Uh… you started the thread. If you only wanted to hear from people who agreed with you you should have said so.
My last post came out the wrong way. I did not only want to hear from people who agree with me. This being IMHO, I wanted to hear a variety of opinions, from both the pro- and con- side of the issue. What I ended up getting was me on one side and everyone else on the other side, and we ended up debating the merits of our positions. This turned into a mini-debate, and since this is not GD, this is not what I was looking for (especially with me the only person on one side of the argument).
Ideally, I would have liked to see a few people on both sides exchange opinions on this issue. Since I was practically the only one on one side of the issue (excluding KidScruffy) and everyone else on the other side:
(a) I thought either many people who do agree with me never bothered to post, or there aren’t that many people who agree with me on this issue. Exchanges with people IRL (family and friends) showed me that I’m not the only one, which many can attest is a good feeling to get when you’ve been the only one arguing a particular point in a thread against everyone else and you start to wonder “WTF, am I the only one on earth that thinks like this?”
(b) Whatever the reason, I ended up doing the heavy lifting for one side of this issue and it ended up being too much work for what I had intended to be a simple IMHO thread with people exchanging views from both sides of the issue.
In any case, thanks to everyone who shared their views and presented their arguments. They were helpful in letting me see some good arguments in support of such a competition.
Another attempt to try and explain to Polerius why it’s a good idea:
If a girl goes to co-ed competition, and she’s the only girl among 30 boys, she’s what sociologists call “marked”. That is, everything she does will be explained, commented on and ascribed to her gender, not to her as person. So if she wins “only” 2nd place, it’s because girls aren’t as good at maths as boys. The boy of the 30 boys who gets 2nd or 3rd place, it’s “well, that individual guy is good at math, just not as good as the guy on first place”.
Even if she manages to win 1st place, then it’s “oh well, she’s an exception, normal girls can’t do math, she’s a freak.”
If on the other hand, you send girls to an all-girls camp - which has been pointed out this is - without any derisive laughter from teenage boys who act like jerks at this age to hide their own insecurity and establish their hierachy, then all 30 girls in the camp can learn that math is fun and that they are quite able to do math.
If they then have a competition at the end, and Alice comes in 2nd place, she’s “unmarked” - it’s because Alice is not as excellent as Betty, but she’s still good at math.
Moreover, the purpose of a competition, contrary to what you continue to believe, shouldn’t and needn’t be only to find out who’s the bestet of the bestest of the best. It’s a way to get children interested in the subject, make it fun. So actually the whole “who made 1st, 2nd, 3rd place” stuff should be downplayed in favour of “we all did good and learned something” attitude.
Because one person winning the event isn’t as useful as having 30 people interested in and not being discouraged. We need not only more professors and scientists and researchers. We need also more people generally educated and interested in sciences, even if they have normal day job.
There are tons of evidence from women who were good at studying hard subjects but eventual all the pressure from the male students was so much that they didn’t consider pursuing the subject. And the stories of women who succeeded tell of how much energy and self-confidence they needed to overcome this invisible barriers. So for every woman that suceeds, there are 10 or more that could also do well - not genius-level, but just as good as the boys - who don’t go there because they don’t have the energy to struggle, because their self-esteem has been undermined so much that they have internalised it and don’t know it.
And yes, it is similar to the situation of when in the 60s a handful of black students went to a white high-school and were daily put down. it’s possible to have more than one minority group that’s marked and under pressure and underperforms.
The fact that the general test scores of women have increased in the last decades is because of special encouragement projects like this. Or did you think that the genetic disposition changed overnight?
When in an international test, they compared students of several European countries, the gap between girls and boys math tests scores was closest in the Scandinavian countries, and widest in places like Turkey, and correlated to how much girls were told “You don’t need to understand math, that’s too hard, most girls have problems with it” vs. seeing smart, sucessful women in all positions of society and having active programs of encourgament.
If I had daughters, I would send them to a summer camp. I would only send them to a competition if they want it, because I think the general stress on being the 1st or nothing is harmful and distracts from the wider view. (2nd place doesn’t count anymore, I think that’s insane).
So, if we get to a point where Caucasians will be only 1 in 30 at the US Math Olympiad, and everyone else is Asian, I assume you are OK with a White-only Math Olympiad, right? Because we wouldn’t want that one white guy/girl to be “marked”, and everything he/she does to be explained, commented on and ascribed to his/her race, not to him/her as person, right?
Also, white kids tend to not go into Engineering anymore, at least in the US: almost all of my colleagues, even the US citizens, are either Indian or Chinese, and if you read Engineering journals, you will see that most of the authors are either Indian or Chinese, at least in some fields (there was a related thread in GD about that)
So, if we value diversity in a field (which is why I assume it is taken as a given that we should have more women in math/science fields), we should therefore value diversity in Engineering fields, and so if/when the proportion of whites becomes very low, we should have specialized programs to encourage whites to get into Engineering instead of other fields they tend to gravitate to, and maybe even a White-only Science/Engineering international competition to get them interested. How does that sound?
I think you don’t understand what competition means. By your logic, at the Olympics (the original ones), we shouldn’t emphasize who ran the 100m the fastest, or who jumped the longest at the long jump, that should all be downplayed in favor of “we all did good and achieved something”
You are insinuating that lots of us are giving bleeding heart reasons for our opinions. That simply isn’t true, especially from me. Test scores show that there are almost always going to be a few freak boys that win ultimate math contests just like almost all chess grandmasters are male and I don’t think that is a good thing because it has little bearing on the vast majority of people, even the really talented ones of both sexes. Let the really talented females duke it out figuratively and even literally during and after the contest and serve as role-models to others. It is quite possible that a female will kick out on the far right-hand left side of the bell curve but it doesn’t happen that often it doesn’t mean much in any case.