Girls and Math

[xela]

This article is well worth reading: "Math ability, in some societies, is gendered." [Emphasis added.]

(Hat-tip to gardenfey.)

Comments

[sammason.livejournal.com]

That's so interesting that I'm going now to post it in my own LJ.

[gardenfey.livejournal.com]

cvirtue has a great knack for posting interesting articles. That one really floored me.

[siderea]

When doing research into women's development in STEM, I found a research article from Singapore about how comp sci isn't at all gendered in that society, and they have a hair over 50% female enrollment in comp sci undergrad programs and a similarly representative programmer population.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was just commenting to a couple of friends the other day how strangely weird it is to me to have lived in two countries with such different views on the matter, given how most everything else is the same.

Y'see, in Brazil, men are supposedly better at physical stuff and I don't know how to say it better, but I suppose the best I could say about how they see things over there is that women are better at patience and things that need persistence. So, things like mechanics, engineering, building etc are "men stuff" and "soft" sciences are "women stuff". Like Biology, Chemistry, Math etc. Most of the teachers and professors I've seen in Brazil teaching Bio, Chem, Math etc were women. Most of the engineers were men. Comp. Sci. is about 50-50. Weirdly enough, Physics is also considered "soft" science there, but most of the people involved in Physics are also male. And I don't mean "soft" science as in Climate, Weather, etc, the idea is that you don't have to carry anything heavier than about 20 pounds in the lab. Which is pretty stupid, considering that some of the engineers never carry anything heavier than a pocket calculator and there are plenty of heavy stuff in other labs and libraries -- I've seen slide rulers that weighed probably 50 pounds and hung from a wall when not in use -- or sometimes even when they were in use.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

How interesting. The original article did get me wondering about the category 'science'. I'm a research biologist in England and it's a female-dominated line of work, with quite a few men too. People I know in physics or computer science tell me the bias there is strongly towards men. Something else I notice, though, is that biologists are often maths-phobic. I make a point of challenging each student I supervise with a simple arithmetical task, such as deciding how much water to add in adjusting a concentration. They're nearly always frightened, but when they've done it there's a wonderful moment of relief about how easy it was.