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Comment by enimodas | Hacker News Reader

I looked a bit at the gender distribution for the gold and silver medalists, I would guess only 1 in 10-20 is a girl, most seemed to be from the eastern bloc countries.

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I would not read to much into it. This is a very specialized competition that selected 6 people from an entire country.

Some aspects of soviet education are very conducive to these competitions (e.g. an emphasis on euclidean geometry). Because of this, a top 10% student from a former Soviet country will do much better than a top 10% American if neither have extra training in this sort of competition.

If anyone is interested in discussing women in STEM in general, this article is a very poor place to do it. Eg the US has done extremely poorly up till now compared with similar English speaking country's. There are just so many idiosyncratic features at play.

It is my privilege to know (just a little) the first United States woman to gain a gold medal at the IMO. I know her mother much better and discuss mathematics education with her online frequently. In all countries, it takes a really sound elementary education in math to gain a chance at qualifying, through repeated rounds of testing that winnow down a national population, for a national team to the IMO. Most of the United States young people I know who have made it onto the United States IMO team have been deeply involved in mathematics competitions at younger age levels for many years, and the young woman whose mother I know was no exception. She was homeschooled for her primary and secondary education. East Asian countries and some eastern European countries seem culturally (compared to the United States) to have much less of a presupposition than many Americans have that girls will not do well in math, and correspondingly more girls in those places do well in math because they stay involved in math.

Gender distribution, yes, that's what stands out. Aside from the gender imbalance, the US team looks pretty much like a typical slice of America, and the top teams are pretty much randomly scattered over the globe.

I can't believe the audacity of Po-Shen Loh to send a team exclusively of boys to the IMO. When you have to select 6 team members how can you NOT select at least 1 female? This flies in the face of all the outreach work people have been doing to get more girls into STEM, and this victory will only discourage them. It appears the top 3 teams are all 100% boys.

I'm delighted that this is currently the top comment here. It shows we are clearly concerned with the right issues. I hope from now on all national teams participating in international competitions will be gender balanced. In order to remedy this situation we need:

   1) A Twitter mob
   2) An email campaign addressed Po-Shen to not repeat this and discredit his work and efforts. 
   3) A post of the team's picture to the popular twitter/tumblr account which shames all male conferences and gatherings 
   4) An email campaign addressed to IMO to implement rules that all teams should be gender balanced.
   5) A solution to Poe's law.

You usually send them based on performance in national comp, so there is no subjective selection, you just have to make it to top 5

Tests are written by people and their biases recognized or unrecognized will end up in tests. What about the way math is taught? Or the perceptions of gender differentials in math? I'm thankful that I have the privilege of not being told that my gender was a handicap for my field (statistics).

"Tests are written by people and their biases recognized or unrecognized will end up in tests"

Honestly I have an extremely hard time imagining how math exams are gender biased. Have you even taken a look at this year or past imo's? You're speaking completely hypothetically and it sounds like nonsense.

Here is problem 2: Determine all triples (a,b,c) of positive integers such that each of the numbers ab-c,bc-a,ca-b is a power of 2.

As for: "perceptions of gender differentials in math" , sure that should be worked on. But it is not the fault of the contest organizes or team selectors who uses a series of objective exams and scores to determine the team members.

Sure, but I doubt the same is true for all of the tests and educational materials that preceded this particular test. Or, or perhaps the teachers. Women are commonly beat down and told they suck and are inferior to men in STEM areas or tokenized or marginalized. All I'm asking for is that we examine, "why might a gender imbalance exist?"

How could mathematical tests be biased? I mean, math is math is math. What would a non-biased math test even look like?

You might find the results summarized in Sian Beilock's book "Choke" of interest.

One simple way, just as a contrived counter-example are gendered questions or questions that assume gendered cultural capital.

I'm not sure what that would look like. I mean whatever ornaments are in the word problem, the thing that matters is the math underneath. You seem to think female maths enthusiasts will get distracted by "gendered" ornamentation and find themselves unable to see the math underneath - which itself seems like an oddly sexist idea. Do you honestly think if we printed the tests on pink paper and made all the word problems about stereotypically feminine things, the results would change appreciatively. Isn't it possible that, on average, women are just less likely to be interested in mathematics competitions. Is this necessarily a bad thing so long as those that are are not discriminated against?

Edit: And as for your comment below, I'm unsure of what the particularities of Thai dress and ceremony has to to with the posited inherent sexism of maths tests. And honestly do you really think women avoid maths competitions because they might eventually meet some foreign women in traditional dress?

Look carefully at the role of women in the headline photo, and you might see it. They're there only to be looked at, to adorn the men. This is a pretty basic and common representation of the reasons I believe women tend to be under-represented in situations like this.

>gendered questions or questions that assume gendered cultural capital

Q. Prove Bob has a winning strategy against Alice.

A. The Patriarchy! QED

7/7

Edit: Seriously, what could that even mean?

And also, to make up for the temporal inequality (the past ratio), the teams should be something like 5/6 female.

And logically: until that happens, the school system isn't catering for half their population.

This guy is being sarcastic, I don’t really understand the down votes. Maybe that’s just the way it is over here.

It's a pointlessly baity answer and deserves downvoting.

Respectfully disagree. He ridicules the simplistic solutions proposed to certain issues (lack of women in a math competition in this case). In my opinion, it adds a valid (and funny) point - you may agree or disagree with him, but it is not a reason to downvote. Sarcastic - yes, ad hominem - no.

I skimmed over it without reading the "Poe's law" line at the end. I've deleted my comment. Have to be more careful.

I think that line is new. I saw it earlier this morning and seriously debated whether or not it was serious.

You forgot the Men's Rights Advocates and Gamergate brigades which immediately show up with posts like yours. (And send death threats to women posters and their families. http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindnes...)

Please just call them bigots, don't let them choose the name we call them.

This is an objective statement that provides data. Please don't down vote it.

Congratulations to Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina for being the only countries to send gender-balanced teams of three boys and three girls.

I assume most countries picked the best candidates for their teams, as mathematical aptitude is relatively easy to quantify. If it wasn't the competition would have no meaning. Congratulating Ukraine and Bosnia for this like it's some heroic sacrifice is odd. These girls were the best choice for their teams so they were picked. I don't see much more to it than that.

I would congratulate Ukraine and Boznia-Hertzegovina for creating the educational system in which talented girls flourished at the same level as talented boys and so which it came time to pick the the competitors, it was statistically likely that they'd end up with a gender-balanced team.

> I assume most countries picked the best candidates for their teams

The fact that there are statistically significantly more men among the best candidates is already enough to conclude that there was a gender bias. The bias can be in the education or in the selection process, etc.

The fact that Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina have gender balanced teams mean that they have managed to avoid this bias, one way or another but not necessarily though positive discrimination, maybe they simply a more balanced education, maybe they have a more extensive selection process where they retrain the students from scratch before selection etc. Eitheir way, they deserve some credit for that.

Are you implying that it would be good if the ones sent were based on a gender balance rather than being chosen on their math ability?

He might be suggesting that Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina are to be lauded for having an educational system that doesn't end up leaving half of the population behind.

You're talking about the U.S. educational system leaving men behind, right?

Because in America, women are more likely to graduate high school [0], enroll in college [1], graduate from college [2], and even make up 3/5's of graduate students [2].

[0] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779196.html

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/06/womens-colle...

[2] http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2011/gender-gap-in-...

It might be. What if there's a psychological barrier in place in a given society where a given group of people are repeatedly told either directly or implicitly through societal conventions inherited from previous centuries that they don't have the gift for science or maths in particular. In such a context, it would actually be beneficial to send "balanced teams" to such competitions so that it gives a mental boost (in the form of a symbol/token/role model that acts as a vessel) to perfectly capable people that just started with the handicap of being say "a woman", "a black" or "a redneck".

As such, reasoning in terms of "ability" is fundamentally flawed because "skills" are never innate, they're the result of a lot of work and positive circumstances in a given field and starting with a handicap from the get go just makes it so much harder that it's absolutely not a level ground.

What if they do worse than the man on the whole in some or many instances? What happens to the image you were trying to create then?

Scott Alexander writes well about this topic: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

It's far preferable to be politically correct than to win, don'tcha know.

Intentionally uncharitable interpretation. More likely that the other teams (and the systems backing them) privileged guys, instead of educating and choosing on math ability.

What makes you think that is more likely?

In 2013, it was Finland and Costa Rica whose teams were "gender balanced", not Ukraine and Bosnia&Herzegovina. In 2012, Bolivia. In 2009, Kuwait.

Previous years stats don't suggest their education systems are anyhow different, it's just how this year's random has laid out.

It could be that the concept of math ability itself is currently defined to preference a gender. Or, taught in a way to preference gender. Or a gender is ridiculed systematically during the learning process. It's not so simple.

I can't think of a worse message to send to potential female competitors than "you're only on this team because we needed some women for appearances".

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