I just recently found out about the existence of China Girls’ Math Olympiad, which basically is like the International Math Olympiad, but only for girls.
Why is there a need for a girls-only version?
Isn’t this tantamount to admitting that girls can’t compete well enough with the boys in the International Math Olympiad, and they need their own competition?
I can see separate competitions for sports (e.g. tennis, basketball) since the two genders are so different physically, but why different competitions for intellectual pursuits like math?
Is there a women-only chess championship?
I have a daughter and I would not be too happy if she went to a girls-only intellectual competition since that would cheapen any achievement she makes there. Best to send her to the competition where she can compete with the best, no matter their gender.
Well, somebody who is dubious about the validity of gender-specific competitions then used a pretty gender-specific word in their request for opinions.
I’m not a guy.
Apart from that, I agree that intellectual comps should be open to all.
Consider the place: China. A culture which has predominantly places women in the kitchen and at home, which once forced them to bind their feet so tightly so that they are small and appear more attractive to men. Where poor farmers sold daughters away because they are not males and thus can’t work on the farms. Where they are generally shunned because they cannot carry on the family’s surname while males could.
Granted, this is changing. Perhaps this is a sign of times.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in modern usage I assume that even girls say to each other things like “hey guys, let’s go to the movies”. Basically, “guys” has become somewhat generic mainly due to the lack of a good female analogue. e.g. see this
I have no idea, but I thought you were asking why China is organising a girl-only competition. Like it or not, there may still be a sense of that females are not as good as males over there. Why would other countries go? No idea.
From that photo and site, it looks like it’s about more than the math – it’s a math-themed summer camp for girls with the competition at the end. They win medals. I’m not sure how cheap any of the girls feel – no cheaper than any guy who got his degree from Harvard before the late '60s, I guess.
Probably because womens’ achievement in mathematics, the hard sciences, and engineering lags behind mens’ achievement at the undergraduate and postgraduate academic levels and in employment in related fields.
Most interested parties agree that encouraging women to participate in these areas is most easily done during childhood. You’ve probably seen/heard commercials with Sally Ride and other prominent female scientists encouraging girls to pick up a physics textbook, etc. Thus, girls’-only competitions are probably useful in terms of raising awareness and in terms of leveling the playing field. After all, it’s presumably not much fun for every girl to have to compete against thirty boys, even if she could wipe the floor with them.
There is still a pretty strong institutional and societal bias against womens’ education in these areas past a certain point, both in the US and elsewhere.
So because they lag in these fields, we send them to second-rate competitions so they don’t have to compete with the stronger competitors, so they can get some medals?
If boys were not as good at spelling as girls, and there was an International Spelling Bee which girls routinely dominated, I would not want to go to a Boys-only International Spelling Bee. The message would be one of defeat and acknowledgment of inferiority in that field.
And, as a resume reviewer, if I see a “Silver medal at Girls Math Olympiad” on a resume I won’t take it as seriously as a simple “Member of US team at International Math Olympiad”.
Participate in these areas yes, but how does participating in a girls-only event, when there is a world-class coed event, help?
Raise awareness, yes, but how do these girls-only competitions level the playing field?
I’m not a girl, so I can’t claim to know how they think, but I think it would be fun if I was the only A in a room full of B’s and beat the crap out of them at some endeavor (especially in an endeavor where it is assumed that B’s are better than A’s)
I don’t see how having a girls-only competition in math helps remove the strong institutional and societal bias. I think it helps reinforce it, actually, since people can say “Oh, you went to girls-only competition? It figures, since girls aren’t as good at math as boys”
Just because you go to one doesn’t mean you can’t go to the other. Presumably the girls’ only event has more female attendees because only females are eligible, meaning more girls are encouraged to continue studying mathematics.
I would suspect it has more to do with the fact that girls are socially discouraged from pursuing math and science, so having a girls only event allows it to be more supportive without having to deal with peers and parents who think they should be pursuing more “girlish” pursuits.
How old are the girls in question? It makes a big difference, in my mind.
In and of itself, I have no objection to gender-segregated education. There MAY be boys in the inner city who’d do better in an all-male environment with male teachers providing more positive role models. I think such schools would be worth a shot.
Similarly, if there’s evidence that girls learn science and math better in all-female settings, it doesn’t bother me in the least to see all-girl math and science leagues established.
Do such programs create an artificial, unrealistic environment? Maybe, but so what? Men and women will still interact in college and in the workplace eventually. What’s wrong with trying different approaches to see if they help, in the meantime?
I don’t know about chess, but duplicate bridge has single-gender events, mixed gender events (pairs must be one male/one female), and open events (pairs can be any combination of genders).
Males have a much wider distribution of intelligence for most measured intelligence traits, especially in math. This includes both the very high end and the very low end. That certainly doesn’t mean that most girls are bad at math but it does mean that a few errant males are almost always going to win such competitions just because they are oddities on the bell curve and it tends to discourage even very talented females. I can see why they would want a special contest for females. We aren’t talking about the Special Olympics here. It is just a chance for lots of females to strut their stuff in math.
I don’t see how this works. If I’m a parent who thinks that my daughter should be “pursuing more ‘girlish’ pursuits”, I would object to her going to either a coed math Olympiad or a girls-only math Olympiad. In both cases, such parents would say “you shouldn’t be in math, since you’re a girl”
