Thursday, July 24, 2008

Women can't do math? Think again

Study: No gender differences in math performance | Eureka! Science News
Good news! I've long heard this idea, especially the variability idea, that female math performance is the same on average, but the variance is smaller, explaining lack of female mathematicians etc (also lack of females who are complete idiots...) however, this study, which appears to have great statistics, manages to debunk not only any difference in mean math ability, but also showed no gender bias on the variance. Nice to know. Thus we must look for explanations of low numbers of female mathematicians in the culture, not in the brain. (or perhaps in the brains of current mathematics/physics faculty).

Clearly our traditional child rearing/marriage roles for women slow them down at the postdoc/asst. prof times in their careers. This is silly in this day and age, since there is no reason why the mother should get to spend more time with the child than the father...but regardless, even preserving those old roles, one sees that this can't be the problem, since it is not a uniform lack of females in academia, but only in math/physics. Bio, history, english, etc are all (relatively) nicely populated with women. I've alwasy wondered it it has to do with math/phys tending to require that the researcher do their greatest work at an early age. Some mathematicians claim that great work is done in the _early_ 20s. This might interact with the "mommy-track" in a negative way for females. However, I still feel that the cultures within the departments has a lot to do with it... Interesting to think about.

Finally of note, but unrelated to gender, the authors bemoan the lack of complex problem solving questions on std tests for no child left behind, hence comparing geners on this topic was even harder, since they aren't tested on it. Idiocracy anyone.