
Where Boys OutperformGirls in Math: Rich, Whiteand Suburban Districts - jbredeche
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/13/upshot/100000005950701.app.html
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mkirklions
I have a hard time with these studies because they obviously had an agenda
before they started.

Rural areas likely do not have as much communication with friends and the
income to support a tech lifestyle.

While you grow up in the suburbs, you see your friends get the latest video
games, you spend more time online. One day you decide you want to 'hack' and
10 years later you are making apps and websites.

There seemed to be a culture among my friends that math/tech was extremely
important. I know my sister had very little interest, they'd play outside with
my both male and female neighbors who none ended up being good at math/tech.

~~~
roenxi
To be fair, this is an area where it is impossible not to have an agenda. Both
being pro-status-quo or pro-something-here-should-change are relatively
radical in the eyes of the other, and there isn't a lot of middle ground.

Ideally, more money would be sunk into raising the statistical literacy of
everybody. Then we can all talk sensibly about the statistics involved here
and take it for granted that Simpson's Paradox is being considered in all
studies involving gender :P.

~~~
tomp
The way the article's written, it's putting much more emphasis on the slight
and sporadic outperformance of boys in math, rather than on the much stronger
and more consistend outperformance of girls in language. _That 's_ the problem
with the agenda, IMO.

Edit: as _mlthoughts2018_ points out, the title could as well be:

 _" Boys, increasingly abandoned in English class, turn to math as a domain in
which they can be rewarded for success-- especially in rich, white suburbs."_

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commandlinefan
I can't find it now, but I seem to remember a study that showed that boys
dominated both ends of the "bell curve" when it came to academic achievement:
the top achievers were boys, but the lowest performers were, too. The author
here doesn't seem to be particularly interested in averages, which would make
for a fairer comparison.

~~~
tomp
Yeah, I was also missing some measures and discussion of _absolute_
performance (both girls vs boys, and rich vs poor).

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creaghpatr
Alternative title: "Where Girls Outperform Boys in Math: Low Income, African-
American districts"

~~~
qntty
Why does it matter?

~~~
cgb223
Not the top level commenter, but my take on that would be that you can tell a
lot of different stories with the same data

Maybe if it was framed this way, we might be looking into solutions to help
struggling boys in lower income areas

Not that one is more or less valid than another, just that different framings
of data can lead researchers to different conclusions/solutions

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mrep
Wow, pretty interesting to see my school district as one of the closest 15 to
the bottom right corner. Looking back though, I can definitely see it. Most of
the kids in my AP computer science class were boys and I now see way more guys
from my high school in STEM jobs then girls.

In my opinion, the biggest cause was due to gender stereotypes. We weren't the
actual school based on for the movie mean girls (although lots of people joked
that we were), but it had a very similar vibe in that math was not seen as
being cool for girls to do and popularity was definitely a major focus for a
lot of people.

Edit: reading further into the actual paper, the first possible reason they
site are gender stereotypes. It's a pretty interesting read. I would at least
skim if it if you are at all curios and it's a shame that this article seems
to have been shadow hidden from the front page despite having 25 points in an
hour:
[https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp18-13-v20180...](https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp18-13-v201806_0.pdf)

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ameister14
"Instilling children early with motivation and confidence to do well in school
is crucial, researchers say. When students reach high school and have more
choice in the classes they take, the gender gaps in achievement grow even
larger."

Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be the gender gap in math that grows
larger, but instead the gap in writing and language.

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sigsergv
The correct title should be: Boys that live in rich, white and suburban
districts outperform girls in standardized test scores.

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mlthoughts2018
It borders on dangerous lack of journalistic responsibility to write a story
like this which does not even mention the effect size observed.

The closest statement I can find to something like mentioning an actual effect
size is this:

> "In the Montgomery Township district in New Jersey, for example, the median
> household income is $180,000 and the students are about 60 percent white and
> 30 percent Asian-American. Boys and girls both perform well, but boys score
> almost half a grade level ahead of girls in math. Compare that with Detroit,
> where the median household earns $27,000 and students are about 85 percent
> black. It’s one of the districts in which girls outperform boys in math."

'Boys score almost half a grade level ahead' \-- ahh so much imprecise
terminology that we can't know what it even means, let alone if this example
was representative or cherry-picked.

I'm not talking about holding a popular newspaper to some unrealistic
standard, like giving us informative plots of the spread (uncertainty) of
results or minor description of the methodology or anything. I wish, but
there's no way.

I'm saying they aren't even throwing any numbers into the clickbait. The
takeaway from this article is _purely_ subjective, because we don't know what
' grade level' or 'almost' or 'better' mean in any of the description. What
does "5 months of grade level" mean, and how does it vary by state or
district, etc?

Normally there's at least something like, "Boys did X% better on SAT math
sections between 2010-2016" or something, and you can look at X% and decide
whether it looks huge and meaningful or looks small enough that it might be
spurious or have no meaningful effects in students' lives down the road or
something.

These just seem like made up numbers in units of months or "grade level". How
do I know what it means? Given that the blue point cloud is roughly around the
0 line, and I don't know how much "1 unit" "means" on the vertical axis, I
seems like there's no conclusion to draw.

 _In fact_ the most salient effect size mention is _about girls_ and _about
language arts_ :

> "In no district do boys, on average, do as well or better than girls in
> English and language arts. In the average district, girls perform about
> three-quarters of a grade level ahead of boys."

Maybe the title should be something like,

"Boys, increasingly abandoned in English class, turn to math as a domain in
which they can be rewarded for success-- especially in rich, white suburbs."

(The point is, it's just as consistent with the utter lack of detail of the
article.)

~~~
mrep
> 'Boys score almost half a grade level ahead' \-- ahh so much imprecise
> terminology that we can't know what it even means, let alone if this example
> was representative or cherry-picked.

Well the paper is linked in the third sentence if your curios and want to get
all the details [0]. Newspapers generally try to keep it simple for the
average person. From the paper: "We estimate the mean math and ELA test scores
for male and female students for each of roughly ten thousand U.S. school
districts in grades three through eight from the 2008-09 to 2014-15 school
years. These data enable us to estimate male-female testscores gaps, as well
as changes in the gaps over grades and cohorts within districts, providing
adescription of gender differences in academic performance at an unprecedented
level of detail.

[0]:
[https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp18-13-v20180...](https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp18-13-v201806_0.pdf)

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Why does the paper being linked have a bearing on this?

The point is that even in a popular article or cursory summary, you at least
need the context of an effect size with interpretable units.

If you have to follow a link to the paper _even for that_ then the article
itself would have to be worded in an entirely neutral way (as in, not
indicating that the data supports any particular conclusion).

Any non-neutral presentation (like saying the data supports any type of
conclusion about boys’ math performance in rich, white suburbs) will create
subjective impressions about what the result means (which can be fine, so long
as an effect size and interpretable units are attached).

People seem to disagree with my comment because the study (among others) was
hyperlinked in the Times article. This strikes me as entirely missing the
point of my comment.

~~~
mrep
Because this is a newspaper, not a scientific journal or peer review and
newspapers are generally written for the average reader who probably does not
want nor even understand all of those details.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
But a basic notion of effect size and units are often included in popular news
coverage of statistics. That's a basic expectation, involving zero nuance or
statistical rigor.

"This is a newspaper" is a reason why they might leave off details about
methodology, metrics of uncertainty, etc. _Not_ a reason why they would make
an _entirely_ unqualified claim attached to no notion of the effect size.

Essentially you're saying we should hold the New York Times to the same
reporting standards as some clickbait site that fuels confirmation bias with
sensational headlines, and not expect large world-spanning newspapers to have
even the _slightest_ of better practices than that.

