's only applied to women.

The fact is, the men under an alias in that study did also improve. And the men did still still perform better. So you could also argue that this study proved that men's true maths skills are unlocked by pretending to be someone else. Which then leaves me wondering why there's the statistical anomaly in favour of men (I'm doubly curious as I'd always assumed that the figures would be the opposite way around, if just because my wife is quite significantly better at that subject than I)

> The effect was stronger for women who cared more about maths.

No shit? People who are more interested in something are usually better at it?

How about "Women perform better under anonymity." Has maths anything to do about it?

Really, it does not look like they factored the 'maths' term out.

and if the result are representative, doesn't it rather show, that math-women tend to care more about how other people see them and math-men care less about it?

women perform better under an alias than as their real name.

however, i believe there is a flaw in this assumption/point/theory with the related data. how can you compare 2 sets of women without a baseline of their mathematical skills? it seems that they are assuming that both sets of women (true name and alias name) have are at the same mathematical skillset. i do not believe that is a fair assumption, especially when the testing set were all undergrads even more so with a testing set of 110 women.

i would be curious as to see this same test being performed with some sort of standard or minimum requirement for mathematical knowledge in order to create that variable as constant as possible.