<p>We learned discrete probability in high school algebra. I think the statistics that everybody should know is the stuff that is just picked up or absorbed by reading articles sometimes. I don’t think there’s much use for the Spanish teacher to know how to do a confidence or goodness of fit test or the other stuff you learn in a stats class.</p>
<p>I find it troubling that women are consistently the most vocal about their hatred of math. From my observations, men who don’t like math are much less likely to make disparaging comments about it. It doesn’t matter what a woman feels about math, when someone responds to me being a physics major as “oh I hate math”, it feels like a passive aggressive dig. Why is it that women feel the need to do this when it seems that most men are perfectly okay with acknowledging my major without subtly putting it down? I think this has to do with the negative attitudes towards women in STEM prevalent in society.</p>
<p>Windbehindwings, I am an engineer and had just the opposite experience as your daughter, even though I graduated from high school in 1980. I was allowed to go ahead I math starting in fourth grade. I got nothing but encouragement at school. My college profs treated the girls the same as the guys. I ended up marrying a fellow grad schol student, and we ended up interviewing for jobs TOGETHER. More than once, the interviewer said he would take either one of us, and would let us decide who got the job! I am still one of only a few female structural engineers in Maine, but the other engineers respect me and ask my opinion a lot. I would not hesitate to recommend that girls pursue engineering as a career.</p>
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<p>Based on my anecdotal observations from cc, methinks it more of a self-fulfilling prophecy (which starts in middle school), compounded by the fact that good math teachers are few and far between.</p>
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Even though I’ve always felt inclined toward the social sciences and humanities, I really think this is part of why I despise math so much. Through fifth grade or so, I didn’t care for it, but I didn’t have a real problem with it. I skipped the sixth grade, even though my classmates and I showed up and sat in a classroom every day that year. Our so-called teacher’s method of teaching math was to do a “contract” with the student specifying how many pages he or she would do in a week. We were to check our own work with the teacher’s editions she left on a table in the classroom. What 12 y.o. isn’t going to take total advantage of that? Seventh grade finished me off … our math teacher had a heart attack at the beginning of the year and we ended up having four different teachers, some of whom couldn’t teach math (or anything else) to save their lives.
As for why women are so vocal about their hatred of math, maybe it’s because everybody in the universe is telling them they are supposed to love, love, love it or be accused of not being a feminist or something. Seriously, one of the popular teenage stores came out with a shirt that said “Allergic to Algebra” a few years ago and people went nuts! What if that shirt had said “History is Bunk” or “I are no good at English”? Nobody would have cast a stone.</p>
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<p>I was lucky to have a female teacher for high school trig, analysis, and calculus who was a PhD in math. She was also enthusiastic and on the ball. I think the boy/girl ratio in her calculus class was about 50:50. This was a public school, too (the same one that Drew Brees and Nick Foles attended :)).</p>
<p>My kids’ public HS also had several female math teachers, including for Calc. But by HS, it’s almost too late.</p>
<p>IMO, the math conundrum starts in middle school, where the strivers push for Alg (& Geom) and those that want more of a ‘social life’ wait until HS. MS is generally where the male-female break occurs.</p>
<p>Take a look at AP Calc enrollments. Calc AB tended towards more boys, but Calc BC is ~60% guys. AP Bio is ~60% female. AP Physics C (which is all math all the time) is nearly 80% guys. </p>
<p>Why?</p>
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<p>I don’t know about t-shirts, but I’ve definately seen people get angry at non-evolutionists simply because of their lack of belief in evolution.</p>
<p>In ms, our math team consisted of 4 girls, one guy. Our female coach was encouraging to us all. In hs (a different town), I think I was the only girl on the math team. </p>
<p>I remembered being annoyed that my 11th grade precalc math teacher would not give blessing for me to do both both AP Calc and comp sci (where the “terminal” was a printer) for 12th grade. I don’t think he made the judgement by gender, but who knows. It turns out that I am not especially gifted with programming (most of the geeky hs comp sci student were) … but still, a taste prior to my engineering college would have made that transition easier.</p>
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<p>Note that this is similar to the gender ratios in the biology and physics majors in colleges.</p>
<p>My experience as a math-y and science-y girl in the rural south in the 1970s was more like MaineLonghorn’s than windbehindwings’s daughter’s. I got nothing but support, praise, and encouragement from my high school teachers; the only negative Nancies were my fellow classmates (but aren’t many adolescents pretty hard on the smart kids?) As an undergrad chemistry major and later as a grad student, I can’t remember any gender discrimination in the classroom or the lab.</p>
<p>It was a different story in my early years in the pharma industry - but I’m guessing that most of that bias resulted from the unprofessional idiocy of my immediate supervisor.</p>
<p>This was hard for me because I was so bad at math and science. OK, maybe not “bad,” but totally uninterested (disinterested?). My favorite subjects were all in the humanities.</p>
<p>I still bought her Legos when she was younger, but as the pieces got smaller, my brain couldn’t understand the “what to do” about it, so I just couldn’t play with her. She’s an only child; DH didn’t seem all that interested in Legos either. However, strangely enough, math was her best subject growing up. As other parents complained about her math teacher in middle school, she was teaching her fellow students (probably in ways that other kids would “get it”). Hmmm.</p>
<p>Then I heard about a program called Expanding Your Horizons, geared towards girls in 6th - 12th grades. [Expanding</a> Your Horizons Network - Home](<a href=“Developer Resume”>http://www.expandingyourhorizons.org/) One day conference at local colleges, so they can meet with people in STEM fields to learn more about what they do. There’s no way I could otherwise expose her to so many different career choices. Plus, it exposes the girls to college as a concept of a place to go to, not a special place only for certain people. It also allowed me as a protective parent to let her wander in a small portion of the campus alone (none of her classmates went) while under supervision - the schools had student volunteers in green vests to guide them if needed. Now in high school, math and science are her favorite subjects - I normally would say “best,” but she just got a C+ in APChem, much to her disappointment.</p>
<p>My personal experience through high school and through 3.5 years at Michigan pretty much agrees with this article. In high school all of the top kids my Jr year in AP Calc BC were guys. Sr year I took CalcIII/Lin Alg before school (at the high school) through a local college. The class was just 6 guys. Sr year in AP Physics we only had 1 girl, and she dropped halfway through the year (don’t pick your boyfriend for a project partner). I went to a large, pretty good public high school too. I think the top ten in our class (out of about 650) was about 50-50 guys to girl, maybe a few more guys. Pretty even though. The top math and science classes were just absent of girls.</p>
<p>As a mech e major at michigan, same thing. Hardly any girls in any of these classes. And if you remove the female asian international students, it gets even lower. </p>
<p>I’m not sure why too, they are given every opportunity to succeed and more. Special programs just for girls in STEM, countless scholarships, boosts in admissions, boosts in the job search, etc. This is definitely noticeable too, that the average female in the engineering program may not be as qualified as the average guy (less admissions competition, trying to get more “diversity” etc). I have been in a few groups here where the one of the girls is the one bringing up the rear. Or you just need to give them more time/take more time with them. That’s not to say I haven’t seen the opposite. One of the smartest MEs I’ve met here is a female in the masters ME program now. There is still that thought in the back of your head though, when you first get a URM in your project group, wondering whether they got in on their own merits. That may not be the PC thing to say, but it is the truth.</p>
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<p>I agree. D’s 6th grade teacher wanted her to take Alg in 7th but D said no…she would have been the only girl and she didn’t want to be (this conversation happened when she was 11 years old, to be fair). She did it in 8th and will be in Calc next year as a senior, but not BC…her HS requires AB first. That same group of boys in 7th grade Alg will be the only ones in Calc BC.</p>
<p>Her teacher never asked me to talk to her about it, I think i probably would have encouraged her to take it back then.</p>
<p>Another angle to this would be to ask if maybe the low proportion of women in these math related fields may be due not to a particular disinterest in math by the female student body, but rather a channeling of an abnormally large portion of male students into these areas. Maybe women aren’t especially disinterested or discouraged about math, engineering and physics (because lumping everything into “STEM” is moronic), but rather the interest of women are actually distributed more evenly throughout academia, while males are largely more channeled into the “hard” sciences, math and engineering. Could the low percentage of women in these fields be at least in part due to an artifact of just having a huge amount of male students channeled into this area? This would make sense seeing as how women now make up the majority of new university students and dominate just about every field of study that isn’t math, engineering or physics.</p>
<p>Anyway this is just a theory, but I have never seen it mentioned before in any of the myriad of “Women in STEM” articles so I thought I would post it.</p>
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<p>My daughter sometimes gets this attitude from a few of her male classmates… and hates it. She earns her grades the same way any man does - through studying. And I expect the reason she has had scholarship and internship opportunities is the same as any other student - a combination of past experiences, grades, hard work, and a bit of luck.</p>
<p>This years Intel STS winner addressing science and stem as a high-schooler:
[Science</a> is for all ages: Sara Volz at TEDxOrangeCoast - YouTube](<a href=“Science is for all ages: Sara Volz at TEDxOrangeCoast - YouTube”>Science is for all ages: Sara Volz at TEDxOrangeCoast - YouTube)</p>
<p>I completely disagree that women in STEM grad programs are less qualified. It is true that female applicants score significantly lower on the physics gre than males, in all other ways they are just as qualified if not more qualified than their male peers, likely because of the incredibly high attrition rate in physics. I am one of the two women in my year at my university who stuck with the physics major and we have both been incredibly successful both in research and in the classroom compared to our male classmates.</p>
<p>I don’t know about gaining admission but I can say that once in engineering school, there was no apparent difference in performance between male and female engineering majors. There were genius students of both sexes, average students of both sexes, and terrible students of north sexes. As far as I could tell in roughly equal proportions. I’m guessing that one poster was comparing based on admissions criteria which may or may not (I don’t know) skew towards admitting females with lower scores, but once in college there was no difference which leads me to believe that if
the entering females test scores tended to be lower on average, there was some other admissions criteria that made up for it. If entering females were actually less qualified than entering males the entering females would perform worse in classes, but that wasn’t the case.</p>
<p>On the idea that it’s not that females are overly discouraged from entering engineering/math (I wouldn’t even include math myself, math seems to be relatively close to balanced in my experience) but that males are overly encouraged, no one can really say in absolute terms what’s going on. People can only make comparative claims on this, not absolute.</p>
<p>I was science-y but not math-y. A real problem for a science major. But I slugged my way through a year of Calculus and a couple of quarters of Stats. Succeeding in Calculus with my poor math brain was probably the most rewarding accomplishment of my Freshman year in college. I was never afraid or insecure about a class after that.</p>