<p>Thank you again, Marian! The humanities and social sciences forever !!!</p>
<p>Actually, footballmom104, I was defending my daughter’s economics major and business career. She was a high achiever (National Merit Finalist, etc.) with no interest in science.</p>
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<p>Yes. No pre-law, no budding social scientists, no economists, no going-for-an-MBAs, etc?</p>
<p>Much2Learn: I completely agree with your OP. </p>
<p>If this was 1952. But it’s not, so I call shenanigans.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t have guessed. In fact, I would have guessed Science would generally be more attractive to girls than to guys based off of the gender make-up of the classes I’ve taken. But regardless, I highly doubt the intention is to discourage girls from perusing math. Likely you just have bad schools where you live, or an administrator gone mad. </p>
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<p>This is not true. The only school of any prestige that fails anywhere near that level (though still quite a bit less) would be Purdue, which doesn’t accept “primarily only those in the top 3% in math.” Maybe this was true several decades ago (I’m not saying it was - just simply that I don’t know) but it’s absolutely not the case today. </p>
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<p>Out of curiosity, what school refused to accept extra money? </p>
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<p>I can only speak about Michigan in this regard, but Michigan seems to have absolutely no problem with students spending extra time in school. The freshman advisers usually tell students to take lighter loads which would delay their graduation past 4 years if they’re not coming in with any credits.</p>
<p>In my D’s school, counselor strongly discourages students form AP classes in STEM. Why? God knows. In another school district, counselor encouraged girls and boys to get AP in math.</p>
<p>Honestly, I do believe that there are more math genius among boys than among girls. Also, I believe that math abilities are innate. For example, I think that it’s not possible to teach a mathematician at Ph.D. level. A person either get it or not. Math geniuses are very rare, IMHO.</p>
<p>At HS level, boys and girls can do equally well in math. Cal B/C is not that difficult. Don’t really see a problem.</p>
<p>"At our public school, kids are required to take intensive science/engineering classes in order to enroll in honors math. "</p>
<p>I think it is the other way round. One needs solid math to be enrolled in honors science. And it makes sense.</p>
<p>What is “honors math”? Calculus? There are plenty online classes (cheap) that teach Calculus. If a kid wants to learn math, I can’t imagine where she may find impediment.</p>
<p>My D is taking Pre-Calculus in the 9th grade. Although, she is on the track to take all AP math in HS, I see that she is not a mathematician. At Olympiad level, boys are much stronger.</p>
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<p>How can you know at her age?</p>
<p>My husband has a PhD in math. He has said many times that the type of math one does in a graduate math program is very different from the type of math one does in high school or even in a college calculus course. The graduate level math is very abstract; the high school math is very concrete. They appeal to different people, and a person who is good at one may not be good at the other. </p>
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<p>This may be true, on average, but individual students of either gender should be judged individually. Some girls will be stronger than some boys.</p>
<p>SoMuch2Learn,</p>
<p>Major is math is great. However, not that many women can do Ph.D. in math. All other STEMs are much easier, IMHO. </p>
<p>Never saw male hostility towards women in STEM. Other way around. They treat each girl as a queen. I tell my D, that she should major in STEM if she wants to be treated as a queen.</p>
<p>Marian,</p>
<p>"The graduate level math is very abstract; the high school math is very concrete. They appeal to different people, and a person who is good at one may not be good at the other. "</p>
<p>I agree. I have several friends who are mathematicians. They have special minds 
I have STEM Ph.D. myself, but I can’t even understand what they are talking about. :(</p>
<p>It is very likely, that my D. will get A in Calculus, but it’s extremely unlikely that she could win in math Olympiad. :(</p>
<p>In my Electronics class there are 60 students and 5 (including me) are women. But the teacher is also woman. I absolutely love the class, but it definitely doesn’t come naturally to me like my English, History, Art, Poly Sci, etc. classes do. I really have to work at it.</p>
<p>During the last hour we go over the math from the homework section and anybody who is confident in their comprehension of the math is free to go. Most of the class leaves. Some men stay. All the women stay. </p>
<p>I used to think STEM classes just came more naturally to men than women, but this post got me thinking that maybe it’s because women have been conditioned from day one to just to =think= it’s more difficult, and in doing so, it really does become more difficult in a mind over matter sort of way.</p>
<p>So how do we reverse the programming? It’s easy to say we should raise our girls right, but for the adult woman who wants to get into STEM studies, how does she overcome a lifetime of boogie-man-math conditioning?</p>
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<p>Its not odd to me. As I mentioned, one girl in my daughter’s circle of friends is doing something outside the sciences. There is one who is double majoring in a science and economics. The high school is huge, and there are plenty of like-minded science-oriented girls at the school.</p>
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I’m late to the party, but it’s amusing to see this kind of comment in a thread about science education. Especially coming from the OP.</p>
<p>californiaaa, until a few decades ago, women weren’t even acknowledged for their ability in math, so how can you even make a statement like that? Ever heard of Emmy Noether? Noether’s theorem is one of the most profound results in theoretical physics. In fact the charges in the Standard Model are a consequence of this theorem. Nevertheless, she struggled to even get a real faculty position.</p>
<p>Heard of Maria Goeppert Mayer (a theoretical physicist and the last women to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics)? She couldn’t even get a full professorship until three years before she won the Nobel prize with Wigner and Jensen.</p>
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<p>The plural of anecdote is not data.</p>
<p>My D is very strong in math. It all comes so easy to her. We heard her AP Calc BC teacher talks about her to his class all the time about what a student can do. She graduated HS so its cool to hear people still talk positively about her.</p>
<p>But there is a societal pull toward the more soft social aspects of intelligence when it comes to future career choices. There have been 2-3 instances of bias against her as a girl in math during HS but the problem seems to be the more subtle, societal bias of low expectations for girls in math and science.</p>
<p>I just keep telling my D that it doesn’t matter what business she goes into as long as she is able to know the finance, economics and to crunch the data that business depends on because nobody is expecting her to be able to do that very well simply because she is a woman.</p>
<p>I’ll see how that goes in time.</p>
<p>In my DD’s HS (private selective prep) there were more girls in her BC calc class than boys. There were probably more boys in the multivariable class, but she never felt discouraged from being a math nerd (she took AP Stats as her elective senior year). Math and science prizes to grads were evenly split between genders, although about 80% of the top 10% of the class were girls. My DD thought it was weird that I asked her whether she felt girls were discouraged in Math and Science. It never even crossed her mind.</p>
<p>My HS GC told me to be a physics teacher if I liked physics. But then he also could not understand why I wanted to apply anywhere besides the State U because, after all I could get in and be done. So, narrow-minded and provincial all around. </p>
<p>Back in the dark ages when I graduated as an EE, women represented only 2% of the US EE graduates. It is better now (maybe 30%?), but certainly not 50/50 like medicine and some other science fields. I think it is a bit of a continuum, and different individuals, schools and parents are evolved to a different level. We need to teach our girls to be strong and confident enough to follow their path. Even if they start like my DD from an encouraging place, they will likely run into bad attitudes at some point.</p>
<p>to Madaboutx ,</p>
<p>"But there is a societal pull toward the more soft social aspects of intelligence when it comes to future career choices. "</p>
<p>In my experience this societal pull comes for both, girls and boys. In HS, counselors push kids into easier, soften classes. Probably, it is easier for schools to avoid potential problems, if kid (boy or girl) would be overwhelmed by the material. </p>
<p>In colleges - it’s the same. Both, boys and girls, are directed to soften classes because college in mainly concerned with the drop-out rate. Also, someone has to learn humanities. Thus, colleges are pushing students in this direction.</p>
<p>Same for both, boys and girls.</p>
<p>Poeme ,</p>
<p>Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 4 July 1934) was a French-Polish physicist and chemist, famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.</p>
<p>Please, notice that Marie Skłodowska-Curie is the only person in the world who received Nobel prices in 2 STEM nominations! And she worked before the feminist movement. And her discoveries are really important.</p>
<p>Poeme,</p>
<p>Sofia Kovalevskaya (15 January 1850 – 10 February 1891) was the first major Russian female mathematician, responsible for important original contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe. She was also one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor.</p>
<p>Please, note that 2 centuries ago, around the time of civil war, well before any feminists, Sofia Kovalevskaya was a great mathematician, who contributed a lot to math theory.</p>