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>If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This sounds like a specific form of a general psychological result that would hold true for men too. If so then this article is beyond disingenuous it is a flat lie. That aside in order for the result to have a bearing on real world test scores it would require someone to be telling women just before their maths test that they're going to fail. Who's doing that, it would be pretty easy to spot in a school and certainly in my country a teacher doing that would lose their jobs.
*/ It does hold true for men -- specifically, men of African-American and Hispanic descent, when reminded that minorities generally do worse on math exams before the exam is given. The proposition that nobody is telling women they're going to do worse on math tests, however, is simplistic. It isn't that some mean old guy is telling them they suck (although one of my female physics professors mentioned, out of the classroom, that she had been thrown out of a physics class at Georgia Tech in the early 1970's for "taking a man's spot" -- you're right that this sort of thing is much less common these days, at least in the West). It's that the whole culture is suffused with the attitude that women's mathematical abilities are suspect -- witness threads like these, which appear over and over on the interwebs, discussing whether or not women are as capable as men at math. Measuring maths ability scientifically and publishing the results, rather than relying on folk-science and anecdote, could help encourage women to trust their own desires and abilities mathematically -- even when faced with a predominantly male culture and continual doubt being cast on their abilities to function at the highest levels. I know this to be true because I am now a lone female coder in a group of (really great, smart, delightful) guys, loving my work on a complex, challenging system. And I remember that I dropped out of the very first coding class I took after a few weeks because I was completely intimidated by the swaggering guy classmates who threw around terms I wasn't yet familiar with -- I felt out of place and was full of self-doubt. It was only after maturing and understanding the social dynamics that I retook the class and ended up with one of the top 5 grades, out of several hundred students. Yet, at first, I had been certain I was incapable -- not because any guys were mean to me (not one was anything but helpful), but because I doubted myself, and felt alone and weird. And surely this isn't gender-specific, and surely many geeky coders can relate, and have probably had similar experiences in different areas of life. This isn't a woman-man thing only -- it's a specific expression of a general human tendency to reflect cultural attitudes about their lives in the images they create of themselves. |
I think I've read a general result along the lines of "you have characteristic X, people with that characteristic perform worse" and that this skews the result. You're poor, you're female, you're disabled, but I couldn't really be bothered digging around for the papers.
Simplistic? Yes, but as I recalled the research was for the situation where they were told quite shortly before the test about their expected sub-par performance so I was relating it to the research.
>Yet, at first, I had been certain I was incapable -- not because any guys were mean to me (not one was anything but helpful), but because I doubted myself, and felt alone and weird.
Overcoming self-doubt and social issues is part of being in a particular field though - if jargon rich fields put you (ie "one") off then there are many fields you would struggle in. If you need someone to believe in you before you can do well in a maths test then IMO you're not going to do well when you've only got yourself to rely on to get something done.
>Measuring maths ability scientifically and publishing the results, rather than relying on folk-science and anecdote, could help encourage women to trust their own desires and abilities mathematically
Go on. What do you mean by maths ability - it's a pretty diverse subject after all. I've seen people do excellently via rote learning whilst for me it was my strength because I could pretty much start with a few "axioms" and work on from there when memory failed - clearly very different abilities that appeared (at undergrad level) to be closely equivalent.