The debate over why so few girls take maths-based A-levels descended into “tsar wars” on Friday after the children’s commissioner for England hit out at suggestions that girls found the subject too difficult.
Rachel de Souza told a conference of school leaders in Birmingham that girls were more likely to be put off taking science, technology and maths (Stem) subjects by male-dominated classes and a lack of female role models.
De Souza’s comments come after Katharine Birbalsingh, the government’s social mobility tsar, caused controversy when she told MPs that girls avoided taking physics A-levels because “they don’t like it, there’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do”.
So, the general preponderance, the probability, is that more blokes like hard maths than birds. To which the response is “But some birds like hard maths!”
Which is true but it’s also the same statement, not a response to it.
Anyone get the impression that we’re arguing with a bird here?
Most normal people would agree that the two sexes are different ( I say most, but nowadays I’m not so certain ) in both temperament and interests.
Most blokes tend to have interests, hobbies or obsessions outside of work, whether sports, motor racing, carpentry etc. Very few women that I’ve met ever have any interests outside of Facebook or Instagram, especially the younger generation.
I think it’s this kind of obsessive mentality that drives male interest in maths and physics – an intellectual challenge purely for the sake of it.
Same kind of mentality which explains why most programmers/coders tend to be male.
This is probably a case of the favoured solution determining the cause of the problem. It’s very hard indeed to teach Physics and Maths so well that everyone gets enthused and start taking a real pleasure in getting the processes right. But it’s relatively easy to dig around on the internet and find examples of overlooked female boffins (boffinas?) or to arrange conferences to parade a few successful women before Year Nine girls. I can’t show you evidence that Maths is easy, ‘cos I don’t find it so. But I can write you a paper on Patriarchy in Science, even though I don’t believe it exists.
The real issue here is that whenever (enter oppressed/overlooked “minority” of choice real, or far more likely invented) is “under represented”, the ONLY outcome is the debasement and degradation of whatever they are “under represented” in.
Call me a paranoid racist, misogynist dinosaur, but it’s almost like that’s the intention.
Mark – you’ll notice it’s always more women in STEM, not more men in nursing. (Occasionally there’s a call for more men in teaching or childcare; but they take one look at the salaries and go elsewhere.)
Sam… Boffinettes ?
I enjoyed maths and physics, I was just useless at them. It is a wiring issue : people who can excel at such subjects often also make good programmers because they can think in straight lines. As Sam rightly points out, they enjoy the process,I was more interested ( I discovered too late ) in the philosophy rather than the nuts and bolts. I knew a few female programmers and a fair smattering had obsessive hobbies.
Women tend to be better at languages, for example, which is also processing information, but not linearly so. As with so much else, the biology deniers seem to dictate modern thinking.
Freedom of choice means some people will choose to do what the woke don’t want them to.
Of course if we were dragging the girls into maths classes, and giving them thirty lashes every time they made a mistake, the wokistas’d still whinge.
I think maths us one of those mental faculties that has limits at different levels in different people, and a lot of it is probably genetic. At school I never had any problems with maths. It was all pretty easy to understand, and I couldn’t see why a lot of my classmates were having real difficulty. When I got to A level I did both Maths & Further Maths. I got an A for Maths but only a D for Further Maths, which surprised me. Hadn’t I revised enough?
When I got to uni, the maths got really hard really quickly, and I never really got to grips with Vector Analysis and Electromagnetic Theory at more than a handwaving level. So I think that was my maths level just before then.
I guess most people find their level earlier, even down at the mental sums stage if observing other people is anything to go by. Going the other way the Fields Medal level for a few talented individuals is far above where I got stuck.
Far more men are Shape Rotators than women, and far more women are Wordcels than men:
Wordcel vs Shape Rotators:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel
Sam Vara,
“But it’s relatively easy to dig around on the internet and find examples of overlooked female boffins (boffinas?) or to arrange conferences to parade a few successful women before Year Nine girls. I can’t show you evidence that Maths is easy, ‘cos I don’t find it so. But I can write you a paper on Patriarchy in Science, even though I don’t believe it exists.”
The thing with the whole “parade of successful women” is that it makes no difference. Girls who like science prioritise that over the social effects in the same way that boys who are into baking. The girls who go to university to do science were into science long before that. When given a choice of trip for their birthday they picked the science museum.
And something no-one mentions is the effect of other girls. Everyone talks about the patriarchy even though my observation is that boys don’t care if there’s a girl doing science. But there’s definitely bitchiness from non-science girls towards the weirdos doing science.
My question when anyone raises an alleged imbalance between the sexes over educational choices, pay, or types of employment, is *in a perfect world without discrimination* what proportion of the sexes is “natural”? If you cannot answer that question you have no basis for arguing that discrimination exists in reality. An assertion that the ratio *should be* 50/50 is just an opinion, and may be dismissed.
“you’ll notice it’s always more women in STEM, not more men in nursing.”
You’ll also notice its always demands for more women in ‘nice’ office jobs, not shitty ones that are out in the open, dangerous and result in you getting covered in shit. More female doctors, lawyers and engineers yes, not so many demands for more female brickies, steel erectors and mechanics. All of which are well paid jobs too.
I’ve run this theory before. Men are better at modelling things separate from themselves. (So despite popular belief, men are actually more empathetic than women) I’d say it likely comes from the hunter gatherer divide. To hunt, particularly as part of a team, you need to see things from numerous perspectives. The prey from your perspective. But also you from the prey’s perspective. And with a group, the prey from the other member’s of the group’s perspective. And the reverse. So evolution has driven the hunter to be both bigger & stronger but also to have this mental ability. Whereas gathering demands a different skill set. Problem being that complex societies are built on that mental modelling ability.
The STEM subjects require it. You’re trying to model systems totally divorced from personal perspective.
Women in workplaces bugger everything up. Well-known fact.
That’s what produces the patriarchy. You’re aren’t going to get a complex society without the abilities of the patriarch. So all through history, societies have generally been patriarchal. Doesn’t mean it’s a totally black/white divide. Women can share the abilities of men & men the abilities of women. It’s just that you’re going to find more men have that ability more pronounced & thus more of them will be more successful if that’s what’s required to be successful. No doubt women tend towards other abilities & they may be what hold societies together. Look at all male societies. The military, for instance. They’re a mental disease in uniform.
I’ve been trying to teach a female friend how to reverse park. OK, she was taught how to, to pass her test. But that’s not how one does it when you’re a successful driver. You have to be the car, with the car’s limits & abilities. Like the car steering works in the opposite direction when you’re going backwards as when you’re going forwards. The dimensions of the car are your dimensions. The rear left corner is the same as knowing where you’re arse is when you sit down. It’s bloody hard going!
I’m thinking back to regularly having to park a Transit sized van in spaces two foot longer than the van itself, where you can’t actually see anything while you’re doing it. It’s done by having a mental model of the van & & mental model of the space & the various arcs the front & the back have to describe to get one into the other. If you can’t do that, you’ll never achieve it
When I started in software engineering it was a decent living but there wasn’t really good money in it and middle class people would look down their nose at you if you went near computers for a living.
When the tech boom kicked off the middle class started wanting to get their kids into what was suddenly considered a lucrative field of indoor work with no heavy lifting. Rather than just admit it they pretend they’re doing it for other people.
rhoda klapp,
“Women in workplaces bugger everything up. Well-known fact.”
It depends on the job. I always used to say that the best programmers I knew for delivering quality work were woman. And the best software testers are women. But what they aren’t doing is innovating. A woman will ice a cake better than a man, but a man will be figuring out how to get a robot to do the icing.
@BoM4
Where possible, I always employed female decorators. They’re far better than blokes. Attention to detail. They can look around a room & see all the little bits need snagging. Because they actually look. Blokes don’t.
@BiS,
On the subject of reverse parking, my wife does it better than me. For a start, her car is smaller, and the view out of the back is better, but the clincher is that she doesn’t care a bugger about scraping her wheels, whereas I know just how much it cost to get my alloys refurbed when scraped on a high kerb on a street with a lot of road camber. More to the point, she knows who pays for her car repairs, and it ain’t her …
I’ve spent some time in the tech industry, and have known many software developers. All I ever heard them say was, “Damn, this place is a sausage fest. We need some women here.” I’d estimate 95% of the women who work at these companies do so in a marketing or public relations capacity (a specialty they chose, mind you) and, if you’re a startup, you may not have the money for that department yet.
In addition, men are more likely to go for what they want, even if it means a slightly uncomfortable environment. They don’t concern themselves with how many other men are at a company, or where their professional “support” will come from. If you need some kind of employee resource group to feel motivated, maybe the job isn’t in your wheelhouse to begin with. If you’re the only woman in a “boys’ club,” then just embrace the novelty and deal with it.
We had a wonderful maths teacher at school. The girls didn’t respond: they stumbled through their O-levels and fled maths.
The physics teacher was a dud but I don’t remember any of the girls choosing physics anyway. Pity: they might have felt that if that old duffer could be a physicist so could they. The biology class was all female I think. Certainly the biology class two years below us was all female.
None of this was imposed. We’d all passed our exams and IQ tests to get into the top stream. It’s just that our interests and abilities differed. Pleasant bunch, my female classmates, just not much interested in some of the things that interested me.
25 years after we all left school they’d organised a reunion for us, a reunion they’d initially agreed to over lunch on our final day at school. Hats off, lassies.
P.S. They’d even hunted down that old maths teacher and invited him along.
Is she arguing for back to single sex schools?
Bollocks. BBC, C4 etc full of female role models and females, pref non-white, are their go to choice on “experts” in every field
Dear Rachel, why not accept girls choose no to as not interested?
Also, as we saw in WWII at Bletchley, women with analytical, maths etc skills are not overlooked
Maybe this would help Rachel:
The Gender Pay Gap Fallacy
More men in boardrooms as ‘women aren’t interested’ in the high risk job
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5GvCkArLCg
@BlokeInBrum
+1
@Tractor Gent
+1 I too hit a limit on maths, lower than yours, I couldn’t go beyond no matter how much teaching, revision.
One thing I wish Pols and msm would stop is calling Arithmetic “Maths”
@bis
+1 empathy is not emotion
We’re all different – isn’t that Diversity?
@Pcar
“One thing I wish Pols and msm would stop is calling Arithmetic “Maths””
That’s one of my bugbears too!
“Oh I’m hopeless at maths”, usually meaning, as you so correctly state, arithmetic or maybe simple percentages or at best, something about compound interest.
The number of people I’ve heard say this over the years. The number I’ve heard say this who are in jobs that require some degree of numeracy and the need to handle data. Hardly surprising so many people are in so much debt either.
“Is she arguing for back to single sex schools?”
Presumably the proof of her complaint lies in single sex schools – are girls more likely to chose STEM subjects in single sex schools, vs mixed ones?
@ Jim
The report I read said that girls in single-sex schools were more likely to take Physics (the subject discussed by Ms Birbalsingh) than girls in co-ed schools, but still far less likely than boys.
So: red herring.
I would have thought that most youngsters pick subjects that a) they stand a chance of doing well in, and b) which unlock the doors to whatever it is they want to do next. Stem subjects are a common requirement for entry to the various forms of medicine for example, and to the best of my knowledge such things are attracting male and female candidates in what is a very competitive market. But actually school level science is only hard because of how it is taught – i.e. badly. And given the curriculum is imposed from the ivory towers of whitehall…..