Calculus at the heart of the STEM gender gap, study suggests

The upsetting thing about DiffEq is that the way it is taught has nothing to do with the way it is practiced or used, either by mathematicians or engineers. Separable equations, for example, are the highest order of bullshit. Almost no interesting problems are separable. (Like, there are infinitely more inseparable than separable ones.)

The track that should really take over should be one where the student develops the intuition about what related rates of change mean, and then abandon the chicanery of these special-case tricks in favor of the numerical solution of DiffEqs and the evaluation of the quality of the solutions.

> but doing very well in the major courses that used the same math

My school's EE department offered a few math classes (presumably because the EE professors were exasperated with the low level of understanding students were showing with important math concepts). The math classes I took from my Electrical Engineering professors were infinitely more valuable and interesting to me than the equivalent math classes I took from the Math department.

In my EE department math classes, I was encouraged to use any tools at my disposal to solve the problems (TI-89, Wolfram Alpha, Matlab, etc.), and the problems were always very real, so I knew exactly why I was learning what I was learning and how it applied to solving real problems.

In my Math department classes, we had to solve everything by hand, the professors were overly concerned with semantics, and the problems were often very abstract and hard to wrap your mind around.

If we care so much about the STEM gender gap, why not other majors as well?

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

1) Health Professions (85% women): nursing assistant, veterinary assistant, dental assistant, etc.

2) Public Administration (82% women): social work, public policy, etc.

3) Education (79% women): pre-K, K-12, higher education, etc.

4) Psychology (77% women): cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, etc.

5) a majority of Biology degrees in 2012 (58%) were earned by women

These majors are dominated by women, many paying more than some of the other STEM majors. So why aren't we changing these as well to be more accommodating towards men?

More women than men graduate from college on average:

http://fortune.com/2013/03/27/boys-vs-girls-whats-behind-the...

Shouldn't we be figuring how how to change this to make it more equal?

My problem with all of these articles and the entire movement is that the goal isn't to make things equal, it's a power-grab to allow one group to completely dominate the other.

I'm waiting for someone to suggest we either get rid of Calculus as a requirement altogether or reduce it's difficulty to make it more 'fair'. This is exactly what has started happening in our military.

This is not uncommon in other aspects of the society as well. Harvard is facing a lawsuit that the school’s admissions policy discriminates against Asian Americans.

"the suit notes the findings of a study of seven top public and private colleges: “Asian Americans needed SAT scores that were about 140 points higher than white students. . . . [I]f a white student needed a 1320 SAT score to be admitted to one of these schools, an Asian American needed a 1460 SAT score to be admitted.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-misleading-lawsu...