How Elementary School Teachers Biases Can Discourage Girls from Math and Science
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm certain it's not just girls vs boys, either. I'm convinced adults are consciously and unconsciously acting as a giant sorting hat and shuffling children into preconceived interests, activities, and careers based not just on gender, but on ALL those things we like to hope don't matter but stubbornly persist in mattering: gender, race, ethnicity, wealth of parents, religious preference of parents, attractiveness, height, voice tonality, presupposed future sexual orientation, and on and on.
We do have a really cool experiment that just started this year, though: a mandatory computer science curriculum in Britain[1]. It'll be a lot harder to convince impressionable kids that they are no good at computers (because they "don't look like it") when everyone is learning it from kindergarten on. It's unfortunate that we'll have to wait another 10 - 15 years to see what effect that will have, though.
[1] http://pando.com/2014/02/10/by-next-year-coding-will-be-mand...
I'm a trans woman (MtF). This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) I've observed something about gender stereotypes just from having lived on both sides.
One stereotype that's widely known in the trans community is that a disproportionately large percentage of trans women work in tech (or are tech hobbyists). The "MtF CS nerd" is probably the biggest trans stereotype I can think of.
This stereotype doesn't extend to trans men (FtMs). In fact, it's assumed that the ratio of MtFs to FtMs in tech is about the same as the ratio of cis men to cis women in tech.
In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).
The only real conclusion is that whatever biased us towards or against careers in tech based on our perceived genders must have occurred in childhood, definitely before college and probably before high school as well. It probably happened in toddlerhood, really. There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed into the spam filter.
This is why I think putting pressure on companies to recruit more and more adult women is fundamentally flawed. There just aren't enough adult cis women who are interested, no matter how much any company tries to recruit. I'm also particularly appalled by attempts to demonize Linus Torvalds for not having enough women as core kernel developers: it's not his fault that people perceived as female (i.e. cis girls and pre-transition FtMs) are told as early as preschool that they shouldn't be interested in technology. Fix that part of society instead of demonizing project leaders.
paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
bbc news article w/ video: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29418230
I think we read Table 1 differently: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/table/T1...
> And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connectivity are negligible until testosterone kicks in.
Possibly, I'm not a biologist, but the 4th paragraph of the intro is interesting in that regard:
"Prenatal hormone exposure is known to influence children’s toy preferences as girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an inherited enzymatic defect....show more boy-typical toy preferences than do their unaffected sisters or control girls....This preference is evident in CAH girls who look like and are reared as girls ... and despite the fact that most of these girls have typical female gender identity... When parental socialization was explicitly studied, one study found that CAH girls are more strongly encouraged to play with female-typical toys than are unaffected female siblings, yet they still show a masculine toy preference.... Thus toy preferences appear sensitive to prenatal androgen exposure..."
Well, I suspect that there are multiple issues at play that make techies more likely to have the MtF transition:
1) There are simply a lot more males in tech. So the MtF transition is likely to be way more common than the reverse.
2) Techies have money. Gender transition takes quite a bit of time and resource that someone poor is not going to have.
3) Bias to late twenties/early thirties probably makes sense as that's the first point where you have the resources and support to pull off the transition but is still early enough that your social system hasn't hardened into place (Trans-changes when you already have children are very disruptive).
> There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new
> and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed
(Upvotes to the parent, if so.)
What you're saying instead suggests that it's actually the continued androgenizing effect of male gonads on the body during puberty that determines whether the brain dimorphisms responsible for different mathematical aptitudes develop. Neat!
What the link says (and proves): after screening off sex-linked differences in aptitude for mathematics (by giving high school kids "mathematical IQ" tests, etc.), there's no difference left over in how often women vs. men go into math/CS. Both men and women go as often as they have potential in the field.
The only thing left to explain is where the difference in aptitude comes from. Right now, it is assumed to be a result of developmental androgen cues that cause spacial-navigation-related parts of the brain to grow bigger in men vs. women.
Transpeople, as a group that much more often gets a non-sex-linked androgen dose in the womb, let you take that apart further into the individual possible factors of "androgen exposure in the womb" vs "androgen exposure at puberty".
But, of course, everyone always derides the idea because "we tried this" with New Math in the 70s. No, we didn't. We tried to teach some parts of discrete math (which are formal abstractions) to 5- or 6-year-olds, who weren't yet at the formal operational stage of cognitive development. You can't teach a 6-year-old about set theory any more than you can teach a 6-week-old about object permanence. You have to start when they're older. But "older" doesn't mean "an optional thing to be taught at university!" It's a formative skill, and if you don't pick it up right when you're first able to pick it up, trying to force it into your mind later is somewhat like trying to learn a new spoken language in adulthood when you've been monolingual for your entire life until then.
I think you may be making a mistake in assuming that people are interested in nothing more or less than addressing the problem. From where I'm sitting, people are interesting in addressing the problem and having a scapegoat.
It's always easier to blame a small group of people than it is to accept that you are part of the problem.
1. I'm a white male. I kinda don't have to worry about it.
2. I came from somewhere where this was less of a problem. Ironically, "lack of diversity" wasn't as much of an issue in the bigger corporations I worked for in Houston. The "boys club" thing is just worse in Silicon Valley than in Texas, from what I remember. I know it's probably tough for some Californians to hear this, but I'm just going to lay it out there from a Texan: between the frat-like feeling of some startups and the amount of cat calling I see on the streets of SF (that I never saw in Texas), y'all have a sexism problem.
Ultimately, though, the women in tech in SF with whom I work say it is a problem and they tell me (and other men) that they work in tech because they love it, but that it certainly isn't easy. I'm choosing to take them at their word.
You hear about it more in this field because - in part - there's a belief that diversity of origin and diversity of life experience leads to more creative solutions, products, and ways of working. I'm not quite sold on this idea, yet, but I'm open to the concept.
I still get angry at the suggestions that people sometimes make that amount to affirmative action or quotas for hiring, but that's why I think the ultimate solution is to stop pigeon-holing children from birth. We wouldn't have to jump through all these hoops in the first place.
Women form a much smaller proportion of computer science students and it's shrinking every generation. And we're a generation further on from any kind of real organized social pressure against professional women in general while the field gets less and less diverse.
So it's a lot more uncomfortable for programmers than it ever was for lawyers.
I don't particularly see a point to making sure that we continue with fascist practices in specific sectors of our lives. If democracy, and consequently diversity, is a good thing for our legal system, then why is it a bad thing for our corporate structure?
Nobody is stopping women from shaping the world. Women need to just fucking change the world and stop asking men for permission.
Bill Burr said it best:
Mike Rowe (who has agendas of his own I am sure), has commented on this discrimination/vilification of the trades many times in the past. Parents and teachers will frequently discourage teens from pursuing careers in the trades because they believe the only way to be successful is to go to college.
If the trades are incorrectly perceived as low-paying, that could help explain why calls for more women in the trades seem to be underrepresented.
Still, it's pretty frustrating to hear people talk about the gender disparity in the trades as if they're talking about ditch digging--i.e. as a benefit rather than hindrance to women. Teaching and nursing both require education, so the options available to women without education are measurably worse.
...people want this? what's good about it?
I get that there's such a thing as "partial credit," but seriously? What kind of math are they teaching?
Correct, the tests are very different:
"We measure teachers’ gender biased behavior by comparing their average marking of boys’ and girls’ in a “non-blind” classroom exam to the respective means in a “blind” national exam marked anonymously.
To construct a measure of teachers' biased behavior we combine the scores from the GEMS 5th grade external exam with those of internal exams held in the middle of 6 th grade. The GEMS test scores is a “blind” assessment since the GEMS exams are graded by an independent agency where at no stage are the identity and gender of the student revealed. In contrast, the internal exam is graded by the student’s teacher and therefore it is a “non-blind” assessment. We assume that this measure of teacher’s stereotypes captures her/his overall perception about gender cognitive differences and we use it as a proxy for her/his level of prejudice and discriminatory behavior in class . 15"
(The paper is surprisingly quiet about what the "internal exams" actually are.)
(Seriously, it's kind of boggling going back and looking. The entire study rests on the exact comparability of the two sets of tests allowing claims of teacher bias by gender to then give later causal effects... and not only can they not establish the comparability in any remotely rigorous way, they don't even tell you what one set really is!)
Now that I have a daughter I will work hard at home to let her know that she can be whatever she wants, but I feel bad for the kids that can't get that reinforcement at home.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...
If we could reach people like her and make the impression that such attitudes are detrimental to the future of every child she teaches, perhaps more progress could be made.
It's controversial, but it has some ideas not usually tossed around in these debates. It certainly brings at least as much to the table as an article suggesting a small study done in Israel explains America's STEM gender differences.
Male elementary teachers not only represent a small 3%, but has extraordinary standards put on them, where people expect them represent the male gender. Additionally, male elementary school teachers are looked at with suspicion, where co-workers wonder if newly employed male teachers are sexual predators or just failures for not picking normal male jobs. Unsurprising, this lead to over 50% of graduates who enter the work force to switch job within the first year.
This is the context and environment this NY times article exist in. It should come as no surprise that an environment this toxic to gender equality produces biases.
In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects...
And the original paper if you have access to NBER: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20909
Since I can't see the paper: did they type these up, or maybe have one person re-write all of the papers going to both graders? Maybe things are different in Israel (where the study was conducted) but handwriting would have given a stranger at least an 80% chance of correctly guessing the sex of the test-taker in the schools I attended.
When you start with flawed assumptions, you will never get an accurate solution. The hypothesis that vicious and systemic oppression of females since birth is keeping them out of Computer Science is hardly sound. While there may be an element of discrimination in all professions that tend to be dominated by one sex, I think it's time to look a little more closely at the situation.
Humans are a sexually dimorphic species. This means that on a genetic and physiological level, our sexes are distinct barring genetic anomalies such as Klinefelter syndrome and other rare conditions. Now as with anything that deals with biology, there is a massive amount of variation within each classification category, i.e. sex. This being said, we can and have done studies measuring the distribution (mean and variation) of tendencies for both sexes to find that they are quite distinct at a physiological level.
This means that when comparing the mean male adult brain to the mean female adult brain, the neural architecture is quite distinctly different. This has natural consequences in our behavior, predispositions, illnesses and life outcomes.
For example, it is found that the mean male does better on visuospatial tasks than the mean female, whereas females tend to do better on verbal tasks. Now all the usual disclaimers apply about cognitive testing biases and sample populations, but there is a slight empirical difference.
This is why in certain Nordic countries which pride themselves on being the most sexually egalitarian, the polarization of traditional careers is at a record high. For example, comparing two equally lucrative professions, on average men tend to study engineering and females tend towards nursing. As these countries have worked tirelessly to eradicate discrimination from their education, social, legal and professional systems, the only variable left to control for is personal preference which tends to gravitate towards sexual averages.
In conclusion, I find it often helps to frame a problem from an empirical point of view before assuming the cause and prescribing a treatment a priori.
Now, are all the developed countries in the world at the level of the Nordic countries in terms of sexual egalitarianism? Most likely not, though I doubt they're exactly Saudi Arabia either, which some of the more radical pundits tend to vociferously imply publicly at every opportunity.
Empirical and rational thought are gifts left to us by our ancestors after thousands of years of toil. I find it disappointing that we constantly fall into these irrational situations simply due to knee-jerk emotional outrage over perceived injustices. I hope one day rationality and empirical thought become the core education platform for mankind.
To turn the empiricism around a bit: the gender disparity among those with perfect SAT Math scores is about 2:1, and is less in the whole 700-800 range. Given that most engineering programs draw from the 600-800 range, how on earth do you explain the 4:1-5:1 disparities you observe in these programs in the face of a much lower disparity in mathematical aptitude in the relevant range?
Moreover, if the disparities are rooted in biology rather than sociology, how do you explain why the percentage of CS degrees awarded to women is half of what it was 30 years ago? http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel....
This is perfectly in line with the statement I made. Just because females with high SATs are more than capable of doing CS, doesn't mean they are interested in it as a career. This is most likely due to their innate predispositions for other types of work. This may be tough for lifelong programmers to understand, but the majority of computer scientists see this field as just work and nothing else. There is none of that Zuckerbergian passion that drives most programmers.
A great example is a guy like Elon Musk, vs a guy like Linus Torvalds. Both undoubtedly prodigious programmers, but one kept doing it even when he no longer hand to, and the other jumped ship onto his other, more pressing, passions.
From a personal example, a close female relative of mine is a brilliant girl who has outperformed me at every academic level. She chose to specialize in the medical field, because it suited her interests more. She is incredible at math and would have made an excellent programmer, but she just doesn't have a passion to spend the rest of her life doing it.
What my argument boils down to is this: girls and boys are biologically different, and thus they enjoy doing different things. Why are certain vocal groups trying to force them into roles which they may not desire? Equality of opportunity will not yield equality of outcomes when individual choices vary.
Edit: removed ad hominem
That doesn't explain why the field is becoming less popular with women. Unless you think the gender distribution of innate predispositions is making significant changes over a period of only a few decades.
I think its a lot more likely that rightly or wrongly, an impression was created that computing as a field was unwelcoming to women, which started driving down participation, and the lower female participation reinforced the impression that the field was unwelcoming to women, in a positive feedback loop.
And based on that you concluded that women are less interested in sciences because of their biology. You seem to be ignoring the fact that girls are actively discouraged from being interested in certain fields. But that couldn't have anything to do with it, could it? Must be the biology...
Free will.