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

I went to a mixed secondary school where I was discouraged from pursuing Higher Level Maths for my Leaving Cert. I excelled at maths at University (statistics).

Fast forward many years and this was one of the reasons I wanted DD to go to a single sex second level school - at her primary I could already see that the boys were seen as excelling at maths. Her private school hooked me when they mentioned that 70% of pupils study higher level maths at leaving cert (like A levels).

DD is there and is in 5th year. She excels at maths. So much so that she was chosen for the maths olympiad - based on her results in maths and science in the Junior Cert (equivalent of GSCE). 4 girls in her school got selected (the top 0.67% of pupils were selected). Only one other school in the country had more than one attendee - and that was 2 boys from a mixed school (my old alma matter as irony would have it).

I agree that single sex education is essential for girls to excel - although I worry also about University. A friend of mine was publicly ridiculed and shouted at by male lecturers in her male-dominated study of QS many years ago (one would hope he would be sacked for that now but back in the late 80's we accepted that kind of treatment and there was no support for rocking the boat).

I know we are always berated on these board for advocating single sex education for girls but having both DD and DS's I can attest that both my DD and my DS are doing better at their single sex second level schools than they did at their mixed sex primary schools.

It's absolutely cultural.

I'm SE Asian, and it will surprise nobody that it was in many ways a very sexist culture to grow up in.

But here's the thing. Of course there was the general idea that overall, males were going to be better than females at everything. However, there was also the general idea that if you were "good" in school you'd be good across all subjects. In practice this meant that girls and boys who were considered academically on par, would have been expected to do equally well in maths, physics and any subject for that matter.

Also, pretty much everybody spoke at least a couple of languages to some extent - and this meant that in school, there wasn't an expectation of "ooh, learning extra languages is soooo difficult and generally girls are better at languages." Which is another stereotype that really me when I encountered it here in the UK.

Girls schools and female teachers aren’t essential. And girls schools have side effects that aren’t so great (not least the sexism that boys from single sex schools seem to bring, on average, to higher education and professional work places).

It’s possible for every school to provide a balanced education that sees girls enter STEM at the same rates as boys. What you need are teachers of either sex who believe girls are just as good and who encourage ability at every level. Role models are great, but we’ll waste generations if we wait on that as the propellant to equality.

I saw this in action in my own schooling. I went to a mixed sex comprehensive with an all male maths department and male heads of physics and chemistry. But our school managed to encourage girls and there was no sex discrepancy in maths results. Our math and physics A level groups were half female, the brightest student in our year was a girl who went on to read physics at Imperial. There was the odd comment that didn’t get challenged but not many and our teachers encouraged ability wherever it manifested even when it wasn’t at the top of spectrum. The core philosophy of the school was to believe in all its students as individuals capable of more than society expected of them (also a working class school with almost no students whose parents had gone to uni). There was action to get girls involved in maths, physics and computing (and to get boys into literature). Half the girls in the sixth form went on to do STEM degrees (same as with boys).

@turkeyboots

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

Yes turkey I read the report this morning and was very irate over my cornflakes. DDs have been rolling their eyes all day. Both DDs are v strong at Maths and both attend a single sex school.

DD1 was utterly frustrated by last years Teacher who just did not recognise that she was strong at the subject, telling her she "couldn't be finished yet" "you must have guessed it" . Unfortunately she had the same teacher for Science (and the same attitude). DD1 had a ball for about 6weeks when the main teacher was out for a while, and the substitute recognised how strong she was and pushed her on.

DD2's regularly tells me that "all the teachers say that Maths is hard" [grr].
I've tried to move both of them to another school, but I'm not sure that there is anywhere locally that has a different attitude.
So frustrating (between us, their father and I have 4 science based degrees).

@TerrificEchidnaSpikes

It's absolutely cultural.

I'm SE Asian, and it will surprise nobody that it was in many ways a very sexist culture to grow up in.

But here's the thing. Of course there was the general idea that overall, males were going to be better than females at everything. However, there was also the general idea that if you were "good" in school you'd be good across all subjects. In practice this meant that girls and boys who were considered academically on par, would have been expected to do equally well in maths, physics and any subject for that matter.

Also, pretty much everybody spoke at least a couple of languages to some extent - and this meant that in school, there wasn't an expectation of "ooh, learning extra languages is soooo difficult and generally girls are better at languages." Which is another stereotype that really me when I encountered it here in the UK.

Similar in Russia, as far as I can tell. I know a lot of Russians and most of the women studied engineering, physics, maths, accounting. And they couldn’t understand why women need special encouragement to go into STEM in the West. They thought it was weird/ stupid that women were considered (or considered themselves) to be less able at maths.

I don't think single sex schools are the solution, although in many ways they do help.
I went to an all girls school where 10% of us took honours months for leaving cert. In the boys school up the road 50% were taking honours. I'd like to think things have improved (Annasgirl's 70% figure is very encouraging) but I fear the general bias still exists which the kids absorb from society in general and from their parents.
When my daughter was 5 the school ran a 6 week computer course after school. It was over subscribed, with almost all of the boys applying but just 2 out of 30 girls. Basically all the boys parents heard about the course and said "yep, this is worthwhile and relevant to my son", while only a tiny percentage of the girls parents thought the same. I found that very depressing.

My daughter was underestimated at maths throughout school, despite always doing well. She got an A* at GCSE and the school still tried to put her off taking Maths and Physics at A level. She ignored them, with my support, got A grades in both. Ended up with a 2:1 in Astrophysics & Computing, now works in IT innovation. The prejudice is definitely still there in schools, it takes determination on the part of girls and their parents to keep going against it.

At my DDs mixed grammar maths and physics seemed to be pretty evenly split and DD got the Maths prize for A levels and her friend got the Physics prize. In her group of friends one did physics at Imperial and 2 did medicine and one did history, DD did maths at a university that is regularly in the top 3 for maths. It never seemed to occur to them or their teachers that girls couldn't do maths, physics or whatever they wanted.

@Flywheel

I don't think single sex schools are the solution, although in many ways they do help. I went to an all girls school where 10% of us took honours months for leaving cert. In the boys school up the road 50% were taking honours. I'd like to think things have improved (Annasgirl's 70% figure is very encouraging) but I fear the general bias still exists which the kids absorb from society in general and from their parents. When my daughter was 5 the school ran a 6 week computer course after school. It was over subscribed, with almost all of the boys applying but just 2 out of 30 girls. Basically all the boys parents heard about the course and said "yep, this is worthwhile and relevant to my son", while only a tiny percentage of the girls parents thought the same. I found that very depressing.

It's instructive to compare single sex versus coed. The difference in the numbers taking physics is particularly stark.

In a girls's school, if there's a computing club, science society or robotics team then it's clear that it's for girls. In secondary schools, the older girls can help run them. How often does that apply in coed schools, I wonder?

@Flywheel

I don't think single sex schools are the solution, although in many ways they do help. I went to an all girls school where 10% of us took honours months for leaving cert. In the boys school up the road 50% were taking honours. I'd like to think things have improved (Annasgirl's 70% figure is very encouraging) but I fear the general bias still exists which the kids absorb from society in general and from their parents. When my daughter was 5 the school ran a 6 week computer course after school. It was over subscribed, with almost all of the boys applying but just 2 out of 30 girls. Basically all the boys parents heard about the course and said "yep, this is worthwhile and relevant to my son", while only a tiny percentage of the girls parents thought the same. I found that very depressing.

The bit about young children and computing is really important. In general, girls switch off from computing before they even get to secondary schools. Most girls start to think computing is for boys not girls at around 8 or 9, really young.

My A-level maths class this year has one girl in it, others only slightly better. I wonder if lockdown had anything to do with the poor take-up by girls this year (previous years have been much better). Normally girls need nudging to consider maths A-level ('I'm not sure I'd be good at it' coming from a top set girl would be usual as they are far more likely to be lacking in confidence in their abilities) and they wouldn't have got that badgering from the top set teacher out of school.

I have had this discussion with primary and secondary teachers over and over again as my daughter goes through school. It's the same narrative all the time, she is doing fine, she is with her friends, yes her grades are good but she would find the top set too fast, she doesn't participate enough in class, she doesn't work quickly enough. And yet she gets the top marks, the words 'I don't know how that happened' came out of her teacher's mouth. She is in the top 10% of the top set but only because we have insisted that they look past her introvert nature, stop putting her with noisy boys who need help and let her sit with her peers like they do with my son. And still, despite all this, they come out with gems like... Mme Margaux, I think we find fewer girls in the maths class because they are better at English, perhaps the real issue is that boys are not good at English.

Maths (and now physics) are the two subjects where boys outperform girls at GCSE so boys will be over-represented in those subjects at A-level as they don't have as much choice as the girls, and because they're more likely to be their 'best' subjects. But that doesn't fully explain why I have 1 girl and 15 boys.

The exceptional girl/range of boys including mediocre pattern still? That's depressing.
Was one of the things which didn't happen in the second half of the last academic year much by way of thinking about a level options in the context of what they lead to, be it uni or whatever, noble? Were the pupils not made aware of how their choices keep doors open or shut them?

For my school Y11 would have been given a presentation about the various maths options (Core, A-level and Further) with career paths and so on, they'd have had a subject taster day and we also get sixth formers to come into a top/second set lesson and discuss the reality of A-level with them.

At the same time, Y11 teachers would have been having casual conversations with kids about what their plans were and steering them in appropriate directions.

We did set remote work for our Y11s over lockdown, but from talking to Y12 now, it appears that quite a few of them did basically nothing.

I read this study the other day, and it did surprise me. I'm a maths teacher, and I was very aware when I was growing up that I wasn't seen as being as good at maths as my brother was, even though I actually got better results at GCSE, A Level and degree level (he did a straight maths degree, mine was joint honours with computing).

It hasn't been my experience in teaching that girls are seen as worse than boys at maths though. Perhaps I've been lucky in that the maths departments I've been in have been predominantly filled with women (current department has 8 women, 3 men). The departments I've been in have always been scrupulously fair in ensuring that tests/exams are the basis for setting, and we don't quite mark blind but we do mark in such a way that the names are hidden the majority of the time (you can often tell who's paper you're marking by their handwriting though, so it's not a perfect system). Setting is always done based purely on test results (which is one of the recommendations from the study) and if teacher judgement needs to be brought into it for real borderline cases then we usually err on the side of putting the girl into the higher set (as a conscious decision due to us knowing about the gender bias we may subconsciously hold). Nationally, there is still a slight gender gap in maths results at GCSE, which does back up the idea that girls may well be placed in lower sets than they should be. You can't achieve the highest results if you aren't in the highest sets, as you aren't exposed to the same level of maths.

The study also notes that bame pupils are also often put in lower sets than their white peers of equal ability. I can't comment through experience on that one because I've never taught in a school with enough bame pupils to be able to form an opinion. It does seem very plausible though, and is another thing that teachers should be looking out for and trying to challenge their own/colleagues thinking.

My DD was even luckier than I realised as she is mixed race. I was very proud when she got the maths prize at school but didn't realise her sex and colour made the achievement even more impressive. Her head of maths was an amazing teacher and he was always very supportive about her abilities.

Actually, having read nobles comment. It has struck me that this year's year 12 does have significantly more boys than girls, whereas normally it's more 50/50. Her comment about top set teachers badgering girls to believe they'd be good enough rings very, very true. And this year's cohort didn't get that because they were in lockdown when they chose their A Level options. The further maths class is equally split between the sexes though, interestingly. And core maths seems to be mostly girls.

I did a maths degree (about 10 years ago) and it was pretty much exactly 50-50 male-female students. Lecturers were mostly male - and still are. I now happen to know that my alma mater's maternity pay was and remains pretty stingy (very stingy compared to what I get in my non academic job!) Lecturers are still mostly male. I wouldn't want to make correlation equivalent to causation, but there could be something going on here.

My further maths class at sixth form was full of cocky nerdy boys always shouting out and thinking they were brilliant.
It made me very sad that I was the only girl as I knew a few girls who were capable but put off by them, thinking they weren't as clever.
However, I very much enjoyed ending up with higher marks than all of the boys, even the three going to oxbridge to study maths or computing (tbf I was heading to oxford to study biochemistry).

I'm now a primary teacher and the year I split the two classes by sex, the girls made so much more progress than usual. Think the girls get so intimidated by cocky boys thinking they know everything and racing through, even if they don't actually understand as well as the girls. When the girls could work at their pace without the boys present they made leaps and bounds in progress.