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> Girls often believe themselves to be bad at math, in accordance with gender stereotyping This seems to be taking one (politically motivated) assumption and m
by tjic 17y ago
> Girls often believe themselves to be bad at math, in accordance with gender stereotyping
This seems to be taking one (politically motivated) assumption and making it into an uncontested piece of background information.
There's a fair bit of good data that suggests that women are, on average, not as good as men at math.
Perhaps some girls have math anxiety in the same way that some (male) nerds have anxiety about meeting new people: they KNOW that the task is difficult for them, and they don't want to fail.
> The study found that when elementary school teachers, who are primarily female, displayed a high level of anxiety about math, that skittishness was transmitted to their female students.
Of course, if female teachers are less skilled at math, then that would also explain the findings.
- lmkg 17y agoSounds to me like there's a vicious cycle going on. Girls are socialized to think that math is hard, have difficulty acquiring the skills, grow up, become teachers, and pass both their skill and attitudes on to the next generation of girls. This makes it rather difficult to find the ground truth (if any) on whether girls are inherently worse or better at math.
- GiraffeNecktie 17y ago>There's a fair bit of good data that suggests that women are, on average, not as good as men at math. Care to share some of that data? The research I've seen suggests that those differences essentially disappear when girls are taught separately from boys.
- scott_s 17y agoI'd also like to see the data you refer to. Anecdotally, my pre-cal and calculus classes in high school had more girls than boys.
- dantheman 17y agoI haven't seen any studies about general men and woman, the only study I've seen is that men seem to have a wider distribution than women -- this was offered to explain why men seem to dominate certain fields. This is not saying that men in general are better at math, just that the underlying probability distributions are different and it might not be reasonable to expect a 50/50 split at the top of a given field. The underlying distribution might 60/40 or 70/30. Just as the prison populations, and serial killer rates are different.