August 03, 2008
Math Is Harder for Girls
From The City Journal:
The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.
Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:20 AM | Permalink
Comments
It's totally reasonable to expect that given the same opportunities girls could (and in some cases) outperform boys in math. Cultural factors notwithstanding.
Lots of ink is being spilt by scientists on this seemingly emotional issue. Why not let them have fun while you help your daughters get a better handle on something else they are not supposed to do well, least of all excell.
Now, if those conducting the so-called research were freudian orthodox analysts. Alas! We'd know then why boys will do better in everything!
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | Aug 3, 2008 7:48:50 AM
While meta-analysis has greatly approved it cannot account for the embryonic shortcomings of gender based research in academia. It is difficult and unfair to make generalizations on a population without testing a represntitve sample.
I respect this article in particular because the consensus is limited to students talking standardized tests like the SAT and not necessarily all individuals in academia.
The trends become more controversial as the population is expanded. Test in India showed that girls did far better than boys before 9th grade where there is a sudden pivot and the statistics completely change.
Once more: trust nothing you read here
Posted by: Yasser Haider | Aug 3, 2008 9:04:25 AM
The issue here is not women in science. Whatever you think about gender differences in math, this study does not say there are no performance differences. It says male variance is higher.
The Times played an ugly political game with science, actually taking a study that suggests roughly what Larry Summers hypothesized to take pot shots at the man.
Posted by: D | Aug 3, 2008 9:31:46 AM
This study also shows that white men predominate above the 99th percentile. Are you really going to argue that this has nothing to do with socio-economic factors? Ummm. Just so.
Posted by: judith weingarten | Aug 3, 2008 11:00:02 AM
The issue of representativeness is an important one for studies like this. As you get out towards the extreme tails any inference you are making about how representative those outside the group are based on those in the group is based on a much smaller sample size and, it seems, would be subject to a much wider confidence interval.
So while you can say with confidence that those one or two standard deviations from the mean look like X, it is much harder to say that those 3 or 4 standard deviations look like Y.
Or am I missing something?
Posted by: Neu Mejican | Aug 3, 2008 1:33:26 PM
That is, making inference about how representative those in your sample are of the larger population...that was poorly worded.
Posted by: Neu Mejican | Aug 3, 2008 1:34:58 PM
Ah, Heather Mac Donald: the thinking bigot's Anne Coulter. I like how she complains about misleading omissions in science writing. How about the missing math gender gap in more gender-equal countries than the US, even in the top 95th and 99th percentile?
Posted by: Anon. | Aug 3, 2008 3:54:54 PM
judith weingarten -
Are you really going to argue that this has nothing to do with socio-economic factors?
Am I being accused of making this idiotic argument? (+) Of course there are many socioeconomic factors, not to mention outright, almost explicit discrimination. And certainly the data on Asian Americans are an important confounder (though why you'd assume they implicate socioeconomics and not culture or genes I don't know)
Even so, when for the largest group of people in the country the study finds a statistically significant difference in variances between men and women -- and no one has suggested that the hiring patterns of the MIT math department reflect large differences in mean male and female IQs - it behooves the paper of record to report accurately. If it cannot, it may (dubiously) bury the story. What it must not do is to claim that the data say the opposite of what they seem to.
(+) To turn the question around, are you going to deny on principle that genes might play some role?
(*) the neu mejican's point about small sample sizes applies with extra force at the tails of the distribution for a minority population.
Posted by: D | Aug 3, 2008 6:03:21 PM
D - while the NSF study may not prove that Larry Summers was wrong about the difference in variability in math achievement related to gender , it absolutely does not support Heather McDonald's contention that "the facts" prove that women are not discriminated against in science. That's utter BS.
It also doesn't rehabilitate the rest of Summer's sexist blather, which basically amounted to: "women just want to get married and have babies, so that's why we don't hire them."
So, review question:
1. A study shows that blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people on average score equally on tests of driving ability. However, blue-eyed people are far more likely to score above the 99th percentile and below the 5th percentile in tests of driving ability. Given this data, we can safely say that:
a. The fact that blue-eyed people are disproportionately represented among NASCAR drivers does not necessarily mean that NASCAR discriminates against brown-eyed people.
b. Driving is harder for brown-eyed people.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Aug 3, 2008 7:25:42 PM
Facts may be stubborn, but alas, not as much as we people are. The thing i do not get is this:
Perhaps, girls are not as good as boys at math, or they are, or they are better… SO WHAT?! i understand that the argument nature over nurture is seized to justify the ugliest politics, but imo, this is where a larger problem lies: how does being better at something makes one intrinsically a better person? Beats me!
Perhaps this is what Richard Dawkins is alluding to when he writes that he is a Darwinist in science, but a social anti-Darwinist. Is it not one of the aims of our modern societies to counter-balance as well as possible inequalities, inherited or acquired?
Obviously, understanding if any observed inequality is due to genetics or society is fundamental to addressing it—but am i too naïve thinking that it is also important to advance the view that being better/worse at x or y (for whatever reason) does not warrant morally unequal treatment.
Posted by: jean-paul | Aug 3, 2008 8:46:18 PM
Vicki Backer - wait...what's the question?
is also important to advance the view that being better/worse at x or y (for whatever reason) does not warrant morally unequal treatment.
Precisely so. The ethics - as distinct from the politics and psychology - of group level differences in various things we care about (even when said groupings can be tagged visually) aren't particularly difficult. I don't see though (with the exception of a few like Peter Singer and Steven Pinker) that this case is being effectively articulated today.
Call me melodramatic, but I fear these next 20-30 years are the last we'll have to make the ethical case from behind the veil, as it were. I really don't think the odds of NO group of people having been shafted by evolution or cultural history are that high, and the sooner we firm up the ethics the better.
Posted by: D | Aug 4, 2008 9:51:36 AM
it behooves the paper of record to report accurately
I would have thought, D, that goes without saying. But your headline reads: "Math is Harder for Girls." My point is that you could just as well have said, "Math is Harder for Blacks". Surely, neither is proven. What we have is a snapshot of today.
I could have included cultural factors (especially for girls) but was thinking of non-whites. So, OK, socio-economic and cultural factors; possibly even unknown genetic factors....
Posted by: judith weingarten | Aug 4, 2008 11:51:58 AM
Would "Hard Math is Harder for Girls" have been a better headline?
Posted by: Sagredo | Aug 4, 2008 1:35:22 PM
Sagredo, that would be slightly more accurate, I guess. But why not: "Boys less likely than girls to be able to simple math"?
According to the article(s), the study shows more males at either end of the distribution of math ability. In what way does this lend support for assigning the intrinsic property "better at math" to boys as a group?
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Aug 4, 2008 2:55:47 PM
I think that in order to establish that being female makes you less likely to be a math genius, you'd have to do a lot more than just acquire skewed statistics. Anything less than a reasonable working scientific model of how our minds/talents develop and how our genes/sex affect development is just not going to do.
Thinking along these lines is instructive, because a cursory reading of the best current genetic science will tell you that genotypes greatly underdetermine phenotypes: in short, while we may be constrained at birth, any one of us could have been a dramatically different person under different environmental circumstances.
A focus on social statistics may therefore distract us from our social reality: we have opportunities at every level to influence the development of people, groups and cultures in ways that enable their flourishing. Do we set about doing this, or do we spend vast amounts of intellectual energy trying to establish some "fact" about a minuscule percentage of boys and girls?
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 4, 2008 10:15:42 PM
Post a comment