Girls underestimated at maths

[GoodyWoolf]

Stereotypes lead to girls performance in maths being underestimated and this could affect their career choices:
www.irishtimes.com/news/education/girls-maths-ability-underestimated-due-to-stereotypes-study-finds-1.4376105?mode=amp&fbclid=IwAR3b-xEq7B2c9nk1zQuwfh8jM-pwHWFo5NWjDmlkugmZQH-B4X6J1KSjMg0

This is one of the reasons that it still seems necessary to have single sex schools. The girls can get their fair share of maths and physics prizes, Arkwright scholarships etc. And by the same token, boys in all boys schools can get their fair share on English, drama etc etc.

There was an interesting Institute of physics report... I'm not sure which, they seem to have quite a lot of stuff which may be of interest

www.iop.org/what-were-doing-address-gender-imbalance-physics

DD studied Applied Maths, Pure Maths, Physics, Computing and French for her Advanced Highers at school (Scottish system, roughly equivalent to A levels) and got 5 straight As.
She got a gold in the European Maths challenge, did a maths degree at Durham uni and now works in risk analysis for a major bank.
Her teachers never discouraged her - in fact they arranged for her to study at two different high schools simultaneously for a year, as neither covered all five subjects. She used to run down the road between schools, changing her tie as she went, to get to the lesson, then run back for the next one!
I heard nothing but praise from the staff at parent evenings - they seemed to relish teaching a pupil with genuine aptitude and enthusiasm for the subject, regardless of sex.
Even my own maths teachers, back in the 1960’s, encouraged the girls in the class, and maths was compulsory to at least O level for all of us. We had a lovely chap who reassured us that he wouldn’t start a new topic until we were all sure we understood the last one, and insisted we ask if we had difficulty. He never belittled anyone for needing extra explanation. I remain grateful to him and the other staff for me getting the grades I needed for medical school.

I just asked dd who is doing Maths A level and she said the numbers are equal in her comp. Same for FM which she doesn't do but i know who does. Her GCSE and main A level maths teacher is female so i don't know if that would make a difference? Again anecdote doesn't equal data but i thought I'd add an example from now as people are using examples from their school days.

anecdote doesn't equal data

I suspect that to some extent, the posters on this thread are a self selecting group of the ones who had more luck than others in their peer groups re sexism etc in this area.

@ErrolTheDragon

"That's good - the sex ratio of teachers will hopefully gradually erode these damaging, outdated lies."

Do you mean there should be more men in teaching? Because there's a 70/30 split with more females in teaching at the moment.

I was thinking in relation to countering the probed existing bias re maths (and also physics, and some of the other STEM subjects).
I don't know whether there is any strong evidence for bias in other subjects against boys, and if it is whether having male teachers would help redress it. Maybe eg male food technology teachers would be a good idea.

In general it probably would be better if the sex ratio in teachers (and the frequent occurrence of its inverse in SLTs) was closer, but not in relation to what we're discussing here.

Proved not probed.

Does the same hold true in single sex schools though? Both DD's different girls schools had huge maths and physics departments. Many, many girls, most in fact, took maths as one of their ALevels. There was only one male maths teacher at one of the schools, and fully female maths staff in the other. A significant number also take DT and IT, and apply for Engineering or CompSci.

My teachers were actually too enthusiastic about my abilities, I felt like i was a bit of a project. I went to a comp with a 40% pass rate but they put me through maths GCSE and A-Level a year early on my own so my minor act of rebellion was to refuse to apply to study anything maths related at university. Poor teachers can't win!

I wonder how much of this is cultural. I grew up on the continent, in a country where maths and logic are revered as the highest academic topics, and I never faced any obvious barriers in studying maths.

During highschool, in my year, the top students in maths were always female (me and another girl).
At university (studying maths & physics) there were more men (only 30% female?), but the top students were still female.
In MEng computing... same thing, the top two students were female (even though the overall student ratio was now only 10% female)

In my career (including in the UK), people often comment that female experts are rare, but typically exceptionally talented (and the reasons there's less female experts at the very top are institutional: e.g. impact of maternity break on an academic CV, re: number of publications)

So it seems to me the bias mentioned in this article is more among non-experts (school teachers...), and I think there is a strong cultural element to this "layman bias", as I didn't experience it at all in my home country (in fact I was pushed towards maths, at the expense of other topics where I was equally gifted).
I think people from far east countries experience something similar (lots of girls in maths/computing...). This is particularly noticeable when these people emigrate, e.g. to the USA, and the "Asian = good at maths" stereotype seems to trump the "girl = bad at maths" stereotype.

I don't know whether there is any strong evidence for bias in other subjects against boys
I think there is evidence of bias in general against boys in the school system, especially in primary school. Possibly as a result of the gender imbalance re: staff (overwhelmingly female). Or possibly because boys are usually more rowdy...
In any case, the boys get worse marks when the teacher knows them, than when the copy is anonymised. I don't think such unfortunate social dynamics are good for anyone (male or female).

It is cultural. DH’s younger female colleagues who are all from overseas tend to be shocked and say it’s not something they recognise from their home countries.

I went to a large mixed comprehensive and was in the top set for maths. Despite my achieving 100%, the only pupil that did, and coming top in the whole year in mock O levels, I still didn’t think I was particularly good at maths, not like the ”clever” boys. I got As, the top mark at that time, in O level Maths and also in Additional Maths, but didn’t take it at A level. I thought you had to be really clever to do it at A level.

12 years ago when dd was in reception her headmaster commented that her class proved the gender divide in that all of the top table for maths were boys and all but 1 of the bottom table were girls. Actually the top table for maths were all September and October born boys and the oldest children in the class and the bottom table were all August birthdays.................

What shocks me about that report is that Ireland has so many single sex schools that this really shouldn't be the case still.

I had a female maths teacher from 11-18. There was no favouritism, no bias. She just loved good pupils who worked hard, and you wanted to work hard. And best still, her husband was in charge of the timetable so she could get extra lessons timetabled so that she could take pupils through exams early, and do extra - I've got maths and additional maths GCSE and pure and further maths A level. She also got him to fix it online that we kept her - or she kept us - all through until A level.

Cultural bias is definitely a big thing. Back when I was a grad student I had a friend from Barbados doing an MSc in computer science. She was horrified by how few women there were; back in Barbados as an undergrad, numbers had been 50-50.

Stereotype threat is definitely an issue, as is imposter syndrome (which I've seen a few examples of on this thread). Back in my schooldays I remember a trip down the pub with these strange new beings, boy sixth formers (my school joined up with the boys' school next door as I went into the upper sixth). Someone asked "who found last week's mock A level physics easy?" And it was imposter syndrome meets Dunning-Kruger -perfectly capable girls wh went on to get As and Bs saying "not me, I found it really hard" while the laziest boy in the year (who went on to get a U) saying "it was piss easy."

I moved from a nice grammar to all girls selective sixth form. I definitely felt more comfortable doing Maths and Physics there. But even then... There were 60 girls doing Maths, 60 doing Biology, 40 doing chemistry.... And 7 in Physics. But we got 4As and 3Bs between us.

My own DDs... One loves maths, one hates it but gets it easily. They are only 9&7 though.

imposter syndrome meets Dunning-Kruger

Theres a phrase to remember.

@Baaaahhhhh

Does the same hold true in single sex schools though? Both DD's different girls schools had huge maths and physics departments. Many, many girls, most in fact, took maths as one of their ALevels. There was only one male maths teacher at one of the schools, and fully female maths staff in the other. A significant number also take DT and IT, and apply for Engineering or CompSci.

Significantly less so, in the UK at any rate.

They can do math just fine, but people like myself don’t really like working with numbers. It truly is boring. My husband and I would be driving and he would ask “are we supposed exit off to exit 123?” And I would be like “what’s exit 123??? Oh did you mean exit off to purple ave?” Numbers don’t bother him but number gets arranged so many ways I can’t remember them. I can remover by James’s

@blueberrypie0112

They can do math just fine, but people like myself don’t really like working with numbers. It truly is boring. My husband and I would be driving and he would ask “are we supposed exit off to exit 123?” And I would be like “what’s exit 123??? Oh did you mean exit off to purple ave?” Numbers don’t bother him but number gets arranged so many ways I can’t remember them. I can remover by James’s

Last part was suppose to be “remember them by words” don’t know why my phone autocorrect that way

@blueberrypie0112

They can do math just fine, but people like myself don’t really like working with numbers. It truly is boring. My husband and I would be driving and he would ask “are we supposed exit off to exit 123?” And I would be like “what’s exit 123??? Oh did you mean exit off to purple ave?” Numbers don’t bother him but number gets arranged so many ways I can’t remember them. I can remover by James’s

People like yourself? You're really just talking about you and your DH there. Some women revel in numbers. Some men hate them.

This thread is timely, although I would have hoped things had changed, as I have just this morning sent my application to study a BSc in Computing and Maths, having been steered away from the sciences to the arts in my A level choices 20 years ago.

My chemistry teacher (a man) really pushed for me to do A level chemistry, but my maths teacher (also a man) "disliked girls" (as I said to my parents, aged 15), and it would have been little use doing chemistry without maths for further study. I had wanted to do chemistry, maths and IT, but it was repeatedly suggested that I look at doing languages instead (stereotypically women's subjects).

I got As or A*s in all of those subjects at GCSE. It obviously still rankles, hence me going back to my studies!