Girls Have a Math Problem: Teacher Bias
http://www.livescience.com/19552-girls-math-teachers-bias.html
If the teacher says it is so, then without a doubt it must be true! We all know how absolutely reliable teachers are and how they never, ever, make any mistakes.
According to the lore I have heard, girls start out smarter than boys, then boys get smarter once the little girl’s hormones kick in. It seems to me, though, that girls recover while boys seem to be stricken with life-long idiocy once their hormones have kicked in, yet for some reason women remain put-upon and relegated to second class citizenship. (I discuss this a bit here.)
Up to a certain point things like desire, dedication, interest, and so forth play a large role in success.
Here’s one for you, though: at very high levels of mathematics, with people in the neighborhood of four sigma above the mean, men are shown to be superior to women with statistically significant numbers.
This is not politically acceptable. Nor is it acceptable that in certain areas of endeavor, Asians are superior to Whites, who are superior to Blacks.
It seems preferable to lay these differences at the feet of environmental or cultural factors; indeed those factors are truly dominant. One has to move way beyond such influences, which throws out a lot of subjects.
Indeed, we 99.99 percent need to presume equality and let the real eggheads squabble amongst themselves.
I have looked a lot at these presumed differences (men being smarter than women, Asians smarter than whites smarter than blacks, etc.) and I see a huge amount of cultural bias involved. True genius needs to have an opportunity to blossom and in our culture that opportunity goes to white males at a rather disproportionate rate. Just stats alone would serve to greatly weight white males in the ‘four sigma above the mean’ in my mind, others do not have equal opportunities to rise to the top. Also, based on my reading of history, the number of ‘four sigma’ women in the past has been vastly under reported for the same sorts of cultural reasons, so in my mind even the current data is already subject to cultural reporting bias.
This is not to say that the majority of humans aren’t total idiots without the native potential to rise above pond slime, just that those few who do indeed have the potential are rarely in a position to exercise it.
BTW, the only reports I have found that appear to be reliable showing sex differences were in the area of trained reflexes (say, those of fighter pilots). Women, on average, do better on exercises that call on previous experience while men, on average, do better on exercises that expose the subject to novel experiences. The difference, as I recall, was small, but statistically significant, but I recall my opinion at the time that there wasn’t likely to be much of a difference in the real world.