Study: Women performed better on a math test when using someone else's name

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/womens-true-maths-skills-unlocked-by.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+BpsResearchDigest+(BPS+Research+Digest)

by DanBC • 13 years ago

46 59 13 years ago

bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk

lawl• 13 years ago

Urgh, the summary says basically nothing and is in my opinion fairly vague. And I don't feel like paying $37 bucks to read this once. Also:

The effect was stronger for women who cared more about maths.

No shit? People who are more interested in something are usually better at it?

pradocchia• 13 years ago

People who are more interested in something are usually better at it?

Yes, but no. It shows that women who care more about math are more sensitive to the reputation/stereotype effects, presumably because they do care.

mtrimpe• 13 years ago

The summary says that women are less good at math when doing a test under their own name rather than under an alias.

This effect is more pronounced the more the women cares about her math performance.

What exactly is vague about that?

krisoft• 13 years ago

Paper is accesible from the second author's website. Haven't finished reading it yet.

Superleroy• 13 years ago

The Artical basically says you work better if not under stress, or am i missing something?

shawabawa32• 13 years ago

Yes, you are missing everything.

It says women performs better at maths when they don't use their own name.

Men do not perform any different.

lcedp• 13 years ago

Men do not perform any different.

I didn't find this statement in the article.

cristianpascu2• 13 years ago

Is anyone aware of studies conducted on differences (if there are any) on how much time women and men invest in doing something (math, programming, sciences) in the long run?

I suspect that although there is clearly no reason to believe that women are less capable than men, there are psychological differences on men's and women's willingness to spend time on different type of subjects. Also, on how they evaluate their accomplishments.

Think of the mythical pizza-and-coke-debugging-nights in your own project no-one will ever use.

mherkender• 13 years ago

there are psychological differences on men's and women's willingness to spend time on different type of subjects

Citation needed? I've spent time with women in science and they seem pretty dogged in the pursuit of their goals. It seems to me that it has a lot more to do with cultural norms.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

christianpascu is asking for the citation! They made an observation, and asked if there was any evidence to support that.

gizmo686• 13 years ago

I agree with your citation needed for such an extraordinary claim as parent's. However, I suspect that there is a selection bias in looking at women "in science". Because of social barriers to women entering science, those that do would tend to be the more driven ones, as the less driven ones, who might have entered science in a gender neutral world, would not have. I recall hearing that the Army used simmilar reasoning for lowering the academic requirements for black high-school graduates (relative to white ones), because they found that at the same level of academic achievement, the black ones tended to do better in the army. The common explanation for why this was the case was that because black students had more barriers than white students, they would have to be more qualified just to be able to have reached the same level.

rayiner• 13 years ago

Think of the mythical pizza-and-coke-debugging-nights in your own project no-one will ever use.

Something like 60% of all accountants and auditors and about 45-50% of Big 4 accountants are women. I struggle to think of a physiological difference that would make staring at hex dumps all night unpalatable for women but would make staring at ledgers all night reasonably palatable. I don't think that's the Occam's razor answer to that question.

eitland• 13 years ago

One of these jobs often rewards creativity. In the other creativity might get you fired or even jail time? (Have never seen job postings looking for creative accountants :-)

streptomycin• 13 years ago

Maybe semi-relevant: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-04-16/are-there-too...

Hard to say what's nature and what's nurture, though.

jberryman• 13 years ago

Most of the students at the conservatory I went to were women, and essentially all of them had been spending hours a day for 1-3 decades honing their skills. I guess my point is my experiences around women does not mesh with your theory.

sentenza• 13 years ago

With math-related fields it IMO boils down to this: From what I have seen in academia during the last few years (yes, anecdotal, sample size of about two dozen female PhD students), I'd say that women are sorted out at almost all stages of the engineering/sciences career path. By the time you are a PhD student or Postdoc, the weeding out has produced a situation in which the women that remain are on average better than the male PhD students, because only the most talented/determined stuck it out.

Then most of them leave academia because they might at some point in the future want children, which is a 90% chance career-ender.

aoloe• 13 years ago

i'm really not sure that in this case 110 + 70 people sum up to a representative population.

and if the result are representative, doesn't it rather show, that math-women tend to care more about how other people see them and math-men care less about it?

mjfl2• 13 years ago

I can't believe any psychological studies these days unless they have been successfully replicated.

RodericDay3• 13 years ago

A lot of users seem to be having a really tough time with the conclusion of the story.

Here is the gist of it: The differences in participation and performance in math between women and men are due to cultural and environmental reasons, it has very little to do with intellectual capacity.

There seems to be a huge reluctance to give up this prejudice, it's always some sort of "there are exceptions, but women and men are different" and whatnot. They really aren't, not nearly to the degree indicated by the gender gap. Same with race.

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

It's because the only way you can consistently react to the facts is to become a radical feminist.

Rather than do that, people retreat to pop evolutionary psychology, religion, devils-advocacy in the service of not having to learn anything, or "la la I can't hear you".

codev• 13 years ago

A lot of the early programmers were women all the way back to Lovelace [1]. People seem to have thought of the hardware as masculine and the software as secretarial and therefore feminine. Then when it turned out there was money it men took over programming.

People seem very bad at recognising cultural programming, friends tell me their 3 year old boy just prefers train sets and their girl prefers to pretend to cook without recognising the millions of cultural signals they've received by that point. Actually cooking is another good example - look at the top chefs and how male skewed they are. A lot of it is about telling boys it's ok to be aggressive and acquisitive while telling girls it's better to stay in the background and adopt a supporting role.

[1] http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...

frogpelt2• 13 years ago

If women really aren't naturally more comfortable in settings that society has dictated to them, why were those positions dictated to them in the first place?

If men aren't naturally disposed to be stronger and more aggressive then how were they able to develop that position?

Just curious.

mjfl2• 13 years ago

It is actually well documented that males, independent of environmental influences, prefer "masculine" toys, such as trucks, while girls prefer dolls. While it's nice to think about nurture instead of nature, there are innate traits of each gender. Don't make the huge mistake in thinking that lead to David Reimer's suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Here is an article citing several studies: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201212...

gcb0• 13 years ago

This is the kind of agenda study that won't last a second under peerreview.

Hate those article press releases that don't even get close to explain the methodology and just jump to a sweet conclusion already analyzed.

frossie• 13 years ago

Well this is not my field, but as far as I can see the study (DOI helpfully at the bottom of the OP) was published in a journal called "Self and Identity" and according to http://www.issiweb.org/ this is peer reviewed.

The official journal of ISSI is Self and Identity, which is published by Psychology Press. Self and Identity is a peer-reviewed academic journal that focuses on research and theory relevant to the aims of the society.

Could you clarify your remark further?

yummyfajitas• 13 years ago

Not only that, but it also means we have a simple (and cheap!) solution to the problem of female underperformance. Lets deploy the fix and be done with this, and scrap all of our other attempts at fixing this (e.g., affirmative action).

That's also a conclusion we can draw from this study, assuming we trust the conclusions to the same degree you do.

RodericDay3• 13 years ago

I think you lack some reading comprehension. My second paragraph summarizes the article.

My third paragraph on the other hand is a commentary on the tech community as a whole, which is backed by my personal experience.

Your snide "trust the conclusions to the same degree as you do" puts you squarely in the camp of those who think it's of paramount importance not to crush prejudice an inch more than is absolutely needed, though, which is a bizarrely regressive position imo.

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

Don't be so quick to throw out affirmative action.

I don't think the whole of the problem of women almost entirely absent in positions of power is "women underperform due to internalized sexism", a significant slice of it is also "affirmative action" by the sexists, passing women over for promotion, disrespecting and devaluing their contribution. If you remove one thumb from the scales, consider that the other thumb might still be pushing them out of true. (This simple consideration is, alas, lost on the current USA supreme court.)

clarkm• 13 years ago

You should really take a look Steven Pinker's presentation on "The Science of Gender and Science":

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/pinker.slides.html

jerf3• 13 years ago

It seems weirder to me than that. Let us take it as a given that there really is a stereotype threat and/or that women are systematically discriminated against with regard to acquiring math skills. Let us take it as a given that damage is really being done. The natural conclusion is that regardless of what name is put on the top of the test, the women should still do worse, because they really are worse at math at the time the test is being given, which is to say, after 15-20 years of systematic discrimination. If the discrimination is effective, then by definition it must mean they really are worse. If they aren't worse, then the discrimination is either ineffective, or women are naturally better at math and the discrimination is holding them back (a position which would be quite complicated to establish and defend).

If the damage can be undone by merely putting a different name on the top of the test, then that strongly implies that the putative damage is itself illusory. If the damage can be wiped away so easily, then it can't have been that bad in the first place. If this is the extent of the "stereotype threat", then it's obviously not holding them back all that much if even so their real skill is equal to the men's.

I can't help but think that this study was indeed ideologically driven, and in the zeal the authors had to prove their point about how women aren't worse than men, they didn't think about the fact this accidentally "proves" that the discrimination can't be that significant. But perhaps it is just a neutral study performed out of sheer curiosity.

And just to make it perfectly clear, I am taking their own logic on their own merits. I'm not inserting my own opinions here, excepting on the question of whether there was potentially an ideological drive here. (My opinion doesn't really fit on this axis at all either way.)

RodericDay3• 13 years ago

Let us take it as a given that there really is a stereotype
the putative damage is itself illusory
My opinion doesn't really fit on this axis at all either way.

lmao. here's a quote for you:

“It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

kaitai4• 13 years ago

I'd disagree on your conclusion in paragraph 2 for the following reason: it's not that there is damage done to women's mathematical abilities, it's that there is damage done to their psyches. That damage can be wiped away by "changing identity" because they can perform honestly without messing up their position in society. We can surmise that there is some adaptive reason women don't perform as well under their own names, and from that conclude that there may be difficult-to-see benefits to "playing dumb" if you're female.

Discrimination is no longer the scary evil force you seem to think it is. It's the pause that precedes the quick end of the conversation after you say you're a mathematician (female or male), it's the changing of the rules by which you evaluate someone depending on whether they are male or female, it's the slight cognitive dissonance that leads someone not to talk to a black physicist quite as long (what am I supposed to say?!)... that subtle social cue that you're not what you are supposed to be. People on the street, at the bank, at the library are just plain nicer to me when I'm performing the pretty female role and are just plain not nicer, or ignore me, when I'm looking ugly or smart. Is it so far to stretch that I might perform better on that math test when I don't have to own it and put my name on it? There is no cost when it's not my name.

pfortuny2• 13 years ago

Ehm....

How about "Women perform better under anonymity." Has maths anything to do about it?

Really, it does not look like they factored the 'maths' term out.

mhaymo• 13 years ago

Because that's a more general claim which cannot be made from this study, and may very well be false.

pfortuny2• 13 years ago

You are right in some sense but then they should not use the word "maths" either as if it were general. They should just stick to "one test", which happened to be "about maths" but who knows if this variable is relevant?

laumars2• 13 years ago

edit: it's been pointed out that I misread the part of the article where it stated that men's performance under the alias didn't improve. My apologies. However to keep the flow of the thread I've kept my original post below:

Research finds the threat comes in two flavours. Women can fear their poor performance will be used to bolster the "women are weak at maths" gender stereotype (known as "group-reputation threat"). Or they can fear that their poor performance will be taken as proof that they conform to the stereotype ("self-reputation threat"). Both can undermine women's ability to fulfil their true potential.

Surely you can use that same logic to say that men are under the same fears and pressures to outperform women. Trying to argue a psychological handicap like the above -where the author cites two contradicting examples that are dependant on the individual- doesn't seem fair when it's only applied to women.

The fact is, the men under an alias in that study did also improve. And the men did still still perform better. So you could also argue that this study proved that men's true maths skills are unlocked by pretending to be someone else. Which then leaves me wondering why there's the statistical anomaly in favour of men (I'm doubly curious as I'd always assumed that the figures would be the opposite way around, if just because my wife is quite significantly better at that subject than I)

shawabawa32• 13 years ago

The fact is, the men under an alias in that study did also improve.

No they didn't.

From the study abstract [1]

"Women who used a fictitious name, and thus had their self unlinked from the math test, showed significantly higher math performance and reported less self-threat and distraction, relative to those who used their real names. Men were unaffected by the manipulation"

  [1] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15298868.2012.687012#.UdLyj6xDuKk

laumars2• 13 years ago

Ah I must have misread that last sentence. Thanks for the correction

bitops• 13 years ago

I must say I am impressed! For once, an article on HN on gender that hasn't deteriorated into something completely pointless and depressing. I am encouraged again about HN's prospect of being a smart place on the nets.

Whitespace2• 13 years ago

If your comment goes to the top of this page, will it have a priming[0] effect on commenters to have more fruitful discussions?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Whitespace2• 13 years ago

There's an unfounded gender stereotype that says women aren't as good at maths as men. Reminding them of this prior to a maths task usually undermines their performance - just one example of a harmful phenomenon known as stereotype threat.

I taught [remedial] maths in college where the girls outperformed the boys (I suspect because they tried much, much harder), so this topic always piques my interest.

I recall reading in several places that both genders do worse when one is primed (boys and girls do worse at math when you say 'boys are better at math'), but I couldn't find the studies.

Does anyone have a link to the study/studies that show both genders do worse when one is primed?

(While searching, I found some interesting criticism of stereotype threat due to "publication bias,"[0] which seems even more fascinating to me.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism

zaroth• 13 years ago

Fascinating result that you can counteract the negative effect of the statement with anonymity.

It would have been interesting if there was a 3rd leg where they issue the tests with an "anonymous id number" instead of having them write a false name...

I wonder if the effect is equivalent of a) writing a fake name vs. b) claiming anonymity will be maintained with a pre-printed number

The author seems to take this for granted with this statement; "At the most practical level, they speak to the benefits of using non-name identification procedures in testing," but writing a fake name precludes a lot of testing, so it would be helpful to know if the benefits extend to IDs.

kenster07• 13 years ago

There was an article posted to Hacker News about the gender difference in learning yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971356

It made clear that boys and girls are motivated by different factors when learning. So I have a problem when I read this article and the first line is:

"There's an unfounded gender stereotype that says women aren't as good at maths as men."

Someone may have taught this writer that opening up with something "controversial" makes for good prose, but I think it just undermines the purpose of the article. There are plenty of statistics that show that technical fields, including math, are heavily male-dominated. Why would someone post something in hacker news that basically implies that this history is not real?

This gender gap certainly may not be because of latent gender differences in potential math skill. But if on average, women tend to be less interested in math, they will reach their mathematical potential less often. And based on the article I linked above, there are at least statistical differences between the motives of male and female students.

kaitai4• 13 years ago

You've just confused motivation, learning style, and competence in your comment. The article yesterday could be considered to be about learning style (it is certainly about the ability of eight-year-olds to sit still). The gender gap in technical fields is heavily influenced by societal views -- in 1984 37% of computer science majors in the US were female, and it's been declining ever since, and in Malaysia women are (close to?) outnumbering men in CS/IT. And then you discuss motivation, which is different. I don't believe it was discussed in a scientific way in the Atlantic article, although it has been studied elsewhere.

Your comment fails to address the point of the study. Women who take someone else's name do better on math tests. Since they didn't magically change their genetic makeup or knowledge base in minutes, the implication is that unconscious beliefs are influencing performance. No one has "implie[d] statistics are unfounded"; you've simply conflated several separate issues.

You are correct that if "women tend to be less interested in math, they will reach their mathematical potential less often." Today's post, though, reveals that it's not all about interest or motivation.

wuntee• 13 years ago

one of the points in this is:

women perform better under an alias than as their real name.

however, i believe there is a flaw in this assumption/point/theory with the related data. how can you compare 2 sets of women without a baseline of their mathematical skills? it seems that they are assuming that both sets of women (true name and alias name) have are at the same mathematical skillset. i do not believe that is a fair assumption, especially when the testing set were all undergrads even more so with a testing set of 110 women.

i would be curious as to see this same test being performed with some sort of standard or minimum requirement for mathematical knowledge in order to create that variable as constant as possible.

Study: Women performed better on a math test when using someone else's name

Related Stories