Feminist Philosophers

News feminist philosophers can use

Females Are Equal to Males in Math Skills, Large Study Shows October 13, 2010

Filed under: Uncategorized — redeyedtreefrog @ 1:08 pm

This is one debate I’d love to stop having but it does seem to be necessary. ScienceDaily today writes, ” The mathematical skills of boys and girls, as well as men and women, are substantially equal, according to a new examination of existing studies in the current online edition of journal Psychological Bulletin.” See their story here.

 

12 Responses to “Females Are Equal to Males in Math Skills, Large Study Shows”

  1. H. E. Baber Says:
    October 13, 2010 at 2:38 pm

    One problem is that Americans math skills are so lousy that they just don’t get the difference between statistical differences between populations and individual differences. Any “scientific study” that shows men and women are IN THE AGGREGATE different in any way however minimally different, leads them to conclude that every individual woman is different from every individual man in that respect.

    I speak as one who has just had students read a report on implicit bias (and take the online IAT test themselves) and a critique of the Mars/Venus cult. Just try to knock it out of their heads that if men and women are on the average different in some way then every man is different from every women in that way.

    And then, contrapositively, the anti-feminist pitch that feminists who hold that we shouldn’t buy into Mars/Venus and other such bs are just arguing in the teeth of all empirical evidence and any that might be discovered that there are no statistical differences between men and women in the aggregate.

    It shouldn’t be necessary to show that “men and women are substantially equal” in the aggregate to persuade people that they shouldn’t buy into the idea that ‘men and women think differently,’ that every woman has a different ‘communications style’ from every man, etc. But most people just don’t have the rudimentary math skills to get it.

  2. alpha Says:
    October 13, 2010 at 3:48 pm

    I am curious to know more. In particular, most of the nasty stuff regarding differences in mathematical ability between men and women concerns not averages, but variation. i.e. even though average scores may be similar, more men than women are very good (and very bad) at math so more men than women become scientists kinds of arguments–thank you Larry Summers. I know that the gender differences in the upper tail of the distribution of MSAT as been decreasing over the last 20 years (and of course the limitations of the tests and problems with the inferences from high test scores to career success). But I am curious to see more data on this and whether or not this is the kind of information that is subject to good meta analyses.

  3. Rob Says:
    October 13, 2010 at 4:32 pm

    I don’t see anything in the report of this study that is at odds with either the Duke study or John Tierney’s reporting of it:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/science/08tier.html?pagewanted=all

    To echo alpha, does this new study challenge the Duke researchers’ conclusion that there are gender differences at the extreme right tail?

    As far as I can tell, the really interesting question is whether, and if so to what extent, gender differences in motivation are contributing to the employment disparity in the related fields. (Which is not meant to dismiss the contributions of discrimination, stereotypes, and maternity-unfriendly structural factors, but to wonder if they exhaust the causes.)

  4. jj Says:
    October 13, 2010 at 4:50 pm

    Alpha, I got to the article through my library; the authors do see the extreme right tail as increasingly less male dominated, and in some countries the dominance of men seems to be non-existent.

    One of the advantages of this study is that it draws on multi-national resources, unlike the ones Tierney loves, which can in effect encode societal inequalities.

    Rob, that is the really interesting question for conservatives, who want to find the difference in accomplishments can be explained in terms of women’s preferences, as opposed to the bigotry people like them have. How nice to find that women choose to take a back seat, and the men can continue to hold the power!

  5. Rob Says:
    October 13, 2010 at 11:38 pm

    You’ll enjoy this recent presentation by Cordelia Fine.

  8. Dan Hicks Says:
    October 27, 2010 at 1:22 am

    Rob –

    If you have access to the journal, you can read the article here. The authors acknowledge that the motherhood penalty (women with children before tenure are penalized; men with children before tenure are not `because those [men] with children have partners who do most of the childrearing’) is real, but dismiss it as the `result from choices made by women’. Which is simply to fail to understand the feminist critique of career structures. The evidence they give to support their explanation (women choose not to go into STEM fields) are surveys of career interests of teenagers and historical gender ratios.

    In short, it’s a rather strange paper.

  9. Rob Says:
    October 27, 2010 at 2:21 am

    Dan, I don’t have access to the full text at this time, but the abstract suggestions to me a subtler position than such a simple failure:

    >> Synthesizing findings from psychology, endocrinology, sociology, economics, and education leads to the conclusion that, among a combination of interrelated factors, preferences and choices—both freely made and constrained—are the most significant cause of women’s underrepresentation. << (My emphasis.)

    Which is what I would expect given the authors' previous work on this subject.

  10. Dan Hicks Says:
    October 27, 2010 at 11:33 am

    Rob – If they draw on endocrinology, sociology, economics, or education research, it’s incidental. They mention that bit about free or constrained choices, but then report data from surveys of career interests of teenagers without really examining the conditions under which these interests form.

    Google Scholar searches for each author didn’t turn up much that seemed related to this paper. What exactly have they written before that impressed you?


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