https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/13/upshot/boys-girls-math-reading-tests.html
Methinks the title of the article is misleading (of course, it is!) as their dot plot shows that boys outperform girls in math in middle-income districts as well. (Look the midline in their plot.)
I randomly picked one dot from their plot and it was Eu Clair, WI. Median Income of $36k in 2010 census, but boys outperformed girls in math.
A better title is that girls outperform boys in low income districts.
I know that there is concern about the underrepresentation of girls in STEM studies, and this problem is thought to begin earlier in K-12.
But to me this the bigger gender problem in education - boys, especially from low-income families, are not doing well.
C’mon, bluebayou, you know better than that. You can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from a single point on a scatter plot, even if it is randomly chosen.
The overall conclusion is clear from the scatter plot: In the poorest districts (e.g., Detroit, Flint, East St. Louis, Gary), girls generally outperform boys in math. At moderate income levels, there are roughly as many districts where girls outperform boys in math, as there are where boys outperform girls. It’s only on the right side of the graph, at higher income scales, that boys pretty consistently outperform girls, and the overall trend (with some outliers) is that the higher you go up the income scale, the greater the divergence in favor of boys.
There are some dense clusters just above the middle of the income scale where boys are pretty consistently outperforming girls in math—but not by much, in many cases just 0.1 to 1 month. These are fairly trivial differences. It’s only at the highest income scales that the advantage for boys becomes almost completely uniform across districts, and in many cases quite large, peaking at nearly a 6-month advantage in Lexington, Mass and Montgomery Twp, NJ.
What’s striking to me is the English scatter plot, which shows girls consistently outperforming boys by 6 months to a full year, across the entire income scale—i.e., a larger difference than boys’ advantage in math I knew girls tended to outperform boys in English, but I had no idea the divergence was so large, or so uniform.
I can understand why in low SES districts girls outperform boys (you’ll find this to be true in Canada and Britain as well and not just in math but right across the board). What I don’t understand is why boys outperform girls in high SES districts. You would think that in high SES districts the divergence in performance between girls and boys would be negligible, that presumably they would be equally encouraged and supported.
Anecdotally speaking, I have a friend with daughters at the same school my older son attends and she tells me that many of the girls they know are dropping down streams in math and science and then dropping them completely as soon as they are no longer mandatory. These are girls who come from well off families and who have done well scholastically in elementary and middle school. For some reason in high school however when they hit road blocks in these courses they just give up and their parents let them. If it were my daughter (I only have sons) I’d be providing every support possible so that she stayed in the higher stream and was successful. Do we really still have different expectations for success in math and science for girls vs boys? It boggles the mind.
Isn’t it plausible that one rationale for this is the same as was reported a few months ago about how “the nations with the least gender equality, as determined by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, had the highest representation of women in STEM” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-arent-there-more-women-in-science-and-technology-1519918657).
That was explained by one commentator in that article as being because “if girls expect they can ‘live a good life’ while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology…However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there…”
In the highest income districts, many girls probably can expect to ‘live a good life’ and their parents have the money to allow them to pursue what they want and do best at (and they are clearly doing relatively better in arts subjects). Majoring in ballet (like my D18) or philosophy in college is not likely to be the choice you’d make if you were impoverished and wanted a better life. Majoring in engineering or medical fields is likely to be a better route out of poverty, just as it is in low income countries like “Algeria, Tunisia [and] Albania”.
Remember this is not saying that the top boys are better than the top girls, it is saying that the average of the boys is better than the average of the girls. If the mid ranking girls choose to do their preferred arts subjects (because they can afford to do so) and so don’t focus on math, while the mid ranking boys stay with STEM (because they are not very good at writing) then the average achievement of the boys in math will be higher than the average achievement of the girls, even if the top performers (who are focusing on STEM) are at the same level.
My vague recollection is that boys, for whatever reason, are more likely to be extreme outliers (fatter tails) in math. So a school representing primarily one end or the other of the distribution would have girls tending more towards the center and boys towards the extreme.
Not sure this particular study sheds any light onto why boys are more likely to be outliers.
Isn’t that exactly what I said? (Which, I would guess, is not what the NYT headline writer wants us to come away with.)
Au contraire. It’s their data. I just opened one data point near the income midline (4th dotted vertical line) to determine what income that midline represents, i.e., Eau Claire @ ~$49k. (I misquoted the $ earlier.) And its just to the right of that middle line (4th vertical) where the boys start to perform better than the girls – note that the cloud starts to shift downward and to the right. yes, it may not be “by much” but the cluster volume and trend is rather clear, at least visually. (Sure, I’d love to see/crunch the raw data, but I can only see what the NYT wants me to see.)
In summary (from the article), “Girls perform slightly better than boys in about a quarter of districts – particularly those that are predominantly African-American and low-income. Boys do slightly better in the rest – and much better in high-income and mostly white or Asian-American districts.” (emphasis added)
Looked at another way, boys outperform girls in 75% (100%-25%) of income brackets.
From the article
“We will have boys shouting out the answer, and if they’re wrong they don’t care,” said Melissa Kondrick, a sixth-grade math teacher in Pleasanton, Calif., another high-performing district with a large gender math gap. “If a girl gets it wrong, they will not answer another question. You’ll see them shut down.”
There is gender discrimination in math education in the high income school districts. Both students and teachers need to go through gender bias training every year
@collegedad13 I don’t know about bias. My older son has had just as many female math and science teachers as male. Presumably they wouldn’t be biased. There does seem to be far more “drama” with my friend’s daughters and their teachers than with my sons. The girls seem to react much more emotionally to situations where my boys would just shrug their shoulders if it even registered on their radar.
They are just as biased as male teachers, according to research I did as an undergrad. More likely to call on boys with hand up, more likely to suggest ways to approach a wrong answer rather than go to the next person, etc.
That’s a fine anecdote, but really begs the question: why is that different in low income districts (where girls outperform the boys)? And if we can’t answer that question, the anecdote is of no value.
Two of my children, a daughter and a son, both attended the same Ivy league school. My daughter majored in History, went into consulting and then law school. She is doing really great. She loves her work and can’t spend the money she is earning. My son is in computer science (sophomore) and is doing really great. I am sure that he will find professional success as well. Students should find their passion. Girls should not be pushed into math because it makes us feel like discrimination is over. Girls should be welcomed and encouraged if they choose to go into math, but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Math is not something that all students are drawn to.
Its not an anecdote. Its a fact born out by many studies.
Here is the study complete with approximately 65 references. It may help @bluebayou
https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp18-13-v201806_0.pdf
That may be true but lets not practice gender and racial discrimination to drive certain groups of students from studying math
My current 8th grader came home furious recently because she was in an advanced English pull out unit and had an essay where she lost a point because of where her claim was placed in the first paragraph. The boy next to her got a perfect score. They exchanged papers and he told her that her paper was way better than his and he didn’t understand the grade. She read his and was shocked to see him breaking all kinds of rules like writing in first person and summarizing his essay by stating he really liked the book.
Her regular English teacher (not the one who had taught the advanced unit) overheard the discussion and asked to read my daughter’s essay, saying she couldn’t change the grade but was curious. She told my daughter later it was a great essay and the other teacher must not have realized the thing she took a point away for wasn’t part of the curriculum anymore.
Both teachers were women. The one who apparently had lower expectations for a boy in writing is a gifted education teacher as well.
All this to say teacher biases and different expectations can definitely be a factor from what I’ve seen anecdotally.
I don’t believe that boys shouting out is the entire answer. Our district does not allow boys (or girls) to shout out answers. Why, then, do girls consistently outperform boys in LA by a much wider margin? Maybe there is gender bias in the other direction by English teachers. In general, girls do better than boys in schools especially in elementary.
The same thing can be said for English…but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying (including math).
@twoin18 – Just the other day I read about study that found gender differences increase in gender “equality” societies. It was a study of navigation techniques. Basically, it found that men navigate best by magnitude and direction while women navigate best by location and landmarks. The difference increased as the “equality” increased in the society, where more equal societies had a higher standard of living. In the less equal societies, the differences were smaller, presumably because life itself was difficult and everyone was forced to have a general level of both techniques (male and female).
On a humorous note, I’ve seen this many times with DW, as I tend to say things like “go south on GA 400” while she always responds with “which way do I turn”. It’s like we’re speaking a different language … and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I give turn directions rather than compass directions. Me? I feel lost if I don’t have a good sense of my direction from the target!
Anyway, what I found most interesting about the study was that this difference was mainly due to the amount of testosterone in the person (regardless of gender). For example, women with a genetic condition that resulted in an increase in testosterone in their body worked better with magnitude+direction. Giving testosterone pills to normal women apparently increased their magnitude+direction ability. Why would there be a difference in the brain? It wasn’t encoded on the Y chromosome … it was just activated by the testosterone generated by the Y. This led to an interesting discussion at the dinner table the other night. D18 is going to major in genetics and behavior. She has the genetics chops already, now she’s going to look at the behavioral part. I anticipate many interesting discussions in the future!
PS. Another interesting thing from that study was that older women were not as good as younger women in location+landmark navigation … but that they were the best at determining where+when to go (i.e. they had “wisdom” – where to go at what time of the year).
I must have more testosterone than my husband. A very typical conversation here would go:
Me- Take Main Street North to 1st Street and turn left, go one block.
Him- befuddled. Where’s Main Steet? What? What?
Me- Exit our neighborhood, turn right towards your mom’s house, then turn left by the McDonald’s.
Him- well why didn’t you say that to begin with?