Nah, the arguement will be that boys are still better at math, but the evil teachers and education system hate little boys, so the little boys are unable to realize their true mathematical potential.  Qon’t someone think of the (boy) children?

Clearly the problem is that boys are now as dumb as girls.

I’m confused/disturbed by where the article goes at the end:

As Hyde and her colleagues looked across the test data, they found something they didn’t expect: In most states they reviewed, and at most grade levels, there weren’t any questions that involved complex problem-solving, the ability needed to succeed in high levels of science and math.

Am I missing something? I’m just a girl, after all…it’s like all of a sudden they start talking about how shitty the tests are to begin with. Like, NO WONDER the girls are scoring so well - these tests are crap!

I predict they’ll go back to the choad favorite about how men are overrepresented at the tails—they’re the geniuses and dolts, dontcha know—while women are overrepresented in the mediocre middle.  That’s a lie too, but harder to refute, and it’ll help keep women mistreated in college mentoring and high-end graduate programs, while rowmyboat’s point will justify favoring boys in all classes, not just math and science, during K-12.

Just wanted to add: It would not surprise me to learn we in the US are not teaching kids enough critical thinking skills and are/will be at a global disadvantage when it comes to competing in high tech fields - we’re still debating evolution, after all - but it just struck me as an odd thing to throw out at the end of this particular article. I’m not denying the point or suggesting it’s not true, I just think it was a bit assholeish to make it there.

After all, if the tests suck this way now, odds are they have sucked in a similar way in the past - so what does that say about past studies showing boys getting higher scores?

Hooray!  Students everywhere will have more people from which they can confidently copy each night’s math homework.

Anony, if my educational life is any indication (grew up in one of those bottom-of-every-list poor southern states), I simply don’t think that high-level math is a priority in most high schools.

A part of the problem is that the public educational system was developed at a time when most people didn’t to go on to college, and definitely before the time that you could ensure a future making good money by going into a techy field (all of which require advanced levels of college math and science, obvs).  So things like trig and calculus are purely optional. 

Even at the magnet school I attended, which is considered an elite public school on the national level, I was only required to take 2 levels of algebra and geometry, and then heavily coerced by my academic adviser to take Trig even though it wasn’t required (and fully allowed to slouch through it my last semester of high school after it didn’t “count” anymore in terms of GPA’s and college admissions).  The techy kids all took tons of math voluntarily (And I took 5-6 arts/humanities courses in a given semester), but then we were not the norm.

Which is why, if you look at state-required standardized tests of the No Child Left Behind, you probably won’t see a lot of that.

I have confidence that the men types are quickly devising more tests so that they can root out some sub-group of girls who are still inferior to boys at math…. they are not going to give this theory up.. just minimize the findings. 

OR if they think too long, they’re sure to “find” that the girls who excel have “unattractive” qualities.  So girls who are good at math will be marginalized as something they find undesirable in a girl.  Fat girls, “athletic” girls (read: gay), or abnormally tall girls…. I give the new studies six months…

I should really say that the order is violence, religion, then crank arguments.

That sounds accurate.

It makes the situation between the two sexes/genders sound like a really long, drawn-out contest or struggle or fight which has, albeit exremely slowly, eroded the basis for male control of society. Reminds me of some of the writing on “4th generation war”.

A feminist insurgency? Or something like that?

It is possible that the big picture doesn’t look like people thought it did.

Amanda, keep dreaming. This article is shit science, gender propaganda and you know it.

“Hyde and her colleagues looked at annual math tests required by the No Child Left Behind education law in 2002.  The researchers found no difference in the scores of boys versus girls—not even in high school,…Girls have now achieved gender parity in performance on standardized math tests,” Hyde said.”

Comparing the results of the “No Child Left Behind” test by gender is a joke. That’s like testing the slow class at the local high school against the entering freshman class at MIT on addition and subtraction arithmetic and proclaiming dullards and the gifted have achieved parity in math.

“As Hyde and her colleagues looked across the test data, they found … there weren’t any questions that involved complex problem-solving, …”.

“That might be a glaring omission, said Stephen Camarata, a Vanderbilt University professor who has researched the issue but was not involved in the study. “We need to know that, if our measures aren’t capturing some aspect of math that’s important,” Camarata said. “Then we can decide whether there’s an actual male or female advantage.”

Duh, yeah! Camarata is politely and politically correctly telling Hyde her study is woefully flawed and full of shit.

“Joy Lee, a rising senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, says she always felt confident about math, …”

Asian females have an average math SAT score higher than white males. Who wouldn’t expect Joy Lee not to be “confident” walking into a math class?. But guess what, Asian females still score 30 points lower than Asian males like all females do relative to their group males, the exception being black females. They score only 15 points behind their males.

The mean score for females on the math SAT 1 is lower by 5-6% compared to males for every year since 1972. The standard deviation of the female score distribution is significantly smaller as well. But research shows females get higher grades than males in the same advanced math courses in high school.
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf

Somebody should really start a “debunking evo psych” blog. I’m no expert so I can’t, but maybe one of you could?

What I think is promising about educational research is the fact that it’s one of very few places where boys are told to be more like girls.  It’s the silver lining in the faux boy crisis - which usually decides that if boys are doing worse than girls, clearly the girls need to sabotaged somewhere along the road.  But where else in our society are boys even vaguely encouraged to adopt traits presented more frequently by girls?

It’s good to see statistical confirmation of what I’ve always seen to be anecdotally true.  In my experience, women are the intellectual equals of men in every field of endeavor.  No exceptions.  The differences are entirely due to individual aptitudes and socialization. 

Male dominance throughout history, as Amanda said, has a lot to do with the larger physical size of males.  Also probably increased aggressiveness due to testosterone has to be somewhat of a factor.  I’m gonna throw out the fact that women carry more of a physical burden by gestating children, which makes them somewhat dependent on men during a portion of their lives, especially in the past when medicine was much cruder and childbirth was much more dangerous and debilitating.

With modern technology, there are no longer any reasons for women to be considered unequal to men.  Well, maybe in purely physical endeavors.  I suspect that someday a woman may be able to make an NBA team (perhaps as a passing guard), but I doubt she will ever make the all-star team.  I would be glad to be proven wrong on that point.

Good to see that.

With modern technology, there are no longer any reasons for women to be considered unequal to men.  Well, maybe in purely physical endeavors.  I suspect that someday a woman may be able to make an NBA team (perhaps as a passing guard), but I doubt she will ever make the all-star team.  I would be glad to be proven wrong on that point.

I suspect that’s a fair bet.  In any situation where pure strength, size, and speed are requirements, odds are (excepting artificial enhancement) that there will always be very, very women who will be ranked at the highest levels, whether sports or some other physical activity.  In endurance events, I suspect, the difference won’t be as acute: the men’s marathon record is flattening out while the women’s is still plummeting (currently at 2:15, where the men’s was around 1950).  Whether that will even out, only time will tell.

In every case I’ve seen with female athletes in physical sports, co-ed is entirely reasonable until the early teens.  After that, even when given the same level of encouragement and opportunity—I knew several female hockey players who played in the regular male leagues, and there was no discrimination, in fact most people root for them—the size and strength difference begins to tell.  One girl who I grew up with was the top player in her league, but once she hit high school, at 5’2”, it was a lost cause for her to continue playing in the competitive division.  She was just too small.  It’s no coincidence that the first woman to get to the NHL farm team level was a goaltender (pure size and strength isn’t as critical, instead reaction time is).

Didn’t take long for the choads to come out on this one, did it?

“The mean score for females on the math SAT 1 is lower by 5-6% compared to males for every year since 1972. The standard deviation of the female score distribution is significantly smaller as well. But research shows females get higher grades than males in the same advanced math courses in high school.”

If what you’re saying, JimB, is “so you see what we’ve gotta do is devise tests which will provide us with the correct data; tests, in other words, which will reliably demonstrate the lesser aptitude of the girls”...well, I for one will not show myself so unladylike as to disagree with you.  But with your permission I will point out two things.

1) What you just said is exactly what Amanda & Co. were saying you’d say.  Saying exactly what your opponents predict you will say is a bad way to try to refute their claims.

2) It may be, as several of the commenters to this post have noted, that the high-school math tests with which the scions of the beleaguered American middle class are fobbed off are sucky and flawed. That would so totally make sense.  Math problems of the higher order require that the persons who attempt to solve them will be able to think critically and clearly, and the ability to think critically and clearly is not only not fostered in the American educational system, it’s positively discouraged.  People who have developed level heads are likely to ask awkward questions, and the societal mythos which now holds sway declares that the asking of awkward questions is a guaranteed preliminary to The End Of All Songs.  The emphasis is on teaching middle-class kids to be good workers (for example: teaching them not to cheat the boss, teaching them not to slough off on the job, teaching them to punch the clock on time, teaching them not to make waves) not on turning them into keen thinkers.  The result is that both boys and girls are artificially dulled-down even when they don’t start out dull to begin with.

But please remember that the results of those same sucky flawed math tests were perfectly acceptable so long as they showed that the girls possessed less mathematical ability than the boys.  In fact the results of those same sucky tests were cited ad infinitum in order to prove not just that girls were inferior to boys in mathematical ability but that women were destined to prove mentally inferior to men in all respects.

So why aren’t the sucky tests still satisfactory, hunh?  The only thing which has changed is their results.

Even at the magnet school I attended, which is considered an elite public school on the national level, I was only required to take 2 levels of algebra and geometry, and then heavily coerced by my academic adviser to take Trig even though it wasn’t required (and fully allowed to slouch through it my last semester of high school after it didn’t “count” anymore in terms of GPA’s and college admissions).  The techy kids all took tons of math voluntarily (And I took 5-6 arts/humanities courses in a given semester), but then we were not the norm.

The Opoponax,

That sounded like the standard US high school math curriculum most of my college classmates had gone through and thus, found themselves woefully unprepared for the math proficiency requirement at my college.  This is ironic as the math proficiency requirement at my college was far less demanding than most similarly ranked colleges and universities where all majors had to take at least one semester of college-level calculus or a higher-level math course if one APed out.  At my school, you can get away with taking a college stats course, taking a series of mathematically intensive science courses, AP out, or passing what I heard was an easy math “test out” exam given by the math department to all new incoming students who expressed interest without having to AP out.* 

Funny your magnet high school is ranked nationally whereas my urban public magnet high school is not due to some dubious methodological arguments put forth by a certain magazine which does rankings…..especially when my urban magnet high school strongly encouraged (read required) everyone to take 4 years of math including trig….and where the vast majority of my classmates end up graduating already taking at least a year or two of college-calculus with many taking higher level math courses such as number theory.  If there were no more advanced math courses….it was not unheard of for some to take those courses through an arrangement with a local college/university. 

Though I was a horrid math student in high school….the college math courses were so much easier that I actually did well without having to work nearly as hard as I did in high school while my college classmates were struggling to keep up due to the inadequacy of the math curriculum at their high schools.  Even private high school graduates were not exempted from struggling due to the inadequacies of their math curriculum coupled with their unwillingness to apply themselves.

Disclosure: I took one semester of calculus and two computer science programming courses for majors…either one would have fulfilled the college’s math requirements. 

* Nearly every one of my high school classmates…especially those at Ivy-level institutions felt my college’s math requirements was a total joke compared to ones at their more mathematically demanding institutions.

But guess what, Asian females still score 30 points lower than Asian males like all females do relative to their group males, the exception being black females.

Though they have not disclosed this…I’m betting this was really a survey of Asian-American students who were largely/totally socialized in the American cultural milieu. 

Interestingly enough, I’ve heard from most Chinese grad students that female math and science majors have remained at about even parity…and even started to outnumber their male counterparts…..even at topflight institutions. 

Moreover, this reminded me of one commenter on feministe who was wondering about why Chinese female math grad students had less problems being open enough with their math proficiency to do math problems on the board and discuss them compared with their American counterparts. 

My answer to that was that assuming they attended college in China that the nationally administered college entrance exam is structured in such a way that your scores do not only determine which college you end up going to…but also which major you are allowed to study.  As math is one of the more prestigious majors, it takes a much higher corresponding score to enter a given institution to study math than it would be to enter it to study something less prestigious….say Chinese lit. 

In short, nearly all of the Chinese female grad students studying in the US who attended college in China were probably at the very least…scored in the top 30% of their incoming class at their given institution….and the national college exam is so cutthroat and demanding that those who pass are given great respect…especially considering the fact that slightly more than 50% of last year’s entrance exam takers failed to score high enough to gain entrance to any higher-ed institution.  Passing such a grueling competitive exam combined with scoring high enough not only to gain admission to a given college, but also admission to a prestigious department like math confers great social prestige upon those who passed…including the female students.  The fact they were able to gain admission to a decent American university to pursue their graduate studies confers further prestige from their peers, family, and society at large.  Not too surprisingly…this tends to be a great ego booster to those who managed to survive the pressures of the national college entrance exam. 

Moreover, another factor in the Chinese female grad students’ higher levels of confidence in openly displaying their competence compared to their American female grad student counterparts is the simple fact that the rigor of mathematical education in China and other East Asian countries is far greater at the K-12 level than their American counterparts.  Though I attended one of the best public urban magnet high schools in the country, nearly every East Asian grad student I’ve met were shocked that most Americans graduate high school without having taken pre-calc…much less calculus.  For them, calculus is a subject that was supposed to have already been covered during the junior high/early high school years if one was on the college-prep track.

This is not to say that the Chinese/East Asian national college examination system/educational system is necessarily better as it has its own problems including students who crumble and even commit suicide under the unremitting stress of being subjected to the cutthroat pressures of studying and taking the multi-day exam….which is aggravated by failing to gain admission to a desired college/major or worse, failing to get into any institution altogether with the severe social sanctions that tend to follow from peers, family, and society at large.

The only males I know that would say men are better at math than women are never better than me.  And the ones that are better than me at math would never say that men are better, because they actually possess critical thinking skills that prevent them from repeating the dumbass arguments that got us to where we are in the first place. 

I’m with Mark B. re:the pregnancy advantage. 

JimB: If you’re trying to compensate for a small penis, try bodybuilding or buying a fancy car.  It will be easier for you than trying to talk data, and you can get a loan for the car.

there weren’t any questions that involved complex problem-solving, the ability needed to succeed in high levels of science and math.

To be fair, few men are able to handle questions test complex problem solving or are capable of handling high levels of science and math, either.

Even at the magnet school I attended, which is considered an elite public school on the national level, I was only required to take 2 levels of algebra and geometry, and then heavily coerced by my academic adviser to take Trig even though it wasn’t required

That is completely unacceptable for a college preparatory curriculum. Adequate preparation for college requires that one at least have taken pre-calculus before graduating high school, unless one wants to spend the first semester doing remedial work. What was your high school thinking?

That is completely unacceptable for a college preparatory curriculum. Adequate preparation for college requires that one at least have taken pre-calculus before graduating high school, unless one wants to spend the first semester doing remedial work. What was your high school thinking?

While that is what should be the minimum level math curriculum for college prep, the vast majority of college first-year students….including some who go to Ivy-level schools like Harvard college* end up having to take remedial math courses because their preparation was such that they never touched trig…much less pre-calc before graduating high school.  Several classmates at frosh orientation ended up having to take math remedial classes because their mathematical preparation was so inadequate that they were unable to utilize the multiple lenient “opt-out” options offered by my college. 

Doesn’t hurt the colleges as that is extra money paid by the student’s family/student/scholarship/financial aid for courses which usually will not count towards graduation credits…even as electives because they are considered too low-level to be considered college-level courses.

* Yep….even Harvard College offers non-credit remedial math courses….a fact which shocked many of my high school classmates who attended that institution.

I was only required to take 2 levels of algebra and geometry, and then heavily coerced by my academic adviser to take Trig even though it wasn’t required

If you somehow were able to pull off going all 4 years at my high school without having taken trig….the admins simply won’t allow you to graduate until you’ve taken and passed trig.  Though this is unlikely to happen as the high school admins and homeroom teachers kept a close eye on your course selections to ensure you’re fulfilling requirements throughout the 4 years….sometimes shit happens. 

There was one classmate in my year who felt he was too cool to take English classes even though the high school required all of us to take 4 years worth.  When the high school admins found out…not only did he have his admission to two ivy-league schools rescinded, which to him was bad enough.  Thanks to the wonderful bureaucratic minds at the NYC board of ed….he was also forced to spend another year at my high school taking nothing but English classes to fulfill the high school’s English requirements.  Despite having to undergo what he felt was sheer torture from boredom…it wasn’t a big impediment and he ended up graduating from one of those Ivies.

It’s nice to see more evidence of statistical equality in the sexes, but I must admit the whole idea that women have lower inherent mathematical ability has always struck me as surreal and depressing. This goes also for the various flavors of the argument—that there are more men at the tails of the distribution, etc. Of course my personal bias is as a math geek in school, always getting outdone by a female classmate, who went on to get a PhD.

In graduate school ~10 years ago, at a hard-core nerd institution, most of the science departments were clearly rapidly approaching gender parity. And this wasn’t restricted to my graduate home—here there’s hard national data to back it up: according to NSF surveys (report NSF 08-306, 2006) biology (56% of graduate students female), Earth sciences (47% female), and chemistry (40% female) are most of the way there in the US. In all of these cases there has been a strong tendency towards increasing participation by women in the last decade. Make no mistake—many of the subdisciplines of these fields are highly mathematical, and all require quantitative reasoning skills.

One sometimes hears the objection that gender inequity is persistent in the supposedly more math-centric disciplines (computer science, mathematics and physics), but these aren’t the only male-dominated subjects— cardiology is almost invariant at a 1:2 F/M ratio over the last ten years while anesthesiology is female-dominated over the same interval. I’m guessing anesthesiology is a lot more mathy than cardio. And anyway math, physics and computer science appear to be headed the same way as the other natural science disciplines, just more slowly. This line of argument has the flavor of a god-of-the-gaps, doomed to become smaller and smaller in scope as time goes on.

It’s like we’re having an argument about the shape of a cloud that’s already evaporating. Except that it minimizes this amazing reality of tens of thousands of individual, pioneering struggles by young female scientists.

Now if we could only make professional and academic science careers more compatible with modern life, maybe our scientific leadership would start to reflect the new diversity of the student population.

Actually, whatever the statistical edge men generally have over women in physical size and brute strength (and of course this edge would often not hold in particular pairings up of particular men with particular women) the only reason this can ever be effective is that society backs up the individual man abusing the individual woman.

Marvin Harris attempted to draw a correlation between agricultural systems emphasising brute strength and male dominance, including abuse.  The idea was that the more able the average woman was able to scratch a living from the soil without a man, the less likely society was structured on the assumption that she needed one.

The news article I read on this study pointed out there was still a difference in average scores on the math SAT… and why.
Many more girls than boys take the SAT. The girls taking it, then, are not necessarily as academically inclined as the boys taking it; many are, but the larger percentage of girls means some of them are coming more from the middle of their high school class than the top of it.

The emphasis is on teaching middle-class kids to be good workers (for example: teaching them not to cheat the boss, teaching them not to slough off on the job, teaching them to punch the clock on time, teaching them not to make waves) not on turning them into keen thinkers.  The result is that both boys and girls are artificially dulled-down even when they don’t start out dull to begin with.

That is a great insight!

Actually it is the story of my life. Here is what I wrote to an old friend last night:

I think personal passion has a lot to do with being less conservative.  That is a sharp insight.  I think that personal openness, though, can trouble a lot of people.  I think one of my strong qualities is being very open to novelty and various possibilities.  I think conservatives in general feel threatened by that—I know my parents did—because I’m the kind of person who asks questions that probe into people’s ignorance (although I was not even half aware that I was doing this, originally, when I first started asking questions).  I think many people feel unsettled and challenged by my tendency to engage them with my questions in order to advance my knowledge.

It might be that in certain highly abstract fields, like math or theoretical physics, having a particular mental disorder might actually be helpful, and that more men than women suffer from that disorder.

(Okay, this is just the old joke “You don’t have to be crazy to _____, but it helps.” I majored in math myself, and my excuse for not going on to graduate school can be that I wasn’t crazy enough )

This is good news. For all the very real “implementation problems” other commenters have mentioned, I think it deserves a little celebration - and I say this as someone who’s no good at any math higher than statistics.

Really, do you need to be better at calculus to subdue another population? 
The Romans would not have conquered nearly so much territory if they had not awed the Gaulish and the Persian populations with their superior command of Space/Point Conceptualization Thingies. Trufax.

>>Nah, the arguement will be that boys are still better at math, but the evil teachers and education system hate little boys

That’s the one the MRAs have been using in Quebec for the past 5 or so years, when the girls started outscoring boys in high school (but are still being outscored in college).

To continue my deeply unserious point, there is good evidence that mathematicians are more likely to be crazy than other scientists. A survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences found that belief in god varied by discipline, from a low of 5% among biologists to a high of 15% among mathematicians. QED.

To continue my deeply unserious point, there is good evidence that mathematicians are more likely to be crazy than other scientists. A survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences found that belief in god varied by discipline, from a low of 5% among biologists to a high of 15% among mathematicians. QED.

Could Ted Kaczynski be counted among that 15%?

anony -

The researchers were dissing American standardized tests, not girls.

(Just in case it wasn’t clear:  They did find tests that had the kinds of problems they were looking for, and used those.  They just weren’t able to use any of tests that factor into things like No Child Left Behind.)

But yeah, not the best writing on CNN’s part.  (Better that the LA Times though, who left that part out completely.)  This university article is a lot better written and makes it clear that the researchers were annoyed at the test makers, not that they had doubts about the female test takers.

exholt -

“Though they have not disclosed this…I’m betting this was really a survey of Asian-American students who were largely/totally socialized in the American cultural milieu. “

Huh?  Do you mean the study overall, or just the more complex problems they couldn’t find on standardized tests?  Because the main bulk of the study was done by looking at statewide scores in 10 states.

Huh?  Do you mean the study overall, or just the more complex problems they couldn’t find on standardized tests?  Because the main bulk of the study was done by looking at statewide scores in 10 states.

Considering that 92% of those surveyed in the report had American citizenship along with the fact that this test only surveyed 10 states instead of all SAT takers worldwide…..I am thinking that they are really talking about Asian-American students who have been socialized in the American cultural milieu…..a process that can be quite rapid during the childhood/adolescent years….especially if they are trying to fit in with their American classmates ASAP to minimize being the “odd kid out”. 

Moreover, Asian high school students taking the SATs to apply to US colleges would usually be taking that test back in their home countries….not wait until coming to the US due to college deadlines, steep expense, and the bureaucratic wrangling of dealing with immigration officials.  Even given this, they are a small portion of their college-bound peers due to the greater expense of American colleges coupled with the increasingly common perception that it is better to attend the best college in their home country and then go to the US for grad school…..especially if the field is related to math and science due to the well-known perception that American K-12 and even undergrad math education is far less rigorous and demanding than what is available in their home countries. 

In fact, I’ve encountered a few Chinese grad students who regard the Chinese undergrads on campus with some dismissive contempt because of the perception that they took an “easy backdoor” to gain admission to a decently reputed American college because their families had the money to bankroll that US undergrad education and the fact that the US college admissions process is perceived to be far less grueling and more open to “undue influences” than undergoing the multi-day national college entrance exam where over 50% of last year’s examinees failed to score high enough to gain admission to a single college…much less one of the more prestigious institutions/majors.*  I recalled at least one of them telling me that many of those Chinese undergrads are attending US colleges because they were unable to even gain admission to a second/third ranked Chinese university on the national college entrance exam and their parents were wealthy enough to pay full tuition to attend.  **

Just trying to clarify categories as the commenter I was replying was effectively conflating performance indicators between Asian and Asian-American students….which IME muddles the issue as Asians and Asian-Americans have experienced different socialization process in their formative years combined with being exposed to widely different educational systems which has great potential to alter the profile of those stats if that study had bothered looking for those stats. 

* In China and other East Asian countries, college admissions is solely determined by one’s score on the national college entrance standardized exam created, given, and scored by each nation’s educational ministry.  This score is considered the sole sign of an examinee’s “academic merit” in determining admission to a given college and major.  Undue influences such as legacy admissions common among many American higher ed institutions is considered little better than a form of corruptive nepotism.

** The Chinese grad students all had full-scholarships from the university and/or government foundations that were gained due to excellent undergrad academic performance in China.  It is also probably no coincidence that the vast majority of those grad students spent their undergrad years at topflight Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Beida (Beijing U).

You can be crazy without being religious, and Steven Weinberg was wrong, it doesn’t take religion to make good people do evil; Zimbardo demonstrated that it was actually normal under certain circumstances.

The relative prevalence of supernatural beliefs among mathematicians does, however, suggest some detachment from the real world, which, given the nature of the discipline, isn’t exactly surprising.

“And I say this as someone who’s no good at any math higher than statistics.
Hmmpf.  Showoff.

Anyway, I found some interesting stuff while diggin’ around looking at stuff for my previous (being held in moderation/imprisoned as part of an twisted scheme to supply spare body parts for an seriously ill comment elsewhere/whatever).  Deep in the New York Times Archives’ there’s a fascinating exchange from the summer of 1915 (starting in the letters column and spilling out once or twice elsewhere) about women in medicine. 

It all got started when Professor Richard Cabot of Harvard Med School (as opposed to, let’s say, a certain President of Harvard University) gave a commencement address at Women’s Medical College here in Philly (now Drexel University College of Medicine) apparently claiming that most women doctors were unsuited for the more ‘strenuous branches’ of the field and were all dissatisfied as a result, and that they should avoid going into general practice or research, but turn instead to ‘social service’.  A Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf wrote in pointing out that women doctors kicked ass (ok, major paraphrase), and a pre-internet troll named Dr. Simon Baruch responded that since he wasn’t familiar with the prominent women doctors Knopf listed, clearly they hadn’t done anything of importance, and proceeded to explain “Why Women Lack Great Originality” 

(”The reason does not lie in the superior mental endowment or hereditary medical capacity of men, but in the biological fact that in medicine originality, logic, initiative, courage, and other distinctly masculine qualities are calculated to overcome obstacles which the truly feminine temperamental qualities that spring from the biological maternal source are incapable of coping with.  It is by no means a mental inferiority, as some foolish men and women assert.  It is a biological law of nature that bars women from original and great epoch-making achievement.  This is proved by the history of improvements in the household, where woman has, according to the feminist orators, slaved for centuries. Has any one of these slaves initiated a single great idea to emancipate her sex from the enslaving drudgery . . ..? No, the original masculine mind came to her rescue with the machines that have lightened her labor until the feminists claim that having nothing to do at home she must seek for “other worlds to conquer” outside the home . . .”)

And so on and on in this vein (the good Dr. has a very interesting take on Semmelweis’ discovery of the importance of handwashing in drastically reducing deaths in childbirth from infection; current accounts may imagine that Dr. Semmelweis faced enormous and unrelenting opposition from his male colleagues, but this fellow lets us in on the real point, which was that “To not one of the hundreds of these women in constant presence of the fatal scourge did it occur that the cause might be uncleanliness - negligence in housekeeping, as it were.” (There’s no mention that his fellow doctors didn’t actually immediate embrace this innovation, and hence failed to spare thousands of women from now doubly&horribly;unnecessary deaths). 

Of course, once an actual woman doctor enters the fray, up pops a kind of proto-concern troll, ‘A.L.S.’, whining
“Has not Dr. Glasgow allowed her emotions to replace the dictates of calm reason when she accuses Dr. Cabot of harboring hatred and subversive designs against women . . . In my humble opinion, Dr. Glasgow impugns her right to championship, and stultifies her cause by resorting to invective instead of logic, by stirring up emotions instead of balancing the scales of reason, so essential to success in her own profession . . . ”  [continued]

[continued]
And so on.  By September there was a whole article (op ed?) by a Rheta Childe Door, asking “Is Woman Biologically Barred from Success,” based on research by a Leta Stetter Hollingworth (short answer: “no!”).  Marvelously, it recounts how:

“About a century ago an anatomist named Meckel . . . declared he had discovered the secret in the greater variability [of female inferiority] from the norm, or average type.  Women were inferior because they were unstable and prone to depart from type.  The theory was eagerly seized upon and tested by Darwin and others, but they were forced to the conclusion that men were more variable, more prone to be unlike one another, and that this trait, far from explaining the inferiority of women, was a perfect explanation of the superiority of men.  This theory of the greater variability of men has lasted up to the present day . . . ”[!!]

That, of course, was September 1915.  (And as Amanda said, “i>The first sign of crankery, by the way, is when you maintain the conclusion, and just change your arguments, after your initial “proofs” are proven wrong.</i>).

(I still can’t get links to work without cutting and pasting tags from elsewhere - is anyone else having this problem? - and they’re all registration-required pdfs, but go to the nytimes little search box and put in - say: women doctor cabot 1915
and that will turn up some (but not all) of them - the times search feature is so bad it’s downright insulting, but at least it’s (marginally) better than microfilm). 

I’ve been wandering through various women&science;searches looking at that general time frame,  and it’s frankly amazing - I keep bumping into John Tierney&Co;.  I mean, the names are different, the wording and references are old-fashioned, no doubt a lithograph would reveal them to be dressed in period clothes, but . . .

It’s like the end of The Shining (movie version), when we realize that Nicholson’s character is in the decades-old photograph of the hotel: You’re the choad-science guy here . . . you’ve always been the choad-science guy here . . .

Semmelweis, if I remember an article from the NY Review correctly, noted that midwives’ patients were more likely to survive childbirth than physicians’ patients, and his favoring lesser-educated women over medicine’s crown of creation didn’t help his case. Wikipedia agrees: doctors conducted autopsies and didn’t wash their hands afterwards.

Some surgeons, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands; they felt that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.

When the Larry Summers brouhaha erupted a few years ago, I was appalled at the number of ostensible liberals who were wedded to the idea that men must certainly be better at the difficult things than women. I may be a wealthy, white, middle-aged lazy slob, but I was raised with the notion that women were intellectual equals. At age 9 I answered the phone and heard a woman’s voice tell me that Dr. Teel was on the line and wanted to speak to my father.  I assumed that she was Dr. Teel (and not an M.D., but a scientist.) As it happens, it was just the operator. We didn’t have direct dialing back in 1960.

I’m perplexed that so many of my fellow travelers are more sexist than I was as a kid, and chagrinned that , when regaling the family with my account of the whole Summers thing, one of my elder nieces asked me which side I took. Ouch! I’ve lived my life wrong.)

So, has anyone come up with an explanation for why men would be better at math than women? Maybe prehistoric men used geometry to calculate the correct trajectory for an aurochs-killing spear throw?

And this supposed innate love for toy trucks that little boys have, where would that have come from? Toy trucks having existed for less than two hundred years and all.

Er . . . is my last night’s comment* in reply to JimB still stuck in moderation or something?

* noting, like Mickle pointed out, that there’s more info in other versions of the story - the NY Times one, f’instance - including both that they used national test scores to look at complex problem-solving skills, and a very convincing explanation for the SAT gap: that more (and a wider range of) girls take the SAT, so that there are lower scoring girls pulling down the average, while their male equivalents simply aren’t taking it.  What makes it convincing that when two states required all students to take the similarly gappy ACT, that gap disappeared (in those two states).

Samantha: “Many more girls than boys take the SAT. The girls taking it, then, are not necessarily as academically inclined as the boys taking it; many are, but the larger percentage of girls means some of them are coming more from the middle of their high school class than the top of it.”

If your hypothesis that larger percent of female test takers compared to males lowers the female average math SAT score is correct, then how do you explain the fact that Black females score only 15 points lower that Black males on the math SAT, but Black females make up 58% of the Black population taking the SAT, while Asian females make up only 51% of the Asian population taking the SAT?

Time for a new hypothesis?

Also, why is everyone discussing East Asians from China in American colleges? The vast majority of Asians taking the SAT are Americans.

“JimB: If you’re trying to compensate for a small penis, try bodybuilding or buying a fancy car.  It will be easier for you than trying to talk data, and you can get a loan for the car.
raspberryjamba on 07/26 at 03:58 PM”

The reason some “groups” have significantly longer penis sizes than other “groups” is because of climate. In warm climates, the usual method of copulation (until recently due to idea infusion) was doggy style. That combined with the reality of huge female ass cheeks, long penis size was a selected trait in males.

In colder climates, copulation was often by necessity the missionary position. Picture doing it doggy style when the air temperature is sub zero. The participants would freeze their asses off. Two bodies, one atop the other covered by an animal skin, would be a much more energy efficient means to engage in sex while the north winds were howling outside your hide covered hut. The selective pressure would have been to smaller penis size.

Why? Calculate what volume of food would be required to maintain a foot long penis for a year and contrast that with the fact that peoples in cold climates need to eat 4 times the volume of food as peoples in warm climates. And since most populations were usually one meal away from starvation, maintaining a foot long penis was an unaffordable luxury.

For reference: Asian females score 30 points lower than Asian males like all females do relative to their group males, the exception being Black females. They score only 15 points lower than Black males.

Also, why is everyone discussing East Asians from China in American colleges? The vast majority of Asians taking the SAT are Americans.

To point out that the gender math gap in the US is not a natural innate quality among all men and women…but a product of American cultural socialization which genderizes math and science. 

Though I have not seen a rigorous scientific study done on all East Asian or international students…my admittedly anecdotal experience from interacting with hundreds of Chinese along with dozens of Korean and Japanese undergrad and grad students over the last 10+ years are that with one notable exception, every East Asian female who has taken the math portion of the SAT, GRE, or GMAT tended to score > 770/800 on the math section…..and where scoring a perfect 800/800 was not considered anything noteworthy as the level of math tested on those American standardized tests is laughable by their standards as the level of math covered is stuff they learned in elementary school. 

Moreover, every Chinese student I’ve met has expressed incredulity and surprise that math is considered one where males perform better than females as that is contrary to their experiences….especially in the last several years when women have actually overtaken men in the undergrad and graduate math and science departments after a few decades when they were about 50/50.

For reference: Asian females score 30 points lower than Asian males like all females do relative to their group males, the exception being Black females. They score only 15 points lower than Black males.

JimB,

Asian-American…..not Asian….as that was what the report was surveying considering 92% of those surveyed are American citizens….and they all took the SATs in the US….meaning they had exposure to the American cultural milieu. 

Get your categories right, please!

“JimB on 07/27 at 01:20 PM”

Oh my . . .  Just . . .  wow.

That is a fascinating hypothesis, JimB.  Do you happen to have a cite handy?  I would be most interested in . . . learning more.

“maintaining a foot long penis was an unaffordable luxury.”

. . . wow.

I have to say, that is a sentence I never expected to read, not even on the internet.
Thanks, JimB.  Got a very good laugh out of that.

“ Calculate what volume of food would be required to maintain a foot long penis for a year ”

Man, we never got word problems like that when I was in school.  Clearly this is why the high school math test gender gap’s closed.  (That is, all the guys are sitting there thinking, ok, how much do I eat? instead of working through the problem . .. Although perhaps they’re facing a stereotype threat-style issue . . . )

“If your hypothesis that larger percent of female test takers compared to males lowers the female average math SAT score is correct, ”

It’s not my hypothesis, it’s the researchers’. 

“Then how do you explain the fact that”

I have no idea.  (I can make some poorly-informed guesses, but likely nothing worth listening to).  Again, the researchers suggest that the standardized test gap has to do with a “skewed pool” of test takers.  If that’s the case, we would expect to see the gap go away if all students had to take the test - and that’s apparently exactly what happened.  What’s going on within specific groups, I don’t know.

I’d ask to hear any explanation you might give, but fear it’ll end up referring back to the costs of maintaining a foot long penis.

The reason some “groups” have significantly longer penis sizes than other “groups” is because of climate. In warm climates, the usual method of copulation (until recently due to idea infusion) was doggy style. That combined with the reality of huge female ass cheeks, long penis size was a selected trait in males.

First of all, what if anything does this have to do with math ability by gender? Yes, people like to screw differently in different climates. So what?

Second, scientific studies show that penis size is essentially the same across ‘races’. Despite what you see in porn, the “groups” you’re referring to actually don’t have significantly longer/thicker penises.

Study of penis size. Go down to appendix #III on p. 62.

JimB, if you in fact do have a small penis, don’t worry about it. I was reading about this one dude who had a micropenis, yet managed to be a total superho/superstud. Had a whole bunch ‘a girlfreinds.

Exholt: “To point out that the gender math gap in the US is not a natural innate quality among all men and women…but a product of American cultural socialization which genderizes math and science.”

You should look at the College Board data. What’s significant is that the females in every “group”, as defined by the College Board, have about a 30 point lower average math SAT scores then the males in the same “group”. However, Asian females have a higher average math SAT score than White males. Apparently Asian females are not sufficiently coerced by American culture to score lower than the dominant White male group. And yet somehow the 70,000 Asian females taking the math SAT know how to score exactly 30 points less than Asian males as do all females in a given “group”. Amazing. How can the American culture produce such complex behavior in female test takers desperate to get into the college of their choice?

Comparing the results of 40 years of standardized g loaded testing having a sample size of 20 million to a few hundred anecdotal experiences from a very selective group is ludicrous.

See: http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf tables 9 and 10.

Anyway, back to the topic, I would tend to view math data from different countries with a large grain of salt, since there are tons of things that are different country-to-country.

Maybe if someone has gathered math acheivement data by gender from around the entire world, that might be useful. But it would take a hell of long time to sort through it all.

Personally I’ve never really doubted that lots of girls are fucking excellent at math. The high school I went to had a really good math/science program and there were plenty of girls who could kick my ass at match even though I was into math. My 2 cents.

I think you’re all being unfair in assuming Jim B. is moving the goalposts around to prove that girls and women are innately inferior in math. The evidence he cited also clearly shows that Orientals are good at math and Negroes are intellectually inferior. And who could possibly dispute the idea that there are vast differences in intellectual capacity along race lines?

Now, since we’re willing to accept that Asians are smart and geeky and black people are dumb and shiftless, and these differences are proven by SATs scores, it doesn’t seem that difficult to accept the fact that math is really, really hard for girls. And I can see why people are really invested in that idea: letting it go would be as ludicrous as arguing that black women aren’t best suited for domestic service, and East Asian women are not naturally suited to be submissive and obsequious.

Now, we need an explanation for why girls outperform boys in classroom math, according to Jim B.‘s analysis. I guess it’s probably got something to do with the “boy crisis”. It’s difficult for boys to concentrate on a day-to-day level, like sitting still in class, and remaining quiet, and going home after school to do their homework. I know that when I was a high school student, I was willing and eager to sit in an uncomfortable chair for hour-long intervals while a teacher droned on about things that I often found boring. Unlike the boys, I wouldn’t have rather been outside running around or watching tv or getting high or fucking or something. It’s that innate passivity and obedience of the female sex that makes us that much better at book-learning (except math). And it’s why scholarship has been a traditionally female field for hundreds of years.

Um, except that it hasn’t been. Never mind. Now I’m all confused.

Comparing the results of 40 years of standardized g loaded testing having a sample size of 20 million to a few hundred anecdotal experiences from a very selective group is ludicrous.

Sure, although, if society really is changing, and you want to keep your eye on how it’s changing, you may not have any choice but to use short-term, imperfectly vetted, data.

Of course, you will then want to eventually start another deep, multi-generation study or something.

The supposed relationship between how good girls are at math, and how much girls want to get involved with my dick, is also a murky one at best.

JimB,

I have read through that report and find that it is really talking about Asian-Americans as in Table 11….92% of all test takers have American citizenship….and everyone surveyed took the test within the US….so we’re talking about data that is applicable to the US only….not across all humanity.  In short, that report is too limited in its scope for its results to be universally applicable.  That is, unless you believe anything that is found to be valid for the American population is applicable worldwide without accounting for the wide variety of social and cultural differences that exist in other non-American societies…....

I’m betting if you got a survey of all college-bound East Asian youth….that gap will be whittled down to practically nothing….and in some cases…you may actually see female students outscoring their male counterparts because math is regarded as a vital subject ALL college-bound students must master….and the rigor and speed at which math is taught is far more demanding than in the vast majority of American K-12 and even undergrad math/science programs. 

Conversely, if you take all American male college-bound high school juniors and seniors and had them take just the math portion of any of the East Asian countries’ national college entrance exam…even assuming it is given in English…the vast majority(~85%+) would score in the bottom 20 percent at best….with only around 5% being able to even match the average of their Chinese peers because American math education at the K-12 level is so far behind that of those countries that the vast majority of American 16-19 year olds just don’t have the mathematical preparation necessary to even compete.  Keep in mind that all East Asians who want to enter college in their home countries must take the exact same national college entrance exam….regardless of their academic inclinations.  It is the same exam whether one is aspiring to study Chinese lit….or Nuclear Physics. 

Also…considering more than 50% of last year’s Chinese national college entrance examinees failed to score high enough to gain admission to any college and the minimal acceptable score for each subsection like math is far above 20%....the vast majority of American male college bound high school seniors and even undergraduates would not have been able to attend college if that test was the sole factor in their admission to college.

Did anyone catch “This American Life” yesterday?  In reference to the posts about doctors not needing to wash their hands as they were gentlemen….On TAL, they talked about a case of hospital baby switching.  One of the moms knew right away that her daughter had been switched.  When she brought it up to her husband, a fundagelical minister, he nixed the idea of saying anything so as not to “embarrass the doctor.”  Unbelievable.  Live with another person’s child; have your child raised by strangers; just as long as you don’t “embarrass the doctor.”  And amazingly, the mom went along with it for about 40 years.

exholt

“Considering that 92% of those surveyed in the report had American citizenship along with the fact that this test only surveyed 10 states instead of all SAT takers worldwide…..I am thinking that they are really talking about Asian-American students who have been socialized in the American cultural milieu…..a process that can be quite rapid during the childhood/adolescent years….especially if they are trying to fit in with their American classmates ASAP to minimize being the “odd kid out”. “

I’m sorry, you are still confusing me.

You are talking about Asian American students in relation to what exactly?.

The overall study, or the question of whether or not boys’ scores have a greater variance - ie, the part of the study that looked at more complex problems.

Not that the rest of your comment isn’t fascinating, I’m just trying to figure out how you are trying to say it relates to this study.

“I have no idea.  (I can make some poorly-informed guesses, but likely nothing worth listening to).  Again, the researchers suggest that the standardized test gap has to do with a “skewed pool” of test takers.  If that’s the case, we would expect to see the gap go away if all students had to take the test - and that’s apparently exactly what happened.  What’s going on within specific groups, I don’t know.”

Exactly.

It’s not as if the researchers saw the nationwide, data, came up with an excuse they thought sounded good, and went with that.

They compared a self-selected group of test-takers to a non-self-selected group of test-takers, and came to the logical and data supported conclusion that the self-selection accounted for the gender gap in the former scores.

Their theory for why this happens is as yet just a hypothesis, since they hardly were able to go to the latter students and ask which would have still taken the test it was not required, and why, and compare that to their individual scores.  Nor were they able to go back in time and ask the students who self-selected out of taking the test to go ahead and take it anyway.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the gap disappears when you take away the self-selection, nor the fact that the lack of self-selection makes those numbers more accurate in terms of being able to apply them to the population as a whole.

Mickle,

I was addressing the fact that JimB kept saying “Asian” which could mean Asians from Asia or Asian-Americans….so I wanted to clarify the ethnic terms so they are much more precise in reflecting the information in the report.  I do this for two reasons:

1. Asian-Americans have always had a problem of being considered “perpetual foreigners” because we’re not considered “real Americans” in US society even though many of us, especially in the second generation and later are just as “American” as anyone else.

2. To illustrate how the gender gap being discussed in that report is really reporting an “American problem”.....not one that is necessarily universal around the world.  The notion that women cannot do math is something that is alien to every Chinese undergrad and grad classmates I’ve interacted with over the last 10+ years along with dozens of Japanese and Korean classmates.  In fact, some of them said that the prevailing American anti-intellectual attitudes…especially against those in math and science along with this genderizing are two major factors why the vast majority of American K-12 students are so far behind in math and science compared to their international peers.  Some of them are actually quite dumbfounded at these self-sabotaging and thus, defeatist attitudes.

ok.  that makes sense.

Thanks