When you write "supports research", I get the impression that you're thinking of some institution, corporation, or social group. Are you?

Has it always been a field dominated by women, though? Because I was talking about the past, too. And with regard to the present, there may be exceptions to the male domination, but they remain clearly exceptional. We don't even need a study to figure this out.

I await your evidence with interest, but I will point out that the article in the OP has evidence of its own.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

I rather think it goes: "gender stereotypes say women have more empathy, so while growing up they are steered, often unconsciously but also by peer pressure to live up to expectations, towards working with living things, whilst men are steered towards the technical fields"
Their respective frequency in those fields then feed the feeling that's where they belong, feeding the way the next generation is steered.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Do you seriously believe that tendency for empathy is not genetically influenced? Considering the evolutionary pressures toward empathy in the nurturing sex, and marked gender differences in empathy among non-human mammals?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I would say culture emphasizes differences between women and men, but doesn't actually cause them (mostly). The fact is, according to my psychology 101 teacher in college, there were studies finding that even without all the "pink and blue" separation of the babies, once they become old enough the boys tended to prefer to play with toy trucks and guns, the girls with dolls. The latter is probably a developing "maternal instinct", and the former has something to do with hunter instincts though I'm not sure how the toddler figures out that a truck or gun has anything to do with downing the buffalo, other than both are manipulable and "tool-like".

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

If you have any solid evidence that men and women are genetically predisposed to have different degrees of empathy (a vague concept which I'll take for granted for now), then please present it.

I would also like to see some solid evidence that your concept of empathy has any bearing whatsoever on mathematical ability.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/P.../Papers/05_Sex

(you have to register)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle4175612.ece

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rus...yalSociety.pdf

http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/...BCandSW_EQ.pdf

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten...t/310/5749/819

There are many more.
I made no such claim. My point is that men and women tend to WANT to do different things, regardless of their mathematical ability.

Don't have time to look for a cite now, but in Soviet Block countries, where both men and women had less freedom to choose their career than in Western countries, there were more women engineers and physicists than in the West; their numbers dropped since the end of Communism. In USSR women (and men) were pushed into careers according to their measured ability, rather than what they's prefer to do. It's not that women ar bad at engineering, but other things are more attractive to them.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

However, the topic of this thread is precisely whether boys are better at math than girls, or not.

The OP has a link to an article about a study which presents evidence that boys and girls are having the same grades in math. How do you explain this fact, if you believe that girls are genetically less predisposed to care about or succeed in math?

I'm afraid I couldn't be bothered. But I took a peek at the others.

In principle, I place more trust on an article in Science Daily than on one in The Times. In fact, the default amount of trust I have in the popular media for controversial scientific topics is near zero.

That one was published as "point of view".

Those two seem to be actual scientific papers. I will take a look at them when I have more time.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

In another thread, Jokegirl remembered the Bechdel Test. I had never heard about it.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

Because public school does not present them with much choice. They are told to study math, and dutifully do it, and guess what -- they are just as good at it as boys. Once they are in a university setting, and can study what they actually WANT, divergence occures. I am sure there are many things you would be good at if you tried, but they do not interest you.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Except that (as noted by tdvance) in past decades girls did not do as good as boys in math at public school.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

Why is that an "except"? If in past decades girls were NOT pushed/encouraged to study math (let alone actively discouraged, as many posters seem to agree), then of course they did not do as well as boys. That situation no longer exists -- in public schools. In college, however, there is no pressure on girls to study math/engineering/physics/computers. They only do so if they want to. And relatively few do.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Yes. Are you?

Look at what you wrote. Do you think we get better answers if we don't look at the question too hard?



Warren Farrell has written a book: Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It


Like I said, it's loaned out. The person I loaned it to is on vacation, so I just ordered another copy.

Going from memory, there was a list of 25 or 30 high paying professions where women either dominate, or earned more on average than men.

Pharmacy was one I remember because it was at the top of the list. Chemistry is another I recall because that is my own profession.

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Olsen the moderator.

There are a number of reasons (besides sexism) that explain why men earn more money in their chosen field.

Number one: Men on average put in more hours per pay period over more years than women do. Men are less likely to drop-out of the work force to raise children. Despite changes in society, a man's primary role in raising a family is raising funds.

I have been hiring scientists since 1986. Way more women than men apply. The only explanation I could come-up with was that the men were going-on to higher paying jobs (chemists and biologists don't get paid that much) while the women were looking for stable positions and family-friendly jobs.

Bottom line: I hired many more women scientists than men scientists. At any one time, I had only women working in my departments. Sexist feminists complained about that too.

No matter what I did, someone would find cause to complain about sexism.

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Olsen the moderator.

Very good points.
It's nice to see better brains expressing what I fail to get across.

I want to add that one of these woman scientists I hired went-on to become a department head, and hired me back some years later when I was looking for work.

I was her subordinate and had no problem with it.

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Olsen the moderator.

It doesn't change the fact that, while things are better now than they were, these are changes made within the lifetimes of many on this board. Try reading Tom Brokaw's Boom!, which contains interviews with women in quite a few fields who were rejected from grad school programs or jobs because they were just going to go out and get pregnant anyway. No, most of those women weren't scientists, but combined with the histories of women such as Rosalind Franklin, Lise Meitner, and Marie Curie, I think a pretty strong pattern of societal disapproval is evident.

Teenage girls are, by nature, unlikely to violate social norms unless a whole bunch of other girls are doing it, too. There are exceptions. I certainly mean no universal statements of behaviour, be it from teenage girls, scientists, math teachers, or employers. However, even when outsiders think girls are being wild and rebellious, they're still generally following a trend. If women grow up being taught that it's unfeminine to do something, most women will avoid doing it. It's only as our beliefs as to what defines "feminine" change that women's behaviour as a group changes to meet it--and vice versa, of course. It takes a lot of women changing behaviour to change societal expectations, and it's still a bumpy road.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Warren Farrell mentioned a large US company that had affirmative action programs for women. Women were put on a fast-track promotion plan to get more women in management postions.

Now since these women had less tenure, they had lower salaries than their man peers who had more time on the job.

On the face of it, it looks like women were being paid less for the same job, when in fact the salary difference was entirely based on their experience and tenur, and the affirmative action programs.

It comes down to this: Even women managers and women business owners are reluctant to hire women because anything they do might be seen as a basis for a sex discrimination lawsuit.

Now let me reiterate my POV: I support equal protection under the law without regard to sex.

All opposed?

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Olsen the moderator.

Who is raising this society of disapproval?

Boys learn early-on that they aren't likely to get some girl to marry them if they focus their studies on Elizabethan Poetry.

So starting about 8th grade, boys turn their focus to math, engineering, and the hard sciences. These are fields which have a better chance of earning them a mate.

I'm not even touching the field of athletics. There are only so many slots for jocks, and their ability to earn a living drops precipitously after High School.

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Olsen the moderator.

That's rich. You're a sociologist?

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Olsen the moderator.

Let us say that I have extensive experience with the behavioural patterns of teenage girls.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I seem to have raised some exceptions.

But, going back to the previous statementThose individual histories are supposed to be evidence of what? Success, or lack of success? How are you combining them?

I don't see how you could make this test double-blind, except by completely isolating the children, which in this world falls under "cruel and unusual".
It's really hard to get rid of deeply ingrained gender behaviour towards children. That girls are still less common in some departments of science education even almost a century after emancipation became a movement should tell us enough.

Personally I have been discussing this topic a lot having studied in a place where 4 out of 50 students in a year were female. There is no discrimination once you start studying - we figured out pretty quickly there was no difference in understanding or general logic abilities between genders (more than there was between random individuals, anyway).
The reason a lot of girls don't choose such an education is because they don't even consider it as an option. It's not a recognized society rule, just a silent acceptance that this is not a career.
I was a sci-fi freak and computer interested since my early childhood. Yet I didn't even consider natural sciences even though I always had been a geek until somebody pointed it out to me.
Why? Well, it's hard to say. I would say there are simple no role models. It's not just great minds like Marie Curie - they are always the exception, not the rule. There are few girls who are brave enough at the age of college entrance to want to be the exception. It's simply not the "normal" thing to do - and that is what has to be changed.

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

Congratulations; I was one myself. However, most "rebels" tend to fall into recognizable groups--goth, for example, or--to go back farther--grunge or Madonna-wannabe or what have you. All in a quest to be different without actually being different.

Each woman described suffered from the kind of discrimination under consideration here. (Again, for Meitner, being Jewish also caused its own problems!) For example, Rosalind Franklin couldn't receive a proper degree at all from Cambridge, as it didn't give them to women at the time; further, despite the quality of her work and its contribution to the work of others, she was actually asked to promise not to work on DNA structure anymore. After escaping the Nazis and the Anschluss, Meitner still faced men who didn't want to let her into their programs because women didn't belong in science, despite the fact that she was already considered a Nobel Prize candidate. (She never received one, nor did Franklin.) Barbara McClintock's mother thought higher education would make her "unmarriageable." Marie Curie was denied entrance to a regular university because she was a woman.

And remember, these are exceptional women. These are women who belong among the greatest scientists of the Twentieth Century. These are women whose studies shaped how we see the world, even shaped the path of human history. How much harder would it have been for an average working female scientist to even get into some of the programs that enabled these women to do their great work?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

probably the closest to "double blind" you could get would involve feral children (who have been used for many studies) and putting the various toys in numbered boxes the tester leaves with them--and the toys have a built-in accelerometer and timer to compute the amount of time the toy is played with.

Whether this actually has been done or not, I don't know.

Now, given the many differences between men and women (versus relatively few between, say, blue-eyed and brown-eyed people) (and also differences in animals of all types too--e.g. female polar bears protect their young with their lives, male polar bears will kill the cubs if the female doesn't watch carefully) it would seem the burden of proof would be on the one claiming that the differences are all cultural rather than inherent in the species--particularly since there are some only-partly-flawed studies suggesting, yes, men are from Mars and women are from Venus (figuratively).

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

For a related datapoint, Culture, Gender and Math, published in the 30 May 2008 issue of Science. Guiso et al. found that the math gender gap essentially vanishes in countries with better gender equality (as measured by a variety of independent sources), and the reading gap actually increases. If a small math gender gap still exists in the US, it may simply be because gender equality (society's treatment of women in general) hasn't been reached yet.

This result does make sense when compared with the improving test scores for various minority/immigrant populations in the US (e.g. Irish in the early 1900s, African American's in the 80's and 90's), where test scores improved as the particular group's station in life improved.

Also, though I'm not certain that this is the article that the OP was based off of, Hyde et al. (2008) noted that there are not enough challenging questions in the standardized tests.

Also, the Association for Women in Science has a lot of statistics that may prove relevant to the discussion. Remember: the plural of anecdote is not data!

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"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

I'm not saying there aren't any inherent differences.
For example, I have never seen the extreme of total dedication to one topic and that topic alone in women that some men exhibit. I do believe there is an evolutionary reason for this - a woman has to dedicate part of attention to her children if she wants her genes to survive.
I do not believe that this has more than a negligible effect on the capacity to do logical or mathematical exercises though. And the cultural effect is definitely much bigger when it comes to women in higher studies of natural sciences.

I know some maths teachers who tell me that girls are actually the same or better than boys at maths until some time into highschool. After that, they stop - not because the math is suddenly becoming too advanced, but because there is peer pressure on them not to be interested in it. Their understanding does not suffer, only their dedication does.
Of course it suffers for boys as well - teenagers are like that - but not in the same amount at all. It is much more socially acceptable for a boy to be interested in a scientific topic in his free time without becoming a "teacher's pet" than it is for a girl.

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

"For example, I have never seen the extreme of total dedication to one topic and that topic alone in women that some men exhibit."

two possible answers:

1. Thats because men have just ONE THING on their mind....

2. real answer: men were the hunters, women the gatherers in pre-civilization days. Men needed to focus on stalking the beast. Women needed to see and be drawn toward that flash of color in the corner of their eye that indicated "fruit!".

And yep--when I'm really focused on something, I practically forget other things exist. That can result in a "rude awakening"--like I remember in college, I was practicing saxophone in a practice room, somebody thought I was someone else (another sax player had the same build as me) and entered the room and tapped my shoulder--nearly sending me through the ceiling.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I have a question along these lines.

It seems to me that nearly all women do directions based off of landmarks, like 'turn left at the shell station' where most men do their directions off of the streets, as in 'turn left at Yale st.'

Anyone else notice this?

Some interesting figures from Warren Farrell's Why men earn more. The startling truth behind the pay gap -- and what women can do about it.

29 bachelors degrees with women being offered higher starting salares than men.

Petroleum engineering
Chemical engineering
computer emgineering
electrical/eletronics& communication engineering
Mechanical engineering
Aerospace
metallurrgical engineering
computer programming
computer science
engineering technology
physics
agricultural engineering
computer systems analysis
construction science/mgmt
business systems networking/telecommunications
architecural engineering
Civil engineering
logistics/materials management
Informations science and systems
chemistry
agricultural business and mgmt
architecture and related programs
history
health and related aciences
other humanities.
biological/life sciences
physical education
journalism
psychology

Source: National Association of Colleges and Employers(NACE) "Average yearly salaries," Offers -- Bachelors degree candidates," Salary Survey: A Study of 2002-2003 Beginning Offers. September 2003, Fall 2003, Vol 42 No.4, 8-11

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Olsen the moderator.

In an Earlier work, Why Men Are The Way They Are, Farrell points out that boys and girls in pre-adolescence are about equally interested in the humanities, but after about age 13, boys quickly learn that their potential as a mate is directly related to their ability to provide for a family. Hence, their interests in the subjects wane, and they devote themselves more to hard sciences, engineering, etc, or the hard, dirty and dangerous jobs that women tend to avoid.

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Olsen the moderator.