4 ms·

It's not mentioned in the article but I think there's a big gender split as well. This is only anecdotal, but my sister was told all the way through school that

It's not mentioned in the article but I think there's a big gender split as well. This is only anecdotal, but my sister was told all the way through school that she wasn't good at maths, despite being in a Grammar School (requires an exam to get in). She ended up doing well in her exams despite years of criticism, and is now a teacher, teaching maths among other things. Again, anecdotally, I more commonly see women laugh off terrible maths skills as "oh ha ha yes I'm not good with numbers". It's just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we've decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.

rocketbop 4y ago
I’ve read quite a few times that more girls take higher level maths as well as sciences at second level than boys, but this reverses when it comes to third level. My anecdotal school experience was that higher maths as well as chemistry and biology had more girls than boys while physics had slightly more boys.
pipes 4y ago
My brother and his wife are both maths teachers. They say the opposite is now true. Girls receive most of the encouragement.
- 2b3a51 4y ago
  Which is occurring because of an initiative from around a decade ago. Initiatives and programmes for school improvement &c have a habit of persisting like zombies.
smcl 4y ago
This doesn't match with my experience in a Scottish state school, albeit way back in 1997-2003. In the top class in maths we always had more girls than boys throughout my time there. If anything boys were often treated as a nuisance for the first four years of secondary school - many leave aged 16 to work in farming or in oil - and you're only taken seriously if you stick around for the final two years. Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own. It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  likewise -- might be a class issue. Amongst the working class, girls were academic sweethearts and boys troublemakers.
adam-a 4y ago
While I think maths was one subject that held out as male-dominated, and it still probably is at university level and beyond, recently girls started to out-perform boys at school level. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/13/girls-overtake-boys-in-a-level-and-gcse-maths-so-are-they-smarter https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/13/girls-over...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
magicalhippo 4y ago
Yeah my SO had a math teacher in middle school which had (as far as I can determine) decided she wasn't good at math. He didn't like those who weren't good, so he never helped her and even talked her down in class. As such she started to resent the math classes, and later on she avoided math, focusing on other things. We met when she had her last year in high school, and she was unsure what to do for college or otherwise. She ended up taking a gap year to figure things out. I encouraged her to explore the options, and through a friend found she really wanted to do construction engineering. To do that, she had to take a year to get some extra math and physics classes. The start was rough, she had a fear of math and was lacking in basics like algebra. But she was determined to try. Meanwhile I'd been in college for a couple of years and gotten the basic math classes there for my CS degree. I enjoyed math, so tried to help her. I quickly realized however I had to go back to basics and build some foundations. Back to basics with fractions, basic equation solving etc. After a few weeks of hard work from the both of us, and nearly giving up, things started to fall into place. She started to realized she could understand math, and with that it became a lot more fun. After a couple of months, it turned out she was actually quite good at math! She picked up new concepts without much struggle, and my help was less and less needed. At the end of the year she passed the exams with high marks, and all I had done to help prepare was just to sit with her and check her answers as she went through previous exams.

rocketbop 4y ago

I’ve read quite a few times that more girls take higher level maths as well as sciences at second level than boys, but this reverses when it comes to third level. My anecdotal school experience was that higher maths as well as chemistry and biology had more girls than boys while physics had slightly more boys.

pipes 4y ago

My brother and his wife are both maths teachers. They say the opposite is now true. Girls receive most of the encouragement.

2b3a51 4y ago
Which is occurring because of an initiative from around a decade ago. Initiatives and programmes for school improvement &c have a habit of persisting like zombies.

smcl 4y ago

This doesn't match with my experience in a Scottish state school, albeit way back in 1997-2003. In the top class in maths we always had more girls than boys throughout my time there. If anything boys were often treated as a nuisance for the first four years of secondary school - many leave aged 16 to work in farming or in oil - and you're only taken seriously if you stick around for the final two years. Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own. It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.

mjburgess 4y ago
likewise -- might be a class issue. Amongst the working class, girls were academic sweethearts and boys troublemakers.

adam-a 4y ago

While I think maths was one subject that held out as male-dominated, and it still probably is at university level and beyond, recently girls started to out-perform boys at school level. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/13/girls-overtake-boys-in-a-level-and-gcse-maths-so-are-they-smarter https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/13/girls-over...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

magicalhippo 4y ago

Yeah my SO had a math teacher in middle school which had (as far as I can determine) decided she wasn't good at math. He didn't like those who weren't good, so he never helped her and even talked her down in class. As such she started to resent the math classes, and later on she avoided math, focusing on other things. We met when she had her last year in high school, and she was unsure what to do for college or otherwise. She ended up taking a gap year to figure things out. I encouraged her to explore the options, and through a friend found she really wanted to do construction engineering. To do that, she had to take a year to get some extra math and physics classes. The start was rough, she had a fear of math and was lacking in basics like algebra. But she was determined to try. Meanwhile I'd been in college for a couple of years and gotten the basic math classes there for my CS degree. I enjoyed math, so tried to help her. I quickly realized however I had to go back to basics and build some foundations. Back to basics with fractions, basic equation solving etc. After a few weeks of hard work from the both of us, and nearly giving up, things started to fall into place. She started to realized she could understand math, and with that it became a lot more fun. After a couple of months, it turned out she was actually quite good at math! She picked up new concepts without much struggle, and my help was less and less needed. At the end of the year she passed the exams with high marks, and all I had done to help prepare was just to sit with her and check her answers as she went through previous exams.