Suck It, Phyllis Schlafly*
How It Works (from the fabulous xkcd)
First, let me explain the title reference. As most of you know, I am a chemist. As a chemist I am a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS is one of the best professional organizations in my opinion because of the data that it collects and analyzes for its members. One of the often-analyzed issues is what they call the “leaky pipeline,” which refers to the loss of women at each level of chemistry. Women now get more than 50% of chemistry B.S. degrees and 30% of Ph.D.s but are only 11% of chemistry professors at the top 50 universities.
Anyway, articles on the leaky pipeline appear on a regular basis in the society’s magazine Chemical & Engineering News. Someone must have brought one of the articles to Phyllis Schlafly’s attention because a few weeks after the story appeared, a letter from her appeared in the Letters to the Editor section (sorry no link, it’s several years old and subscriber only). In the letter she wrote her usual tripe about a women’s place but she brought out the big guns – data! She stated that since neither of her daughters were interested in science, that is proof that women aren’t good at science. (I don’t think any of her sons are scientists either, but don’t let that get in the way.)
A new study by Professors Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz (blogged here) at the University of Wisconsin (go Badgers!) strongly suggest that the gender gap is due to social factors, as many people have long suspected.
The duo of Janets have published a review that tackles the issue from three different angles. They considered the presence of outstanding female mathematicians. Looking beyond individuals, they found that gender differences in maths performance don’t really exist in the general population, with girls now performing as well as boys in standardised tests. Among the mathematically talented, a gender gap is more apparent but it is closing fast in many countries and non-existent in others. And tellingly, the size of the gap strongly depends on how equally the two sexes are treated.
Hyde and Mertz used a wide range of data sources, including the standardised maths tests that all US children must sit as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act. Last year, Hyde reviewed data from 7 million children across 10 states and found that neither gender had the edge in performance, regardless of ethnicity or grade, even in schools which had seen disparities in past decades. The duo also looked at data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a programme that tests a random sample of students every year, and found that male and female 12th-graders had only “trivial differences” in terms of complex problem-solving.
The alternate hypothesis was about greater variability in intellect between men and women. In IQ tests, boys were much more likely to be in the top 1% and the lowest 1% even though the mean between the two genders was the same. This is the “men are more likely to be geniuses” argument, AKA the Larry Summers argument. The study addresses this as well.
To test that, Hyde looked at data from maths tests in Minnesota and compared the numbers of boys and girls who scored in the top 5% of their year. The ratio was 1.45, meaning that for every two girls in this elite group, there were around three boys. In the top 1%, the ratio was 2.06, meaning two boys for every girl. That seems to vindicate the Variability Hypothesis, but those figures only applied to white American children. In other ethnic groups or, indeed, in other countries, the picture was very different.
For Asian-Americans the ratio was actually 0.91, meaning more girls than boys in the top 1%. International studies have found similar trends. One analysis of tests from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that 15-year-old girls matched or outnumbered their male peers in the top tiers within Iceland, Thailand and the UK. Two studies found that 15-year-old boys and girls were equally varied in their mathematical skills in most of the countries taking part in PISA and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). In some, like the Netherlands, girls actually turned out to have the wider range of ability.
You can suck it, too, Larry Summers.
*h/t Jason, for the post title idea
Nice post, though I’m sure your husband would rather have you preparing dinner. 😉
I deal with this girls suck at math all the time with my daughter – who, btw, is in honors math. Go figure.
The worst is when I hear her repeat it.
Well, now you have data to show her it’s not true.
My husband usually does the cooking, lucky me.
It may mean that the Netherlands has an anti-male pc culture which is destroying men. There is beginning to be an anti-male culture in American Education. We need an educational system which serves both males and females. The Asian countries seem to have a better handle on that than we do.
There is beginning to be an anti-male culture in American Education.
: nemski slams head against desk :
David, where are you getting this nonsense? Anti-male culture in American Education? Please prove that.
Nemski… jinx!
: nemski slams head against desk :
I don’t know, nemski. In a male dominated culture, we’d advise you that the beard needs to go, but you do answer to Mrs Nemski and you have the beard. Maybe you and David need to talk more. 😈
Really, I don’t even understand what David is trying to say here. Is he saying now that schools discriminate against boys? Obviously the study results prove discrimination because men are just naturally smarter, huh?
Come on, UI, you silly girl! It’s the same argument they’re using against Sotomayor!
Exactly pandora. Anything that threatens male privilege must be fought against.
I’m smarter than you two, combined. I just keep it close to the vest out of respect for the wimmenfolk.
poke…poke…poke… 😈
Thank you for not showing off, Smitty.
I do what I can…i do what I can. 8)
Surprise, surprise, I think David has a point, based on my own experiences as a HS Chemistry teacher in the ’90’s.
In general, I found girls to be more serious and better performing students than boys.
That said, I did find a fear of math all to prevalent in girls, but their response often was to work harder at it, then sometimes freeze in a test that incorporated math skills.
We in the Science Dept tried working with the Maths Department on this issue, but due to lack of extended commitment did not make any significant progress by the time I retired.
My unsubstantiated conclusion was that we have an American cultural issue with our boys, now demonstrated in fact by some of the data UI presented.
And speaking of achievement, we have reached the point where there are more women than men graduating from college; and, due to the current economy, 60% of the workforce are now women. These are truly amazing and interesting developments.
My hope is that we take more full advantage of these women on the rise in terms of their becoming our top achievers and policy makers.
In the meantime, we need to work on what can be done culturally and educationally to bring more men back to being more serious about preparing for the future, while simultaneously raising expectations for all young people.
A lot goes to the context of the nuclear family, where we obviously have been having more serious disconnects for some decades now.
We must not hesitate to look beyond our borders at what others are doing that are working better.
Somebody, please pass my last comment through moderation. Thanks!
The title of this post should cause any man to instantly shrivel.
Thanks for posting #15!
Sorry, Perry. You got caught in moderation and I just now got back to my computer.
UI-The last decade in education has demonstratively seen a positive trending for females to comfortably gravitate to areas of math and science. This is in part to the concerted effort of educators and industry to promote and encourage ladies to any field of talent, historically male dominated. That comfort and visibility of women in such fields, trickled down to better performance on standardized testing. The talent may have always been there, but the intellect wasn’t channelled into measurable performance areas, because 1) women were under-enrolled by choice in higher maths and sciences, and 2) again by choice, women didn’t “see” themselves in one of those type “careers”, in most part due to absent, if any, modeling. While you take issue w/ Republican David’s “anti-male culture” sentiments, he does make a cogent point. While we entered the era of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day”, and became witness to real live female astronauts, CEOs, and chemists–the boys kind of hung in suspension, while the U.S. has fallen all over itself with quotas, and all sorts of glass ceiling breakage. Well, there are shards. And like it or not, we have not progressed enough to be a gracious achiever. So yes, for now, we may have replaced “don’t worry your pretty little head”, to ” am I the only adult here?” I personally can’t wait to see a more gender neutral embracing of all aptitude–because right now in high schools, and young adults I sure see a bunch of talented, proven women who tolerate under-achieving, slacker men. For whatever reason the Sugar Daddy is being replaced w/ my Baby’s Daddy, and her PhD may encourage his GED, because currently there is not a whole bunch of other folks rooting for a male’s success too. It’s like the US can only champion one demographic at a time. And considering much of educational opportunity is given, and decided K-12, the dudes come up real short in life coaching–because the US has yet to coach all individuals going forward, in favor of disaggregated retrospective applied to a wrong sample. As if us girls don’t have enough to worry about, now we gotta worry about the menfolk too!