Females are shite at Maths

[AutisticHedgehog]

According to a fucking hilarious Mumsnet cliche-meme on the FB feed.

FFS this is appalling. Why are Mumsnet of all places perpetuating the myth that girls can’t do maths.

I know plenty will say “lighten up, it’s harmless fun” but it’s not. It’s continual nonsense-shite that pervades and influences girls and their views that maths is a boys’ subject.

Maths is for everyone.

Shame on you MN.

[OutwiththeOutCrowd]

AssassinatedBeauty I'm just considering the evidence of what happens in the upper ability range as I find it interesting, whether or not it's ideologically pleasing from a feminist perspective. I would never put women off from doing maths. I'm a woman and I've spent plenty of time fiddling around with equations and I love it!

[ByeMF]

Sadly never progressed beyond GCSE (got an A). Loads of stats in my degree though! Really miss algebra and am always trying to force dd to let me do maths with her!!

[AssassinatedBeauty]

I don't give a fig about whether it's "ideologically pleasing from a feminist perspective". It's totally pointless to mention it on a thread about primary level maths, as you actually acknowledged and then did it anyway. This sort of thing is always wheeled out when women and mathematical ability is mentioned, like it's massively important. If you want to encourage girls and women to have confidence in their maths ability, then maybe don't immediately point out that women are considered less able than men. And that apparently this is considered fixed in stone.

[HerRoyalNotness]

Ive just had to help my 11yo with maths, whole numbers and fractions. He got all 15 wrong the first time he did it and said he hated maths and his teacher was hopeless.

Tbh, I had to google it as I was never any good, and as it happens, I got it. My brain seems to be able to grasp the concepts now that seemed insurmountable as a child. Perhaps I just had a crap teacher way back. I’d never be a mathematician but I’m sure with some extra help I could have understood enough to pass my A level equivalent exams

[PattiStanger]

How could any MN employee get something so wrong? Has the interview selection process failed again?

[DadDadDad]

Assassinated - I'm not sure why you are so resistant to Outwith broadening the debate. If we can't encourage more girls into the upper end of the achievement range of Maths, then we will perpetuate a view that it's a subject dominated by males, and that children are not going to expect their mother to be able to help them with their Maths homework.

[AssassinatedBeauty]

How is it broadening any debate to remind us that women are not as able as men at maths, at the top end of the ability curve? How does that encourage girls and women?

[TarragonChicken]

"Having said that, the evidence does seem to indicate that in the upper tail end of the ability curve, as shown, for example, by performance in the maths SAT test in the States, males outnumber females, and the further into the tail you go, the more skewed the distribution becomes."

SATS are not purely a measure of inherent talent. I would argue that this could be caused by societal pressures on girls not to challenge themselves too much with maths, not to be too geeky. My dp teaches some really gifted boys maths, who think nothing of doing maths problems in their spare time for the fun of it. Can you imagine girls being encouraged to do this?

[DadDadDad]

I didn't use the word "able" I talked about "achievement". If fewer girls are pursuing the more challenging Maths achievements (A-levels all the way up to degrees and beyond) that is potentially creating a vicious cycle where girls see it as not for them. Talking about this picture on this thread is not going to discourage girls - girls seeing with their own eyes the lack of high-achieving female mathematicians is likely to discourage (some of) them.

Do you think girls can't be as able as boys at the higher levels of the subject? I don't, which is why I want to debate what we do about their lack of representation at those levels as shown in Out's statistics.

[Thesearepearls]

Can we assume. MN that disciplinary action is being taken against Content?

Because outrageous sexism in the workplace and feeding said outrageous sexism into a public feed is not okay.

What disciplinary action are you taking?

[Japanesejazz]

I was great at helping with maths homework until further maths. That may as well have been written in Chinese. So my daughter asked for help from my friend who has a degree in maths and is female. I sent my daughter to a girls school. The best pupil in every subject was female and no lack of representation in subjects usually chosen by boys. The fact that the headteacher is a man annoys me greatly

[PickAChew]

I did a bit more maths than DH. Both of us good at it, both of us rusty. Likely if I couldn't instantly remember or work something out, I might then ask DH and then probably resort to Google.

Not likely to happen unless one of the boys miraculously takes A-level, though. 14yo is maths brilliant but can't be arsed and 12yo is still on P scales.

[AssassinatedBeauty]

How does telling (mainly) mothers that maths ability is reserved for men at the higher end help with encouraging them to support their children with their maths homework?

I understand what you're saying about a vicious circle, with a lack of numbers feeding into a lack of interest. I don't think that continually reminding women that they are less able than men helps with that.

[tillytrotter1]

Slightly divergent but why do some parents find Maths so trivial? It's not unusual for parents to tell their child's teacher who is concerned about their child's mathematical development Oh, I'm/we're hopeless at Maths too! You never hear parent trivialising a child's poor reading development, that's considered almost shameful.

[Fruitcorner123]

katesheppard I am so glad you posted that because OutwiththeOutCrowd has used a test result statistic to try and demonstrate a point about ability and intelligence and I was about to post something similar.

The U.S. SAT scores are not a measure of a person's innate mathematical ability and katesheppaard has posted some great evidence to suggest why intelligent capable girls score lower than boys of similar ability.

I made a point earlier in the thread which, granted, was anecdotal about my experience as a teacher of girls who are good at Maths and how they often don't believe in themselves or even have encouragement from home to believe in themselves. Maths is all about trying and failing and eventually getting a solution. This is a generalisation but the boys I teach generally have the confidence sometimes arrogance to make mistakes and keep on trying. Girls are far more worried about failure and embarrassing themselves. They are not born like this so what do we do to create this gender difference?

For me the difference isn't an ability one it's a confidence one. We are failing to bring up girls who believe in themselves and take risks. Risks and failure are crucial in Mathematics.

[DadDadDad]

Assassinated - you’re the one who keeps going on about women being less able. To me, what observations from NoNornas and Tarragon point to is that we need to find ways to tell girls that they can be just as able and then encourage them to compete.

I think what tilly has just said is also relevant because of that underlying attitude “oh, it doesn’t matter, Maths isn’t for everyone, look at me and your mother - we’re rubbish, ho, ho”, which you’d be less inclined to say about English.

[DadDadDad]

That’s interesting, Fruitcorner. Maths is a subject where you very exposed, because it’s clear whether you got something right or not. Are boys encouraged to thrive on the competitiveness that emerges from that, while girls shy away from a subject that doesn’t seem to allow working together towards an answer using consensus? Is the answer partly about teaching Maths in a different way, eg I’ll tell you at outset what the answer is, now can we work out the best way to reach that answer?

[AssassinatedBeauty]

Well, initially I was irked by the "ideologically pleasing from a feminist perspective" response, and find it infuriating that someone always pops up on these types of threads to mention the evidence/research about mathematical ability, and the lack of female maths geniuses. But perhaps I shouldn't let myself get riled by it.

[PickAChew]

Tilkytrotter - being bad at maths is something that has been laughed off forever. It bugs me, too.

[PickAChew]

My suspicion is that maths geneii are equally distributed between the sexes but women are more likely to have suffiently developed soft skills to enable them to take those skills in other directions or base a career on something else altogether.

[Fruitcorner123]

i like that idea dad and yes it will be interesting to see how the genders respond to that. I think it has benefits for both sexes and there is still the same competitiveness ( whose method is best) but no risk of being completely wrong.

[Semster]

My 16 year old DD just took the SAT and got a perfect 800 in math.

This is not just innate ability, it's also because she is at a school that pushes ALL students to do the hardest math class they are capable of at any time. She found the SAT a doddle compared to the math she is studying at school.

As I said earlier in this thread, at her previous school she was not allowed to do 9th grade math during 8th grade, despite the fact that boys who had scored lower on the state math test than her were encouraged to study beyond their grade level.

Funnily enough, once they get to SAT level in her previous school, boys outperform girls at the top end - not surprising considering they have been pushed harder at earlier stages.

[Slanetylor]

pickAChew has nailed it here. Males have a better ability to focus on one thing. Where females have a better ability to use other skills at the same time.
My brother is pretty genius at maths ( as am I but didn’t do a degree in it) but in his maths degree the top performers tend to do very poorly in group tasks and interviews for placements. They seem to have focused all their abilities into one area.

[OutwiththeOutCrowd]

AssassinatedBeauty

I think you are misunderstanding where I am coming from. I don’t want to put girls off doing maths! I think society should help girls to achieve in this area. To do so means looking at the data available about mathematical performance with a cool unflinching eye – data which indicates males are outnumbering females in the upper ability range - and asking what could or should be done to change this.

I wouldn’t say there are no female maths geniuses. Emmy Noether is a personal favourite of mine. Her work on symmetry and conservation laws is both profound and beautiful.

[BarrackerBarmer]

"Males have a better ability to focus on one thing. Where females have a better ability to use other skills at the same time."

Nope