Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

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Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:02:07 GMT

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re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

Alamanach — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:45:16 GMT

That doesn't quite address the question of math geniuses, though. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and from my experiences in engineering school, I have no doubt that women can perform just as well as men when it comes to learning and performing mathematical calculations-- heck, they might even be a little better. But I was dumbfounded by the stark and absolute difference in mechanical intuition. The women could calculate great. But not a single one I worked with had any understanding of what, mechanically, was actually going on. In order to design something new, one has to do more than solve heat transfer equations, one has to be able to imagine what life is like for a mechanical component. To calculate all the gear ratios in an analog clock is one thing, to model them all in the mind's eye and watch them run is something else entirely. I did not meet a woman who could do that latter task. (I'm not saying they are not out there, just that I never met one.)

It has been said that men tend to be better than women at solving problems involving spatial relations. If that is true, it would explain my experiences in engineering school. It might also help explain a gender disparity among mathematical geniuses. To calculate the necessary relationship between N and epsilon for a uniform continuity proof is a lot easier if you have a clear idea in your mind of what N and epsilon look like.

re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

history geek — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:44:27 GMT

@ Alamanach:

I am a woman who can understand what is "going on" mechanically, and have a husband who cannot (even teaching him to drive a manual transmission drove me nearly to distraction-- he understood what to do, but not why). The difference between us? I grew up learning to fix cars and bikes, building and repairing the family home, and listening to my father's endless lectures on engineering basics. Most women don't grow up in such an environment, and many men do. My husband, on the other hand, grew up in a family that had been white-collar for multiple generations, and paid others to do this kind of work. My admittedly anecdotal conclusion (backed up by what I've seen in others of both genders) is that learning to understand mechanics is not unlike learning language-- we're better at it if we start early.

re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

SeitenNari — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:42:32 GMT

@ Alamanach:

; ) That analogy doesn't apply very well to uniform continuity proofs. But, that is very much beside the point.

It is that sort of belief, that women are poorer at solving problems involving spatial relations or any other math related thing, that becomes a tiny part of the larger problem. Didn't you meet any male engineers who were poor at such visualization skills? I'm bewildered when I try to consider that professional female mechanical engineers are poor at taking on spatial problems. Perhaps it is a gender-gender communication issue. Who knows?

The article suggests that it is social, not innate biological factors, that contribute to the female population's seeming failure to produce its 'math geniuses.' I feel confident that properly conducted science will show us again and again that this is the case. Innateness doesn't count as an argument unless it can be backed up, in this context or anywhere else.

It's interesting to note that the gender gap really has started to shrink now that people are bothering to contemplate why it was there in the first place. Maybe the US and other countries will truly start paying attention one day instead of doing all this wibbly-wobbly handwaving.

And thanks for this article. It made my day.

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Sharon Begley | brautigan's toothbrush

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:33:38 GMT

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re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

mathgirl — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:24:58 GMT

Re "extreme math abilities" on the basis of International Mathematical Olympiad results - so I guess you are implying that former socialist countries have more gender equality than the West? I am sorry to disappoint, but they have a very rigorous selection and A LOT of training (incomparable to anything in the US or Western Europe), and sex discrimination in the former USSR is also incomparable with the West.

Results in science are not only about abilities. You can be very good at something, but just not that interested (and choose biology or medicine over math, for example). Scientific achievement at 40 is not perfectly correlated with grades at the graduate or undergraduate level at all. And the "extremes of math ability" as manifested by the number of math professors is not 1% of population, it is much much less, so drawing conclusions on the basis of school results is similar to describing the properties of 10 karat blue diamonds by looking at large pool of standard 1-karat ones.

re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

PurpleTeeth — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:19:43 GMT

PNAS - is that a joke? Obviously someone has a sense of humor on naming a committee for a gender study.

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The Math Gender Gap Explained | Sharon Begley | Voices | AllThingsD

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The Math Gender Gap Explained [Voices] | UpOff.com

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re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

Geoffrey Falk — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:07:15 GMT

"Korea topped Japan by 6 to 0."

But, Korea actually has a slightly lower World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index (0.6157 vs. 0.6447) than does Japan. (Higher is better, in terms of female emancipation, etc.; Sweden, for example, is 0.81, while Yemen is 0.45.) So, the 6-to-0 ratio between countries with a "common gene pool" is exactly in the *opposite* direction of what it should be if the greater number of girls sent by Korea was the product of negative "social and other environmental forces" directed toward young females, and rather wildly so.

Plus, in rural Iceland were girls' mean scores higher than boys'. In the Reykjavik metropolitan area the math performance of girls and boys was much like that found in other countries.

Janet Hyde's earlier (shoddy) work was debunked in late 2008, in "The Math Sex Gap Revisited," from which the above GGI numbers and info about Iceland are taken. That article is posted here: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm . Most of that debunking also applies to Hyde's current article, regarding gaps and male variability (see also http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm , written in the aftermath of the Larry Summers kerfuffle).

I have contributed a thorough debunking of Begley's ideas, and of Hyde's, here: http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/June2009.asp#5 . There's far too much wrong with Hyde's studies, and Sharon Begley's presentations of those, to post it all here.

re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

Alamanach — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:34:54 GMT

@ SaitenNari:

"Didn't you meet any male engineers who were poor at such visualization skills?"

No.

"I'm bewildered when I try to consider that professional female mechanical engineers are poor at taking on spatial problems."

You and me both. I had been raised to believe that there were no differences between men and women, aside from the trivial anatomical ones. Engineering school was a shock. For what it's worth, I noticed that the female students tended to gravitate towards areas like thermodynamics, which involve a lot of calculation and minimal visualization.

"It's interesting to note that the gender gap really has started to shrink now that people are bothering to contemplate why it was there in the first place."

My own contemplation: http://alamanach.com/2008/07/16/the-dispensation-of-suffering/

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re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

tersisma — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:33:36 GMT

Geoffrey Falk has the interesting post with links that investigate the dodgy studys in question. seems this "study" has dubious origins from an author that has stretched credibility in the past and puts out this material as political fodder instead of as real science. the goal i guess is to get headlines and thus affect perception through a new announced truth even if it is false. especially easy since the press will not bother to fact check your work, especially on such a touchy subject. the idea that data sets from lower level students has anything to do with the highest achievement at the pinnacle of the extreme math genius is laughable. the number of such real genius's is a tiny fraction of that said %. her new study reeks of someone massaging the results to fit her agenda.

might as well repost these since they are rather interesting.

http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/June2009.asp#5

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm

re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

tersisma — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:24:55 GMT

more proof the bias in education is against men.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8085011.stm

Female students are ahead of men in almost every measure of UK university achievement, according to a report from higher education researchers.

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Gender difference in math ability variability driven by social inequality, not biology – study « Restructure!

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re: Sharon Begley: The Math Gender Gap Explained

Chrislux — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:38:13 GMT

With respect to mathematical geniuses it is nonsense to believe that the top 1% high school students can be assimilated to geniuses as the authors of the referred study seem to imply. What is true is that participants and above all medallists at the international mathematical olympiads are truly geniuses because they represent say the very best ones out of millions of competing teenagers. In fact only the 6 best high school mathematicians in each country are selected for the international mathematical olympiads. The study referred to at the end of the Sharon Bengley´s article is a study by Gallian, Kane and Mertz about country and gender participation and results at the international mathematical olympiads. This study does not at all put at variance Larry Summers´view that the mathematics gender gap at top levels may well be biological. In effect according to the referred study even in the countries which most favor female participation at the mathematical olympiads (like Russia or Bulgaria) there are only 12% to 24% females, which means that males still make up 76% to 84% of exceptionally talented young mathematicians. In other countries the male supremacy is even greater close to 90% or 100%.

The reason why there is such an overwhelming male representation in fields like top level mathematics, theoretical physics or astrophysics is actually simple. It can be explained by the the fact that you basically need a IQ of at least 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean of 100 (in other words a IQ of at least 150 or 160) to master the most advanced topics in these disciplines. Now there are numerous studies showing that the standard deviation of males IQ is significantly larger than the standard deviation of females IQ but that is a fact that few people want to mention because it is not politically correct. If you add the fact that the IQ distribution is approximately normal (or gaussian) then you have a very simple explanation of the huge male over-representation in those areas.

Note that exactly the same factors explain why there is a huge male over-representation at top levels in games of pure abstract intelligence like chess or checkers. For example there is only 1 female in the best 100 chess players worldwide (1%) according to FIDE rankings of April, 2009 which are available free online. And in the first 1000 rated chess players worldwide there are only 21 females (2.1%) whereas females represent 7.6% of the whole FIDE rated population. This relative dearth of females at top levels means that they just cannot compete against males at the top end of chess competitions. Note that all the big chess tournaments (like world championships for example) are open to both genders but as the result of the huge gender gap female-only chess tournaments had to be set up in addition to all the other ones open to both genders.

Now, why is the male IQ (and other quantifiable cognitive aptitudes) standard deviation higher than that of females remains to be investigated. But it cannot be ruled out that it is related to gender biology, maybe even linked to chromosome arrangements.

After all studies have shown that male rats show better spatial skills than female rats for example in finding out their way out of a maze. Maybe we will see some feministic scientists like those referred to in the article who will suggest that this male rat superiority is due to social factors in the rats society or maybe to the chauvinistic male rats behavior. But who will then believe them?

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