March 11, 2009
Study : Girls Still Not Swarming into Sci-Tech
This is a conversation I often have with others, the question being why don’t girls get involved in science, technology , engineering and math. I get a headache every time I see a certain commercial that displays a mother too tired to remember 3 times 4. What? That’s a big deal?
Then there was the Barbie fiasco. Even this week I have been talking to colleagues about exposing teachers to higher math with certain programs. Problem solving, supercomputing, that kind of thing. Take a look at this article and talk to me.
Study: Girls still not swarming into sci-tech, dammit
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/03/girls_in_stem_roundup_study/
US researchers have issued a comprehensive roundup of research covering that hotly-debated topic: Why aren’t there more girls in the sci/tech/engineering/maths-based world? Don’t even mention the kind of math at Shodor.org. But we can do this. Yes we can do math and yes we can do problem solving and there are girls in computer science.. not enough.
In broad outline, the Cornell Uni team of psych specialists (one male lead author, two female co-authors, hem hem) say that the consensus of science suggests that men’s possible biological advantages in maths-based areas could well be a factor in the lack of girls. But that isn’t enough of a factor to fully explain the almost total absence of women from such fields.
According to the new paper, Women’s Underrepresentation in Science: Sociocultural and Biological Considerations, men in general aren’t all that much better than women at maths. But at the high end of ability, especially in spatial and mech/electronic geek type reasoning, there are a lot more chaps:
For both spatial reasoning and mathematics, males are between 1.5 and 2.3 times more likely to be at the high end of the score distribution (including in some analyses >7 times more likely to be at the top 1%). Where males are hugely overrepresented at the high end is in areas of mechanical/electronic reasoning (by a factor of nearly 10 to 1).
But all that said, women today are much more present at the higher end of so-called STEM work (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) than they were: though a lot of the female inroads have been made in areas that aren’t really very techie or maths-y.
In addition to their impressive gains in high school and college, women are increasingly attaining doctorates in STEM fields: By 2001, women earned 36.6% of PhD degrees in scientific and engineering fields, up from just 8% in 1966, though disproportionately more were earned in less math-intensive fields, such as the social and biological sciences (43.5%– 67.1%). Still, women have made impressive gains in attaining doctorates in math-intensive fields as well, obtaining 29% of the PhD degrees in mathematics, 17% in engineering, and 22% in computer sciences. Women’s successes have been even greater in other scientific fields, where they have obtained 50% of medical doctor (MD) degrees, almost 75% of doctor of veterinary medicine (DVM) degrees, and 44% of PhD degrees in biological sciences.
The trick-cyclists say that it’s important not to make too much of the possible inbuilt differences between the sexes, saying that in fact these factors can be warped fairly easily by environment, training etc. For instance, one indicator thought by brain brainboxes to indicate STEM aptitude is the ability to visualise and understand rotations – as in engineering drawings, for instance.
But it appears that if you play enough action-oriented video games, your ability to perform this mental feat goes up – boy or girl. This may offer a clue as to why male college students seem to stay the course better in STEM:
A recent, well-controlled study found that merely playing action video games can narrow gender differences in mental rotation … mental-rotation performance of college women who had one semester of video game training (Tetris) [was] only marginally lower than that of men who had no training (but were given repeated testing on rotation ability), and this was true regardless of pre-existing spatial experience. Perhaps with an even longer intervention, more complete gender convergence would occur.
Even if you assume that gentlemen are just better at maths than ladies are, and don’t get into underlying differences like their parents not forcing little girls to play video games in their youth, females are still rarer than they should be according to the study.
“Women would comprise 33 per cent of the professorships in math-intensive fields if it was based solely on being in the top 1 percent of math ability,” says Stephen Ceci, lead author. “But they currently comprise less than 10 per cent.”
The research suggests a similar pattern across all STEM activities, in commercial and other non-academic contexts in Western-type societies. Ceci and his collaborators ascribe the remaining difference primarily to matters of family life, with women still taking more time out from work than men at critical times in their careers. Discrimination as such wasn’t seen as so much of a factor.
There was also some suggestion that people naturally tend to drift out of the hardball end of STEM activity anyway, and that such a jump was easier and more attractive for those with the people skills at which women were deemed to excel.
“It appears that the family-career trade-offs constitute a major factor in the dearth of women in fields such as engineering, physics, computer science and in higher-level positions in non math-related fields,” says Ceci. “Women who are good in math seem to have more career options. Those who are highly competent in math are more likely than men to have high verbal competence, too, thus opening up the option of going into the humanities or law, which may offer more flexibility in their career tracks.”
Overall it seems the jury’s still out on the underlying causes: but it may be some time before the sweaty locker-room/dungeon of the hardcore STEM geeks sees a (probably welcome) influx of females. The Cornell roundup paper was based on more than 400 previous works, comprising decades of research into the subject.
Those who fancy a proper academic punch-up should probably read the whole paper, here (pdf) (http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bul1352218.pdf).
Comments(1)
The article above made me upset. Girls still not swarming to math and science. Well there are reasons.
for the last years of NCLB, many girls have not been taught science. The NCLB initiatives did not value science in schools. Some states only required one half an hour a week for science. Go figure.
Ms. Spellings had two missions, math and reading. I think since she never taught she never learned to integrate skills and enhance reading through other subjects. I always used science as a motivator. We read, we used those icky reading books that if you really use them in the way they ask you have an all day boring task. Here’s the deal. Most reading textbooks are the middle of the sandwich. Children don’t learn to wade into the story. Textbook writers take the best part of the story and then make workbooks and puzzles around it. Oops, forgot the phonics book and the word list.
Teachers have to correct these workbooks. Most of the texts have a number of things to add to the story an maybe even a DVD. If you do all of these things your class will be busy all day, well, don’t forget about math.
We have math as a long highway that never ends. It is a mile long and an inch deep. Panicking began for me in February when the yearly test began. I had not finished the book of course and I was going to be measured by the outcome of the work of the kids for this year in FEBRUARY.. why can’t they test in June or at the real end of the year?
Math in most American school is drill and kill. I loved problem solving so I taught it too. I am sure that there is a kind of problem solving but I mean real problem solving, and extended math, thinking math beyond memorization. I did not make kids do 250 long diivision problems if they understood the process and could demonstrate it. I also used math games, math sofrware and http://www.shodor.org ( Interactive math) Algebra was a natural progression. Not hard at all.
More than that we played some math as a group against the computer. You betcha we knew the factors of numbers. There was a game that would challenge us to gve the prime numbers. I think it was called the prime number generator. All I know is that kids wanted to stay down from lunch to beat the computer.
Men’s ideas of geography are great. I once turned down a chance to live a summer on a glacier, with no makeup and scare contact with people. I would have liked it for a week maybe, But I did spring to learning about cultures and travel and mapping the world to learn about people.
I probably would have been an anthropologist had I been exposed to the right mentors. But have been to 22 countries. Geography however is not a subject taught in schools either. Go figure. The world is smaller we need to know things and we talk about places around the world every day.
Do we know our geography skills. I think not and the reports show us that most American citizens DO NOT KNOW geography. So ? Ethnobotanical studies come to mind. I fell in love with that kind of learning on Earthwatch expeditions. I learned to think of cultures in a different way exploring archaeology. American social studies is often quite truncated. We go from Greece to Rome, to Europe , Medieval Studies, to the US and then.. we learn about the USA. Maybe now they include the African Diaspora. Sometimes we include Egypt because everyone is fascinated with mummies. Even girls. Did I say that? What I mean is geography is not always adventure living. I also never wanted to BE an astronaut. I just wanted to KNOW about it. Isn’t that ok?
Biology and botany. Reading it is not that much fun. But I had a parent who plowed up a section of the play ground ( back forty) and we did early yield crops. While doing this we also hatched chickens, raised frogs, raised butterflies, tilapia, and did some bottle biology. Then there is the NASA stuff. I used to do an after school program because I had the stuff and the kids would not go home. Now there is money for after school program. Lots of money. Girls will attend those. I know one that really works. Afterschool Universe, NASA
the kids make a spectroscope, a telescope and do hands on things. At the high school level we at the Thornburg Institute have a total hands on curriculum and the girls ( teachers) do very well. I had a growing chamber for hydrophonics but some parent said that people in California used it for growing dope, so my principal made me get rid of it. It was great for raising tomatoes. I see that thing in the airline catalogues all the time. Must be used for lots of things.
Courses for Dummies?
One reason teachers don’t know good STEM skills is because of teacher courses designed for teachers. They might as well put science for dummies, or physics for dummies or , biology for dummies on the label.
I am an accidental lover of science. I went to Catholic schools so I didn’t get much in the way of science except reading about it. I wen to a Black school where they probably decided that we didn’t have the smarts to learn science. My science education has been with NSTA, with NASA, with lots of different organizations who really teach the sciences. I am proud to say that I took my astrophysics at Berkeley . Ironically, since I took so many institutes and workshops and special programs I don’t have a degree in a particular discipline. Maybe that;s a good thing. Geography, Geology, Astronomy, Archaeology, Field Studies, Ecology, the Globe Program
all fun and wonderful experiences.
The hard part was getting permission to actually teach science. I learned to write grants for the resources I needed. I learned to invovle parents so that the school board would not say no. I stood on the shoulders of NSTA, and NASA and other groups . I still had a hard time in the culture of schools as they are today.
We must be more creative, innovative and imaginative in teaching STEM science, technology , engineering and math. Did I tell you about the project in engineering that became a school playground that we and parents designed. A little reality helps. I am not about mountain climbing, but I have flown as a passenger near Mt. Everest and even then I was scared. Adventure for me is a different thing. Learning to cook Pho noodle soup. Thinking about how the slaves lived and died. learning tesselations. Maybe we need more women to teach STEM in different ways,or not. The exposure is a problem.
Who ever glued rocks in a box. I am sure that I am infamous for freeing the rock from glue so that kids could actually handle and test them. You get the drift? Hands on minds on for all. Abolish the gating factors of NCLB.
If everyone and his mother has a GPS, shouldn’t we teach geography? Just a thought.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/03/girls_in_stem_roundup_study/
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/03/girls_in_stem_roundup_study/
Study: Girls still not swarming into sci-tech, dammit