Do women "enjoy" math as much as men?

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Sure, and anybody holding the nature position could also use the same evidence: namely that females have an innate fondness for anything cute and cuddly (for some obvious biological reasons), and the reason why female children are given dolls to play with is because, on the whole, they prefer those types of toys.

I’m a null at regurgitative knowledge. I enjoy any subject (including math) when it’s taught as something I can reproduce logically; I hate any subject (including math) when it’s taught as “there’s no logic to it, just learn it by rote” (a direct quotation from my 6th grade maths teacher, who evidently didn’t understand her subject).

QFT

My Ingeniería Química Superior, which can be translated as either “Chemical Engineering” or “Industrial Engineering, emphasis on Chemistry,” depending on which legal organization you ask: 70-80 students per graduating class, first female students accepted in the 1976-1977 course, my own graduating class entered in the 1986-87 year and was 40 females, 38 males.

Mind you: many of the women (including me) were in that particular engineering because our parents accepted it and they wouldn’t accept something “harder” like Physics or Electrical Engineering. That’s a rant for another forum, though.

The point is, all the “odd exceptions” appear to be male.

Can you totally and exhaustively list every single odd exception in the entire world from the beginning of time until the end? Could you even do so for the present?

Also, can you cite reliable sources that agree with your assertion?

I know women are severely underrepresented in engineering disciplines, which have a strong math backing them, but what about other mathematical disciplines? Someone above mentioned statisticians or economists, are women more evenly represented there? I’m sorry, but all the gender equality handwaving aside, if women are significantly underrepresented in mathematical disciplines then it is probably safe to say “No, overall women don’t enjoy math as much as men.” What the proximate or ultimate cause for this is, who can say. We can point to socialization phantoms all day but I think the question is still answered.

I can safely report computer science is steadfast in its refusal to yield to the female onslaught.

Interestingly enough, my graduate program in CS is roughly one third female.

A line of argument can be fallacious without being wrong. Bacillus Cereus is making the claim that even if men and women have the same mean math ability, men’s abilities have a higher variance, and therefore the most mathematically able person must be a man. That’s not correct. It may be highly likely that the most mathematically person is a man, but it’s not guaranteed.

Physical strength is a bad analogy because it’s so highly dependent on size, and most men are larger than most women. If you can control for that, you might have something, but you don’t until then.

Really? As an undergraduate, we had around 250 people in the initial intake, around 90-95% of which I’d estimate as male. This only got worse as the course progressed. My PhD seems to be even worse—there’s hardly any women at all, and the female computer scientists tend to be clustered in the more applied areas. One conference I went to had about 100 participants: only two were women (one was the organizer)!

About 30% of math Ph.D.'s awarded in the past several years in the U.S. are female.

Need to read a bit more. The conclusions are not all that clear except to note it is not easy to draw conclusions without very careful analysis of the inherent bias present in any given test and controlling for it. From your link:

My favorite niece, who is wonderfully geeky and improbably cute, has been known to say “Uncle, I’m bored…can you make me up some trigonometry problems to solve”?

That is only half of why she is my favorite.

Eh…I don’t know. The talk was a few years ago. I’d like to think a doctor at the University of Chicago conducting such studies and being peer reviewed is fully aware of the issues you point out. I do not recall her saying the testing of the University of Chicago students was somehow statistically meaningful but rather one of those quirks that she, as a researcher, noticed and found interesting and simply remarked on it.

I guess I don’t see your point :slight_smile:

They’re removing any advantage that men have in spatial reasoning from a test that is supposedly verbal. Once that advantage is removed, the scores even out between females and males on the “superficially verbal” test. At no point is that paragraph talking about testing for spatial or quantitative ability, according to my reading.

Inherent is the implication that females are inferior to males, on the whole, at spatial reasoning, and the first paragraph of the paper points to a whole body of research from the 1970’s onwards that confirms this, as well as confirming, that in fact, the results are clear when it comes to spatial and quantitative reasoning:

Bolding mine.

Elementary doesn’t mean short, necessarily. The argument is longer or shorter depending on where you are starting from. If you know elementary high school algebra (and can square an expression of four terms), are comfortable with modular arithmetic and with induction, then it is not even that long.

Here is a web site that includes the full argument. I guess it is three or four pages long, which I had forgotten: http://www.alpertron.com.ar/4SQUARES.HTM

Incidentally, the author of this web site, Dario Alpern, has many usefull mathematical functions on his site.

“Can be”, no, no one can demonstrate that. But “is” is a different matter. There are, in any generation, a handfull of mathematicians doing spectacularly innovative work. I mean the kinds of things that all the rest of us DON’T say, “I wish I’d done that”, because we know we are incapable of it. Galois and Abel in the early 19th century, Hilbert is late 19th, early 20th. Grothendieck in the mid-century, Perelman more recently until he dropped out, they are always there and are not women. Come down to the next level and you will find women. Not many and there may well be sociological explanations for that.

Incidentally, AFAIK, women dominate linguistics departments. Is this because women got in first and are now preventing men from rising in the field (demonstrably false) or because women have a special affinity for, and interest in,language?

Let me add their final paragraph:

I am in no way qualified to discern if all those tests in the 70’s that they pulled data from meet this criteria. My reading of what they are saying is that there are biases inherent to any testing of this. Those biases need to be well understood and controlled for, presumably, by administering multiple tests that balance the bias.

So, if the tests in the 70’s were skewed to engaging the spatial processing of male brains when working at verbal tasks it will seem men are better but that is not a reasonable conclusion.

Again, I do not know if they controlled for all that historical data or not (sounds like they do not think such things are generally done) but the bottom line seems to be you have to be very cautious in analyzing such data as it can easily be misleading.

Well, for one, the opening paragraphs of the paper indicate that the evidence shows females fair better on verbal tasks than males. The whole point of the paper, that I linked to, was demonstrating that males may outperform females if the verbal task is “superficial” (again, this is according to my reading), and really a spatial task at heart.

At no point was any claim made about the validity of the evidence, from the 1970’s forward, that males are better and spatial and quantitative reasoning than females. In fact, the study only serves to reinforce this evidence, by presenting a “verbal” task that is really spatial in nature and showing how women fair worse than men at the task.

But, I’ve got to be honest, as a non-expert, three decade’s worth of research on the matter seems pretty conclusive, and I think it absurd that nobody would make the obvious connection and vary how the tests are carried out, trying to isolate any cultural factors. If you find a concrete problem with the studies mentioned, then sure, I’ll change my mind. However, as far as I’m concerned, all available evidence suggests one thing only.

Seems they have looked at culture and they have evidence that suggests something other than you suspect.

I finally found an article talking more about the Science article I linked to earlier (since I cannot read that article without paying for it):

I ran across an article in the NY Times discussing the lack of women in computer science. Interestingly enough, in the early 80s, there were approximately equal numbers of women and men in CS classrooms, but that’s changed pretty radically today, despite the fact that we’ve been moving towards parity in other science and engineering fields. There are a couple of hypotheses offered, but I don’t find either of them completely convincing.