Comment by booop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by booop | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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

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?

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

"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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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