Women stay away from math out of their own free choice

Submitted by anthony on Sun, 2010-10-31 20:18

Article here. Excerpt:

'Ever wondered why there are such few women in math-intensive fields? Two psychological scientists at Cornell University believe women aren't innately poor at math; instead they choose to stay away from the subject.

Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams reviewed all of the evidence and concluded that the main factor is women's choices-both freely made, such as that they'd rather study biology than math, and constrained, such as the fact that the difficult first years as a professor coincide with the time when many women are having children.

But girls' grades in math from grade school through college are as good as or better than boys', and women and men earn comparable average scores on standardized math tests.

Williams and Ceci also reviewed research on sex discrimination and decided that it is no longer a major factor. In fact, one large-scale national study found that women are actually slightly more likely than men to be invited to interview for and to be offered tenure-track jobs in math-intensive STEM fields.

"When you look at surveys of adolescent boys and girls and you say to them, 'What do you want to be when you grow up,' you never see girls saying, 'I want to be a physicist or an engineer,'" Ceci said.'

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Comments

Seems to be a very poor analysis. They point out that "girls' grades in math from grade school through college are as good as or better than boys', and women and men earn comparable average scores on standardized math tests." I must point out that the same thinking would suggest that girls are better at academic subjects overall... Yet we see no mentioning on that. The problem is that on average grades do not directly measure innate ability and IMO innate ability has less predictive powers between the sexes than amongst them (I think girls math grades are inflated by non ability factors). Standardized tests are somewhat better at that but still do not measure natural ability. It is interesting to note that girls may do slightly better math grades while boys do in fact do somewhat better than girls on the standardized tests.

Also a major error from the "researchers" is that they should be looking at the potential pool of STEM students not using the averages of all... If STEM professionals have above average IQ then you probably would expect more men due to their greater variability in IQ. (The same can go for other "smart jobs")

Apart from just bad analysis the REAL DANGER is that they did not consider or bring up the fact that's girls do much better in the reading/verbal areas than boys. Should that at least make them question whether boys are being under served by the education system and that their grades are not a good reflection of their ability. The ways they ingore that but make reasonings That would suggest that girls are better overall is disturbing.

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Submitted by fondueguy on Mon, 2010-11-01 19:09

Women stay away from math out of their own free choice

If this is a pretext for stopping at last wasting billions of dollars into improving girls' math scores and increasing number of women in STEM, then such a conclusion can only be welcomed.

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Single men is the only social group benefited from feminism.

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Submitted by nbdspcl on Mon, 2010-11-01 11:38