Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/04/science/girls-lead-in-science-exam-but-not-in-the-united-states.html?hp

by danso • 13 years ago

36 46 13 years ago

I don't have any answers, just commenting anecdotally. I have an eight year old daughter. I'm a Physicist by education and nowadays I work in software startups in Silicon Valley. She loves sciences, because Daddy loves sciences. We get the telescope out on clear nights, she has a picture of her holding a camera obscura image of the recent eclipse, we got out of bed to watch the Space Station fly overhead. Right now she's in the other room on her Chromebook playing VIM Adventures to familiarize herself with the hand movements for VIM.

I go on all the school trips. The trips to the tech museum see lots of the little boys running around, fascinated by the science. Most of her female peers... meh. Given that they all have the same classroom experience it seems to me that the explanation is outside of the classroom, and it starts early.

Gender role reinforcement is still very big in US culture. Girls are steered in the direction of !science repeatedly by parents, by TV, by media role models.

Like I say, I don't have an answer, but it saddens me and I desperately hope that as she moves towards middle school, the peer pressure and anti-intellectualism that is teenage-girl-culture in the US doesn't overpower the decreasing influence I have as a parent.

jerrya3• 13 years ago

Most of the cartoons I watched with my daughters have girls and women as scientists and doctors about 100% of the time. And exploit the trope of boys are stupid, fathers are bumbling.

These days, well for the past several decades, I would say TV encourages boys and girls to be high pressure, well dressed lawyers, or maybe high pressure, not perhaps not as well dressed doctors.

But even the Fringe like TV shows show scientists to be mostly dweebs represented by terribly beautiful and well dressed people with boxy bulky square hipster glass frames. (This is why I had to go into normal engineering and was always scared away from fringe pseudo-science science -- I wasn't as attractive and didn't have the wardrobe dollars or fashion sense.)

richardjordan4• 13 years ago

I certainly think it's true that popular culture has a disturbing fondness for making boys and men out to be bumbling idiots and Homer Simpsons.

But, sticking with a Simpsons theme, far more of our media projects female role models closer to Jessica than Lisa.

saraid216• 13 years ago

If you haven't heard of these, may I suggest:

http://www.roominatetoy.com/ http://www.laurenipsum.org/

And, you know, a zillion other things, but these are the two I'm most familiar with at the moment for girls at your daughter's age.

richardjordan4• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links :-)

I am indeed familiar with lots of options for girls her age, and I work with her to keep her interest level high with this stuff. I think if you're an engaged parent it's easy to find ways to enjoy science and technology with a daughter and ensure she learns this isn't just "boys stuff".

But I also see her peers and their parents and I see a far bigger push towards less empowering role models and less science-minded interests.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Things like http://sugru.com and http://littlebits.cc are like the 21st-century equivalents of LEGO bricks. Lots of great stuff out there.

eduardordm2• 13 years ago

You should write more. Me and my wife are planning to have our first child this year and I'm having trouble finding info about how to raise one of our kind.

Last month I went to a little girl's birthday party. The invitation asked for a damn toy-stove for present. I bought a tablet, filled with nice content for kids and gave it instead. The father was not pleased at all, said that it was a girl and her 'femininity' should be cherished and if his daugher wanted a doll, she was getting a doll.

richardjordan4• 13 years ago

Your story is sadly something I have seen a lot in my daughter's eight years. I also have some horror stories of ex-in-laws in Texas and their pageant mommery (ugh, shivers).

I need to get back to blogging in general as I think there are plenty of anecdotes worth sharing of science & tech parenting and startup life.

Sounds like you're on the right track already.

The main thing is to answer questions honestly - even early. Don't feel you have to coddle or dumb them down too much. When I explain things I use scientifically accurate (though obviously simpler wordage) explanations. I talk to her about the wonder of science and its explanatory power. They're way more sophisticated in their thought processes very young than popular culture would have you believe and they're eager to learn.

I got the telescope while she was young and she marveled at the details on the moon (craters, rough edges), and how many more stars you could see. The microscope didn't capture her attention (not yet anyway) so I don't push it.

The solar eclipse was a great excuse to break out pinhole camera-ing and there's a great photo of her holding a piece of paper with the light disc of the sun on it with a big dark chunk bitten out of it by the moon. Took her to NASA for the transit of Venus so she got to see it through high powered cameras of enthusiasts.

Then mostly just followed her interests.

She had a couple of ideas for "Dad wouldn't it be good if..." websites/services. So I've promised her next hackathon that comes up she can come, and Daddy will build the product but she has to be the PM and tell me what goes where and how it works, and we'll practice her presentation in advance and she can be on stage to do the pitch (and if she backs out and gets anxious she doesn't have to, that's okay, because it's not about forcing her to do something if she doesn't want to).

Realized this is becoming a very long answer, but that's basically how I am dealing with it.

jerrya3• 13 years ago

Am I misreading this? You bought a tablet for a little kid's birthday present?

juletide• 13 years ago

Hi, I hope this isn't too random, but your comment made me smile—please keep doing what you're doing. I was raised by a medical doctor father and a "geeky" older brother—dad was always sharing cool science things with me, and my brother got me into pursuits like chess, video games, etc. I was a dorky girl in a rural mountain town but my family still drove me five hours to computer camp every summer, where I first started learning to program, because fostering my dorky interests mattered that much to them. Now I'm 22, nearing graduation in a great computer science program, headed to a fabulous startup next year, and I couldn't be happier—I don't think I'd be here if I hadn't had such great encouragement at home.

stephenhuey• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks for letting me know about VIM Adventures. I was just about to leave the office when I read your comment and got sidetracked playing it for half an hour! Perhaps I'll finally love using Vim.

lutusp4• 13 years ago

A quote from the article: "... and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, made his notorious comments about women’s aptitude ..."

This is a gross misreading of history. Summers didn't make a disparaging comment about women's mathematical or scientific aptitude, he merely commented on a theory that men and women have the same average IQ, but different standard deviations in their scores.

The theory is that men and women have the same average IQ, a view supported by much research, but men's IQ standard deviation (deviation from the mean) is larger, which means the population of men includes more individuals who are both smarter and dumber than women, but with the same average value.

The theory is discussed in some depth here (scroll down to "The Trait-Spread Theory"):

http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/index.html#Gender_Issue...

Graphic:

http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/graphics/population_cur...

Summers' comments on this theory were widely misinterpreted as suggesting that women were't as smart as men, Summers couldn't extinguish the resulting brush fire, and he was forced out of his post as president of Harvard.

In short, it seems Summers overestimated the intelligence of his audience. There was nothing disparaging about his remarks, but they were perhaps a bit too technical for a public presentation for nonspecialists.

jacobolus• 13 years ago

This is silly revisionism. Summers was forced out of his post because he had spent years antagonizing all sorts of people at Harvard, and therefore had many enemies within the faculty. The comments about women were (a) an incredibly stupid thing for a university president to say,† and (b) a convenient pretext for getting rid of him.

† Any statement that can be easily interpreted or misinterpreted as offensive is a stupid mistake for a university president.

lutusp4• 13 years ago

That may all be true, but the theory isn't itself in any way disparaging to women. You've listed some reasons for the consequences of his remarks, but this shouldn't reflect on the theory itself, or justify the claim that Summers' remarks merit the description "notorious comments about women’s aptitude."

_mulder_• 13 years ago

It would be interesting to see how this correlates with women working in Science and Engineering careers and how it varies by country, continent and culture. Doing well in a mandatory test is one thing, but does good performance in a test then translate into a deeper interest (or perhaps, confidence) in science?

From my own experience in the UK, I went to school with many clever girls but I think only a handful actually went into STEM careers and even then the most notable example went into pharmaceuticals science which seems a more female friendly industry than say, physics or mechanical engineering (incidentally, the same girl was the only female in my physics class, with 15 boys... perhaps this put her off even more!). Most girls went on to study medicine, law or business.

abraxasz• 13 years ago

The article fails to provide important details. Imagine the following two situations:

- In every country, there are as many boys and girls taking the science exam, and the girls get a better average. But the top n students are all boys.

- In every country, there are three times as many boys taking the exam, and the girls get a better average.

In both cases, we could conclude that the girls outperform the boys if we use the average as metric. But the first scenario would echo Larry Summer's comment on large standard deviation, and the second would be an instance of selection bias.

Another point that would be interesting to know is wether gender relative performances at age 15 carrie on to later years.

Jimmy• 13 years ago

Excelling at a science test for 15 year-olds is meaningless. When women equal or surpass men in terms of the number of papers published in top journals, then we'll have a story.

danso2• 13 years ago

I think part of the OP's point is to examine whether or not the data support the hypothesis that boys are naturally more inclined toward science than girls and there is nothing we can do about it. If it seems, though, that girls aren't always trailing boys in science in other countries, then what can be done to level the field in the United States?

I don't think the OP's point was to show that females are just better than men at science, in which case, yes, a count of published papers by gender would be one metric.

jerrya3• 13 years ago

What explains the gap? Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the tests for the O.E.C.D., says different countries offer different incentives for learning science and math. In the United States, he said, boys are more likely than girls to “see science as something that affects their life.” Then there is the “stereotype threat.”

This may be true, but not for the typical given reasons, ie., because of pressure on girls to avoid science.

There is an interesting 2010 Norwegian documentary, Brainwash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask) which explores nature vs. nurture in terms of gender preferences in Norway (and includes some of the research of Simon Baron-Cohen) that can be found on YouTube.

In that series, IIRC, and roughly paraphrasing, it was said that when people are in a culture that is on the higher end of Maslow's Pyramid, it frees up people of all genders to make their careers be reflections of what truly interests them.

In the NY Times article, it is said,

boys are more likely than girls to “see science as something that affects their life.

and

For girls in some Arab countries, education is the only way to move up the social structure,” Mr. Schleicher said. “It is one way to earn social mobility.

In Norway, the documentary tries to examine why when there is so much cultural encouragement for gender neutral behavior and gender neutral training why there is still, regardless, such an imbalance of women that go into nursing compared to men that go into nursing.

Is that because society says, "only women can be nurses?" Apparently in Norway, the answer would be no. And the researchers would claim that Norwegian culture is at such a high level in terms of satisfying people's needs, that this gender preferences reflects real innate biological preferences and not culturally learned preferences.

In the United States, my belief is that kids of all ages are discouraged from entering STEM fields.

Aqwis• 13 years ago

I don't think Norway is a good example. More women than men study Chemistry and Biology in Norway -- STEM isn't just mathematics and physics.

olivier1664• 13 years ago

In france (500/497), if you go to Mathematics/Physics/IT it is mainly males. I suspect that Chimestry, Biology and Architecture allow to show balanced quota.

Tichy2• 13 years ago

At least for IT, I suspect part of the reason there are so few women is because they have better options - stay home and have kids, or do something more socially rewarding (involving interaction with other people) that earns less money (because they don't need to earn a lot of money, that's what their husbands do, or because they are smart enough to figure out that happiness is more important than money). I guess you could say "maths is hard, let's go shopping". I am aware that this is not a political correct hypothesis. I also don't have anything against women entering IT.

We tend to romantizice IT because in theory a single person is free to follow their visions. Being a hacker at home working on fancy projects is indeed cool. However, most IT jobs are a drag, you spend most of your time motionless in front of a computer, more often than not in an office in the basement while the (mostly female) PR department has their offices on the top floor with a view on the skyline.

defrost• 13 years ago

Speaking as someone that's spent 30 odd years wandering the intersections of mathematics, computer science, numeric engineering, geophysics, bioinformatics et al, I have a hard time recalling the last time I met anyone in the IT department that was much chop at applied mathematics.

By contrast, between a third and a half of the peers that I run into are women; eg:

http://65.54.113.26/Detail?entitytype=2&searchtype=2&...

.. one woman, 91 diverse publications, most leading to working implementations of actual robots, hand sign reading vision systems, etc.

I guess you could say IT is boring, let's go make robots with lasers.

EDIT: I should specify I'm talking from an Australian perspective, maybe our sheilas have more of a kick arse take no prisoners attitude?

atestu• 13 years ago

A 3% gap is trivial! This story should be about how similarly boys and girls perform in Science, not that ridiculous difference.

brudgers• 13 years ago

That this passes for analysis speaks more to the state of journalism than science education.

Girls in the US score 120 points higher than they do in Uruguay - a country about the size and population of Alabama. Singapore is a data point in favor of women though the difference in scores is less than 0.2% and it has the population of Metro Atlanta. Likewise, Iceland is a data point where men lead by one point. It has a smaller population than metro-Evansville Indiana-KY.

Counting countries is meaningless, except as an excuse for a linkbait title.

droithomme• 13 years ago

That article is misleading in its claims. In the derided western countries where "girls do worse", the girls still do better than the praised countries where girls do better than boys.

Look at the four countries to the right where the girls did best relative to boys and the girls scores: Kyrgyz Republic (340), Qatar (393), Albania (406) and Jordan (433).

Compare to the girls score in countries where girls are alleged to be failing: United States (495), Denmark (494), Netherlands (520), Liechtenstein (511), Chile (433).

Notice that girls are doing better in the countries the NYT thinks are bad, like the US, than in the countries the NYT thinks are good such as Jordan.

danso2• 13 years ago

Right...but isn't there some value in comparing populations at a country level? I don't think the OP is making the argument that girls are flat-out better at science. Rather, I think the OP is raising the question: if boys are more naturally inclined toward science, shouldn't we expect them to be relatively better at it in most countries? At the very least, it shows that the gender gap does not have to be an intractable one.

pekk• 13 years ago

If girls do better in country A than they do in country B, that seems to be a win.

But when we look at how well boys do, we may find that boys in country B do even worse than the girls, which means that country B scores better for some form of equality.

If we score policies by this metric then we may well advise that country A do things just to knock down the boys' scores. This is probably the wrong lesson to draw. We don't improve life or results for girls just by making things worse for boys. At best, a disparity highlights a place to look.

So the point isn't that it is bad to compare countries to each other. The point is actually that this comparison should consider girls-to-girls across countries, not just girls-to-boys inside each country.

btilly• 13 years ago

This is an important point.

In a society where girls are pushed not to continue, the minority that does continue is likely heavily weighted towards the ones who would have done better than the average girl. Therefore girls doing better is evidence of the selection process that got girls into that sample, and not the average abilities that girls have.

cjdrake• 13 years ago

Why are we comparing performance on "science", when there are hundreds of sub-disciplines that fall under that umbrella? Isn't it reasonable that in different countries with different cultures, you will see men and women move into different disciplines, and therefore develop different scores on some generic "science" exam?

This looks like journalists attempting to get screen-views by using some vague data to stir up battle-of-the-sexes arguments.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

It's interesting that the New York Times chart is based on the PISA test

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/

when there is another source of comparative data available from a different test, namely the TIMSS test, which was conducted more recently.

http://timss.bc.edu/timss2011/international-results-science....

Those tests are distinct in what they test in mathematics,

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts...

and following the links about the science sections of each test may reveal some meaningful differences about how they test science. Both international testing programs look at the issue of how scores of girls and boys differ in each country tested, and both are based random sample surveys intended to be representative of the general student population in each tested country or region. Checking each international testing program against the other provides a chance to reality-check some of the findings.

What I notice about what I take (subject to correction by more exact data) to be a cultural difference influenced by differing schooling practices is that in east Asia, the other part of the world I have lived in besides the United States, girls of high school age seem more willing to show what they know in a testing situation and to engage with academic material that is deemed "boyish" in the United States than girls are in the United States. I am the parent of three sons and a daughter, and my wife grew up in Taiwan, so I've seen this from both sides of the male-female divide and from both sides of the Pacific. As an active volunteer in organizations related to gifted education reform, I'm very happy to see examples of countries in which girls don't go "underground" about their abilities as they reach high school age. I've known girls with strong interests and practiced ability in science throughout my life, but especially among girls who themselves received or whose parents received secondary education in science in east Asia.

ellyagg• 13 years ago

I think people generally miss the obvious explanation for this. American teenagers have more freedom than kids in other cultures. Here, kids have enormous latitude with regards to how and where they spend their time. They acquire agency at a young age. We don't have strict tracks to various careers or specialized tests to weed people out of opportunities at a young age. We don't have Tiger Moms[1]. We hear lots of stories of uneducated people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or making it in sports and entertainment. Some other cultures share some of these properties, but not to the degree of the US.

Which gets us to sex and and the fact that sex is an ancient, ancient behavior whose irresistable force will shape the patterns of behavior in any culture. If you want to know why things look a certain way, start with sex.

Teen-agers want the attention of the opposite sex. In America, pretty teen-age girls uniquely have the opportunity to acquire as much attention as they desire and they spend a lot of their time and agency acquiring it. And it is by no means a symmetrical arrangement. The girls seeking attention only want it from a much smaller fraction of the boys.

So, a bunch of girls are gathering attention instead of studying. For most ordinary people--not necessarily Hacker News readers--studying hard enough to be able to program computers or deeply understand maths is a lot of work. And a bunch of girls don't need to bother. On the other hand, a bunch of boys have nothing better to do and can only hope that studying hard will pay off in the attention of girls down the road.

[1] I'm generalizing because pretty much all cognition is for the purpose of generalizing and this discussion is definitely about generalizations.

Udo• 13 years ago

  For most ordinary people [...] deeply understand maths is a lot of work. 
  And a bunch of girls don't need to bother. On the other hand, a bunch 
  of boys have nothing better to do and can only hope that studying hard 
  will pay off in the attention of girls down the road.

I agree with a little kernel of truth here that says girls are perversely encouraged to just ride on their charisma, but it's a huge fallacy to believe this is somehow the most natural state since people in America are by definition free. They might be politically free, but social pressures and conventions are enormous.

Do not make the same mistake evolutionary psychologists make all the time in assuming whatever you see culturally is hard-coded into the human mind. This is probably hard to notice until you start looking at a lot of other countries, where some are even more restrictive but others are way more liberal than the US.

Girls being encouraged to do nothing but look pretty and dig for wealthy husbands is not the hallmark of a free society and it is not somehow justifiable by making a hand-wavy statement about the supposed nature of the sexes.

Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States

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