Female researcher: Make STEM ‘less competitive’ to ensure it’s inclusive to women

Submitted by Mastodon on Wed, 2016-03-23 07:32

Article here. Excerpt:

'A doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota recently published a research paper that argued one way to make Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics more inclusive for women is to make it “less competitive.”

Laura Parson suggests that females enrolled in such studies suffer from “the masculine nature of STEM education” in her research paper “Are STEM Syllabi Gendered? A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis.” To rectify the issue of reinforced gendered messages, Parson essentially proposes that STEM courses could offer “less competitive teaching methods.”

“Although the corpus of syllabi explored was small, the findings from this exploration support the view of STEM courses as chilly,” Parson posited in her paper. “This suggests that there is an opportunity for STEM courses to reduce the perception of courses as difficult and unfriendly through language use in the syllabi, and also as a guide for how to use less competitive teaching methods and grading profiles that could improve the experience of female students.”'

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Comments

that's the left's answer to everything isn't it?

affirmative action and the idea that giving people stuff will create equality somehow. whatever happened to 'a woman can do anything a man can do?'
yah, I think I see how that works (or doesn't work) now.

who didn't see this coming?

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Submitted by daveinga on Thu, 2016-03-24 21:53

How much is 2 + 2?

Male answer = 4

Feminist answer = It's a patriarchal conspiracy to keep women down.

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Submitted by el cid on Fri, 2016-03-25 17:44

el cid, your comment reminds me of this...

Changing math is exactly what our state superintendent did while I was in high school. Correct answers no longer carried as much weight as to how well your written response was (yes, she changed the state exit test for math to include math answers which needed a narrative to explain them), and more points were given to the narrative. Women tend to be more "wordy" and a significantly larger percent of test scorers were women (the math test needed to be hand-scored which made it somewhat subjective.)

One thing to know about school testing is that the testing companies also sell the curricula to match the tests. So in my state, all of math became more like English class, I clearly remember teachers teaching how to write the first sentence to explain your math. (I had just transferred from a private school - and this was all new to me)

And when the first students came up thru the ranks with full indoctrination of the new math, She held a press conference to proudly announce that for the first time girls were scoring higher than boys in math. However, she didn't count on people checking her claim. Many colleges reported that they got different results when these same students applied for college by taking the SAT test, boys were still outperforming girls in math.

The superintendent even did her college thesis back in the day about how to improve math scores for girls.
So feminists believe they can get more women into math by "changing" math and the need for correct answers. Bizarre, I know!

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Submitted by Kris on Fri, 2016-03-25 20:03

STEM is a field that is and always will be competitive. This is due to the fact that--as Terrence Popp puts it--"Math doesn't give a f*** about your feelz!".

But, I'm willing to make a deal: we'll get on making STEM less competitive, as soon as you get on implementing 50% male quotas in gender studies, psychology, biology, fine arts, and every other field dominated by women.

So, that being said, we can definitely expect STEM to stay competitive.

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Submitted by xtrnl on Fri, 2016-03-25 20:07