Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

blogs.discovermagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 66 posts

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#41

Post by hugh3 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25
chesser wrote: post #20

"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth. Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one. Further, this is an introductory cou…

>"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I just thought more men preferred Physics. Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them…

Y'know, I think it would be very interesting to answer the question of whether the observed gender gap in ability in the hard sciences is due to genetics or some other factor.

However it's a damn-near-impossible to do decent research on this question. There are only two possible answers, A and B, but if your results show A then you'll be lauded and become the subject of approving articles like this one, and if your results show B then you'll be condemned and possibly hounded out of your job like Larry Summers. When there's such an incentive to get the socially-approved answer rather than the scientifically correct answer, lousy research tends to proliferate.

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#43

Post by chesser »

hugh3 wrote: post #41
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I just thought more men preferred Physics. Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them…

Y'know, I think it would be very interesting to answer the question of whether the observed gender gap in ability in the hard sciences is due to genetics or some other factor. However it's a damn-near-impossible to do decent research on this question. There are only two possible answers, A and B , but if your results show A then you'll be lauded and become the subject of approving articles like this one, and if your…

In my above comment I worked out that there MUST be genetic differences.

Even if you start from a point of complete genetic equality in aptitude, all it takes is any kind of cultural or social bias to create a selection pressure which will lead to genetic difference.

Given the historically different roles of men and women, it would be vanishingly unlikely for there not to be genetic differences.

If being very good at a task leads to more reproductive success, and only one gender performs that task, then only one gender receives the benefits of that selection pressure (to the extent of sex-chromosome-specific loci).

On the flip side, there is evidence that being TOO much of an outlier is negative. The smartest people tend to be more socially marginalized, both voluntarily and involuntarily. So it's possible that the top people are essentially evolutionary mistakes (as they are LESS likely to reproduce), and as evolution seems to roll the dice more with males than females, more males will turn out like this.

In a post-Darwinian society, this all goes out the window. It's just a historical relic of not being able to tinker with our genome directly, and having to rely on sexual reproduction.

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#46

Post by SoftwareMaven »

hugh3 wrote: post #15
derefr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As i read it, it doesn't change actual understanding, but rather removes (some of) the confounding variable of test-taking anxiety. Female students actually understood the material just as well as male students, but they didn't believe that they did, and they didn't test like they did, so for all empirical purposes, they didn't. The writing task was basically a luminosity exercise: making them aware of their own true…

So does it give additional test-taking anxiety to the male students, who do worse than those in the control group?

That is a really interesting question. Given the "control" was also given a writing exercise, I think it opens a lot more questions. If we hold it true that the 15 minute writing assignment makes a difference by itself (questionable, obviously), it would bring up interesting questions about male versus female motivation, where males do better when writing about others' motivations while females do better when writing about their own.

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#47

Post by chesser »

xiaoma wrote: post #29

I can't believe that the article didn't even mention once that the exercise decreased male performance. The text was also full of assertions that are clearly politically motivated.

Since they only had two groups, one of them HAD to come out ahead.

I also noted it listed MEAN score instead of MEDIAN.

This would allow for a small number of people to spike the score. For example, a group of friends, or a study group. I have tutored students from a 60 or 70 to close to 100% in the space of a single math test.

If the divvying up happened to put a few more brainiacs in one group and a few more dullards in another, this could account for the entire swing.

The specifics of dividing up the groups is very important. For example, if one entire classroom got Essay A and another got Essay B, even if there were equal numbers of bodies, it would only take one good study group to account for the discrepancy.

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#48

Post by hugh3 »

stelfer wrote: post #33
hugh3 wrote: post #2

I remain really skeptical. If you believe this, then doing a fifteen-minute writing exercise at the start of a fifteen week course in which you "write about your values" rather than a different fifteen-minute writing exercise where you "write about other peoples values" leads you to understand introductory physics significantly better at the end, if you're a woman, or understand introductory physics significantly wor…

I doubt you have spent time teaching undergraduate physics. Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic. Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior…

I doubt you have spent time teaching undergraduate physics.

Why do you doubt that? I did a bit of teaching during my PhD, though never an entire lecture course.

Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic

This concerns me less than whether or not it's likely to be true.

Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.

Ah, the old "unless you belong to group X you're not allowed to comment on this" line. I have nothing for this.

* But here's a hypothetical for you. You come to my company for a job interview. When you come see me, I ask you what your favorite subject is and I let you talk about it for twenty minutes. Then we start talking about the job. When you see Bob next door, he immediately starts drilling on topic. Which interview do you perform better on?*

I have no idea. It's possible that the stress of being judged on what my favourite topic is might cause me to stress out even more. In any case, it's a pretty nonequivalent situation.

There are two types of physics students... the ones who are really at university to learn something else, and the ones who are at university to learn physics. I was in the latter category. Going to my first physics class and having it being a hand-holding exercise instead of a "listen up you pricks, F = ma and you'd better not forget" lecture would have seemed like a waste of precious lecture time. Of course, a female student could easily have felt exactly the same way.

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#49

Post by chesser »

Gianteye wrote: post #38
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I just thought more men preferred Physics. Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them…

I'm sure a decent proportion of scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and folks in fields that tend to be dominated by men that couldn't give a toss for the gender of their fellow researchers. They couldn't care in the least who's publishing and who else inhabits their labs. They care about the truth. Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women. If you…

> Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women.

They are simply reflecting the social mores of their day. IBM had the socks and garter police -- for men! In addition, men tend to tease each other much worse than ragging on someone for not wearing enough makeup.

Additionally, we all carry the evolutionary legacy -- or baggage -- of the past. EVERY species with sexual reproduction discriminates according to gender!

Sexual competition enters the picture unavoidably as soon as you introduce a member of the opposite gender to a single-gender group.

If I have 5 guys in a room working on a startup, and I add a "cute girl", it will immediately change the dynamic and become a distraction and likely become divisive.

You're NOT going to be able to counter both biological and social factors built up over time.

I would hypothesize that if you took any productive small startup, and swapped out a male for a female of equal ability, it would probably destroy the cohesion.

Re: 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

#50

Post by mhartl »

Men dominate the physical sciences and mathematics, with the disparity growing as the subjects get more advanced. The notion that a 15-minute writing exercise can close this gap strains credulity.

For a hard-headed introduction to this subject, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Women and men have different cognitive strengths: on average, women are more verbally fluent and are better at inferring emotional states from facial expressions and body language, whereas men are better at spatial rotations and abstract reasoning. Women do better or worse on typically "male" tasks depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles and the corresponding levels of androgens ("male" hormones) in their bloodstreams. Patients undergoing male-to-female sex-change operations do progressively worse on "male" tasks and better on "female" ones as the estrogen therapy progresses, with the opposite effect in female-to-male patients. And so on. While the bell curves substantially overlap, the notion that men and women are cognitively identical is scientifically untenable.

Perhaps the continuing disparity in the abstract sciences points to discrimination against women in those subjects. And yet, women make up approximately 56% of college graduates, with men at 44%—a 12-point gap. I find it telling that virtually no one decries this disparity, nor infers from it a systemic anti-male bias in higher education.

The authors of these kinds of studies clearly want there to be no gender gap. (The results of this study could reasonably be described as "the 15-minute writing test that boosts female learning and suppresses male learning".) When the political biases of the researchers are so evident, it's difficult to trust the results.

Post reply on HN