Math Quiz: Why do men predominate?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I don't buy this at all, if you mean "top tier" in the sense of people who are at the Olympiad/math professor level. Look at the numbers- there have been ten Fields/Abel/Wolf Prize winners from the UK, all of whom have been male. The odds of this happening given "more girls in the top tier" are less than 1:1000.
"Furthermore, they noted that a small math gender gap correlated with a higher rank on the World Economic Forum’s 2007 measures of gender equality, in which the United States ranked 31st, between Estonia and Kazakhstan. A similar correlation was found for the number of girls on International Mathematical Olympiad teams."
Yes, but what was the correlation? 0.02? 0.2? 0.9? The article doesn't tell you, conveniently for them.
To get Fields medal, it's not enough to be a brainiac. You need someone to step up and give you a good mathematical education in your formative years, take your questions seriously when you're a more advanced student, and so on.
See the biographies of Sophie Germain or Rosamund Franklin if you want examples of how being the 'wrong' gender can hold back a first rate mind.
The claim was, specifically, that "in (presumably less sexist) countries, the difference between male and female mathematical ability goes away, so sexism must be the cause of these differences". She named the United Kingdom as an example of a country which is supposed to be less sexist. Yet, we do not see a single Fields, Wolf, or Abel medalist. If math in the UK is sexist, then why attribute the better female performance in the UK to lack of sexism, rather than luck or genetic differences or climate variation or some other random factor? If it's not sexist, where are the female Fields medalists and IMO team members?
"To get Fields medal, it's not enough to be a brainiac. You need someone to step up and give you a good mathematical education in your formative years, take your questions seriously when you're a more advanced student, and so on."
Then why don't British IMO teams (http://www.imo-register.org.uk/) have a larger proportion of women?
"See the biographies of Sophie Germain or Rosamund Franklin if you want examples of how being the 'wrong' gender can hold back a first rate mind."
(I presume you mean Rosalind Franklin?) You mean, fifty years ago, when it was perfectly legal standard practice to openly discriminate against women (and blacks, and Jews... ) in employment? No surprises there. But the article is talking about today.
in my experience (with a sample size of ~10), the only women i've interacted with who were super excited about (and good at) pure math and theoretical CS (Ph.D. students) grew up in eastern europe or india, and when i asked them about their experiences growing up as females who loved math, they said that it felt completely normal in their home society and that they were shocked that there was this stigma against girls being able to do math in the US ... [again, this is only my tiny biased sample size, just my 2 cents!]
How could a reviewer -- even an anonymous one -- object? Doing so would put his/her career at risk.
Maybe it's best not to do research like this at all.
It's crazy that people can't investigate the topic thoroughly - arguing "all culture no biology" demands a really high burden of proof. Arguing "some culture some biology" shouldn't be academic suicide, which it currently is.
The main article in that edition is “Powerless in Gaza” which is more political than technical (even if it were technical, it is not relevant).
Another article is supposed to be about Finland’s nuclear waste disposal system (by Sandra Upson) – which could have been extremely interesting if it wasn’t for the author’s completely unscientific anti-nuclear rant. This ridiculous article was discussed elsewhere: http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/crank-week-decem...
The “Math Quiz: Why do men predominate” is also one of those political articles. What is worse, the final page that is supposed to contain data, contains a graph that is illegible and data that doesn’t support the premise.
Worst IEEE Spectrum edition ever (in all fairness, it was a December edition).
In other words, countries which have successfully suppressed greater male variance (if it is inherent) or have through cultural engineering increased apparent female variance, have done so at the cost of reducing mean outcome.
It is worth noting, however, that this result was achieved by looking at countries that were assumed to already have adequate educational resources, and have already achieved above average mean outcomes--presumably through some sort of cultural emphasis on the value of mathematics. Both of these effects appear greater than that of suppression of male variability.
That might mean that people able to achieve olympic level of math skill are actually abundant enough so small random pick from all available people with such potential does not show differences.
It's been shown that for a few cultures on a small norming sample on particular tests (IQ, SAT) that standard deviation on math related scores is greater than that for women. The bulk of the standard deviation is accounts for by people testing around the mean, because most of the scores are around the mean.
Knowledge of the standard deviation does not, as our financial markets recently showed, correlate so well with extreme outliers, as those with Olympic level abilities are likely to have. And the sorts of thinking demanded by those taking an IQ test or the SAT are not so similar to those required by Olympiad level problem solving (correlated and similar though they are). And the sort of thinking required of Olympiad level problems is not so similar to that required for success in research mathematics (helpful and correlated though they are), as shown by the large numbers of people who attain great honors in such competitions and do not end up really producing much original work. And it's been shown and is frankly straightforward to see how cultural influences can effect both interest and resources available for bright young minds of any background or gender.
We just don't know enough about one's aptitude and its interaction with the environment to make such blanket statements. Men have more variance in aptitude! It's like a difference of a standard deviation of 14.5 points for women and 15.5 points for men. Keep in mind also that a core component of most IQ tests and the SAT is time pressure. In the SAT it's raw time pressure, and in psychologist administered IQ tests you have several factor: one being an explicit time weighting, two being the the fact that the speed of one's response can give you a much higher score, three being that your answers are subjectively weighted by the psychologist (which could already introduce bias), and if you seem unsure you'll be docked points, and if you seem sure but speak vaguely you can often turn a yes into a no, and four whether or not they move forward in sections depends on how quickly you're answering. It's been shown by Benbow et. al. that, at least in America, girl's confidence with mathematics is astonishingly uncorrelated with their performance (unlike with boys, who, if they're good, tend to think they're even better.) It is completely reasonable that if you're more unsure about your own abilities you might hesitate for just a bit longer, sound a little less confident, hazard fewer guesses. This will, by itself, reduce variance in one's score. You'd need to account for only a 6% difference to explain the variance in score.
(Also, from what I know, too, the selection processes of countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, and the USA are anything but a random pick. They can be quite grueling, actually.)
> (Also, from what I know, too, the selection processes of countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, and the USA are anything but a random pick. They can be quite grueling, actually.)
I didn't mean that getting into Olympic is random pick from general population. But since not every person that is able to achieve Olympic level is in the Olympics (some smart students might not care, some not so smart teachers might not care) it is kind of random pick of all who could theoretically pass the grueling trials.
That's because many of the tests were redesigned in the 1990s to eliminate their correlation with g, the general intelligence factor. This was explicitly done to eliminate the gaps between sexes and races.
Girls have been closing the gap in the study of mathematically precocious youth, and the international science Olympiads, too. The SAT and the IMO et. al. have been re-engineered? News to me.
How the heck do you make a math test with the g correlation eliminated, anyway? That seems pretty hard.
I'm not entirely sure if the g-loading changes were made in the math portion, or just the verbal. As to how to decorrelate math, I suspect it canbe done by simply reducing the number of chained dependencies. For example, have one question involving sin(x) and another involving x^2, instead of one question involving sin(x^2).
If you eliminated g loading of a mathematical test, you'd need to be able to take a developmentally challenged person, and expect, statistically, for them to get the same score as a fields medalist. I just don't see how you're going to swing that.
RE: The Mensa site. They claim that the GRE and the SAT and the ACT no longer correlate with IQ. Or g. That's just wrong. The old SAT correlates positively with the new SAT. The old SAT correlates positively with g. You'd have to have an extremely unusual statistical correlation between the old SAT and some other variables to yield 0 correlation with g.
They could be concerned that it's less well correlated. Or that preparatory courses from Kaplan, et. al. were killing the correlation.
But in all seriousness, who's keeping count. There are pretty severe conceptual problems with g anyway. I mean, all it is is the principal factor in a kind of multivariate linear regression analysis of a bunch of scores on tests, which are arbitrarily selected and claimed to represent 'intelligence.' You can't expect that linear statistical relationships mapping a few scores from a few tests chosen ad hoc really capture the breadth and diversity and range of human intelligence. It's crazy! If we look for some linear relationship, we'll find it. But it can't possibly tell the whole story.
For a math test, reducing g loading means having simple problems that rely on previously-learned information, rather than multi-step problems and problems that require invention. This is trivial to arrange.
Obviously this will not make a dull person able to pass the test, but we're talking about college prep tests, where the competition is among the people on the top part of the g bell curve.
The MENSA issue is one of grossly insufficient correlation, since the organization is based on intelligence, not educational history.
g is the psychometric measure most highly correlated with practical outcomes like annual income and mortality risk. I suspect the second most correlated measure is attentional control (focus versus ADD), which is the fuel for the brain's g engine. (Time preference likely has more practical importance than either, but we don't yet know how to measure it.)