On 6/26/13 1:15 AM June 26, 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 08:44:09AM +0800, Charles Haynes wrote:
at least in the USA it's clear that girls are steered away from STEM
curricula by a variety of mechansims, primarily social. Girls aren't
"supposed" to like Maths, and so they don't. Girls that show an interest or
aptitude are subtly or not so subtly told that this is inappropriate, that
they're weird, that they will be unpopular, and so on.
In fact until they're told they should be bad at it, girls generally show
higher aptitude for maths than boys of comparable age.
I'm not buying that explanation. I expect that the divergence happens
at puberty. Does it?
In the US, girls now outscore boys in math through high school. The
subtle (and-not-so-subtle) discouragement continues all the way up. One
of the reasons I chose to homeschool my children was that I wanted my
daughters to experience the full ability of their brains without such
discouragement. My eldest recently graduated college with a computer
science degree. She worked as a math and physics tutor, and her toughest
job as a tutor was helping students overcome their conditioning against
being able to handle math and physics.
We had an interesting demonstration of subtle bias this last semester.
My middle kids took the same college math class with the same professor
(someone recommended by their eldest sister). Both kids are gifted in
math, both did excellently well, but my daughter's exams were graded
harder than her brother's, and the professor's comments to my son were
encouraging while his comments to my daughter were discouraging. He
acted, in short, like my daughter wasn't really bright enough to handle
this stuff and that her mistakes were proof of that. My son's mistakes,
on the other hand, were perfectly excusable and no evidence at all
against his natural aptitude.
It didn't make a difference in their final grades. If they had been
closer to the border, however, the differential grading and
encouragement could have pushed my daughter's grade down and my son's
grade up.
--
Heather Madrone ([email protected])
http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com
Live sweetly in bitter times.
