
Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/04/science/girls-lead-in-science-exam-but-not-in-the-united-states.html?hp
======
richardjordan
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.

~~~
eduardordm
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.

~~~
richardjordan
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.

~~~
purplelobster
Wow, that's one lucky kid. Keep up the good work.

------
lutusp
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...](http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/index.html#Gender_Issues)

Graphic:

[http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/graphics/population_cur...](http://arachnoid.com/artificial_womb/graphics/population_curve.png)

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
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.

~~~
lutusp
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."

~~~
jrkelly
How is the theory not disparaging to women? Society is run by people at the
edge of the bell curve, if you say that there are less women at the edges than
you are saying that it's no big deal we have less women in high-ranking
positions.

~~~
lutusp
> How is the theory not disparaging to women?

Think about it. If men have a wider standard deviation from the norm, that
means there are more criminals and morons among men than among women. I think
that's consistent with everyday experience, and suggests that women are more
likely to be mentally balanced and law-abiding. Public records support this
conclusion.

It's all in how you look at it. The theory says that, on average, men and
women have the same mental abilities, but in the extreme, there are more
criminals and mentally challenged people among men. That is also supported by
public records.

> Society is run by people at the edge of the bell curve ...

No, it isn't. Look at the average politician, or military leader -- these
people aren't in any way extraordinary, to put it diplomatically. These are
the people who steer society, not scientists and Nobel Prizewinners.

> ... if you say that there are less women at the edges than you are saying
> that it's no big deal we have less women in high-ranking positions.

Very intelligent people don't get into "high-ranking positions". They don't
because voters don't trust them. The last genuinely intelligent person who ran
for U.S. president was Adlai Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956), but the voters
rejected him largely because of his obvious intelligence.

Also, please, say "fewer women", not "less women". The latter describes
physically short people of the fair sex.

<http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/less-or-fewer>

~~~
jrkelly
A theory that states "women cannot be exceptional" is disparaging to women.

~~~
lutusp
> A theory that states "women cannot be exceptional" is disparaging to women.

And if anyone took that position, the argument might be valid. But no one has,
for a very good reason -- the theory doesn't support it.

------
droithomme
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.

~~~
danso
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
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.

------
jerrya
_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.

~~~
Tichy
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
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&...](http://65.54.113.26/Detail?entitytype=2&searchtype=2&id=1881031)

.. 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?

~~~
Tichy
Robots with lasers certainly sounds more exciting than IT :-)

------
abraxasz
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.

------
ellyagg
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

      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.

------
brudgers
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.

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

------
_mulder_
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.

------
cjdrake
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
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....](http://timss.bc.edu/timss2011/international-results-science.html)

Those tests are distinct in what they test in mathematics,

[http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-
chalkboard/posts...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-
chalkboard/posts/2013/01/09-timss-pisa-loveless)

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.

------
Jimmy
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.

~~~
danso
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.

