James Bond on Women's Equality Day

[Bakustra]

That would be acceptable is middle school, but in higher level education, that's just ridiculous.

Oh yeah Angry Birds, cause we all know that games take real life physics into account.

Why? You've already indicated that you have little or no interest in physics (but this applies to chemistry too, though to a lesser extent) beyond a class you took once. Why is this unacceptable at the high school or introductory undergraduate level?

EDIT: To put it bluntly, I think the whole highfalutin approach to physics hurts more than it helps by distancing science from the everyday, which is, in my view, disastrous pedagogically.

Another barrier to women entering physics is that physics is highly math-dependent, but maths courses are also discouraged for women culturally.

[Covenant]

That would be acceptable is middle school, but in higher level education, that's just ridiculous.

Oh yeah Angry Birds, cause we all know that games take real life physics into account.

Ridiculous is caring if or if not Angry Birds uses real physics when the point is simply to introduce a scenario wherein physics can be discussed. If people can relate to the scenario, problem solved. That solution would, in fact, do that--without needing to bring up Justin Bieber's hair or trolley carts or whatever. If we can make science equally interesting to girls from an early age we'll stand a fair chance better of getting them to take continuing courses past the point at which we need to use beanbags to illustrate concepts. I'd say that's around the same time we're able to discuss raw concepts and stop talking about it in terms of cars, bullets, and rockets--right?

I'd say it'd work just fine all the way until University classes--and even then. What, are you afraid of making science too snuggly? I can think of worse things. If you're still at a level of study where people need a physical or descriptive example to 'stand in' for the examples being made, then there's no harm in making those examples as inclusive as possible.

Bullet, bird, or block, they're all the same so long as it's simply for the premise of the physics being discussed. Having a kneejerk reaction to this is probably a reason why these subjects are still lagging in inclusiveness. Why are Fat Pandas unsuitable for advanced study? The goal is to learn these subjects, not to appeal to some vanity or sense of scientific dignity.

--edit: I didn't see people responded before I did. I'm glad my ideas didn't seem idiotic!

When you're trying to design homework problems in a hurry, and you don't have the natural aptitude that Covenant has just shown... it's a lot easier to do nothing but balls on ramps than to try to introduce 'feminine-appeal' problems to balance 'masculine-appeal' problems.

Whether "nothing but abstract balls on ramps" is a good enough solution to the problem, I don't presume to know.

I agree entirely. I think it's too much to ask of already overtasked teachers. I'd like to find more ways for people in these teaching situations to simply log on and download examples like this so that they can focus on teaching and less on coming up with ways to reach people.

If I can think up examples, so could others, and maybe provide some valuable teaching resources. We need like... Teacherpedia or something, full of lesson examples and extra ideas. I'm no educator, but I strongly believe that everything that can be done to make teaching better should be done--and at as little cost to the educators as possible.

[Phantasee]

I had an excellent physics teacher in high school who used the simple blocks and ramps for the initial definitions, but he used all sorts of every day things for his in-depth examples and questions. Cars, bombs, yeah they figured heavily in the material, but his own examples were much more diverse. A lot of good stuff like "ship is sailing away from the shore at x speed at y angle, how far away from the shore is it at z time" that you can relate to easily (and don't tell me ships are masculine! I'm from the Prairies, ships are as exotic and foreign for boys as they are for girls).

Unfortunately there were fewer girls in the class because after Grade 10 the sciences split into three and girls self-selected themselves out of Physics (you really only need one or two sciences to go on into Arts, just Bio and Chem for Sciences, and only require physics for engineering). Probably based on previous classes, where the stuff was often taught out of the shitty textbooks we had from the early-90s or late 80s. They phased in new textbooks, but they were always a year behind me so I don't know if it made a difference.

[Covenant]

This may sound stupid, but what classes DO girls take? Once they're able to select what they take, that is. This is more aimed at the middle school and pre-University (ie, College for us Americans) coursework. I think that's really the time when you need to interest people in physics and such.

I'm big into science but I went to art school. Even though I took no science in college (zero, and no math), I do have an interest in science that I carry with me every day. If that same hook could be gotten into other people, we may be able to get more female scientists and science teachers out there and change some of these dynamics.

[Phantasee]

You get some options in junior high (Grades 7 to 9), but for the most part it's pretty much set in stone: English, Social Studies, Math, Science, Phys Ed. Most kids take computers because it's easy, foods for the same reason. More girls take Foods and Fashion (and I think some schools still offered cosmetology?), more boys take shop and vehicle maintenance, but those aren't the most commonly taken options. The languages are predominantly female, but Eastern languages are more even in the split IIRC, and French is fairly close to 50/50 (yay bilingualism!). Umm.... my junior high experience wasn't really representative of most people's experience in this district, though. We had outdoor ed and drill as 'mandatory' 'options'. Military history was very popular but that was probably just a peculiarity of my school. Of course, lots of kids took band or bagpipes or whatever, that was fairly even in the split as well.

In high school, languages were predominantly female, except, again, Mandarin, Japanese, and French were more even. Biology and Chemistry were fairly even, maybe with a few more girls in Bio, Physics was close to even but with a few more boys than girls in Bio. The last math class available was mostly taken by students bound for engineering, since it was Calculus, and a prereq for Engineering, but there wasn't much demand for it outside of those kids anyway so I suppose the gender gap between boys and girls in Eng dictated the make up of that class anyway. The Pure stream of math was maybe more girls than boys and the applied stream was fairly even, and the bottom level that only went until grade 11 was mostly boys but that's more to do with boys being more likely to be underachievers or something. The kids who were in the Applied stream would have had to spend time upgrading after high school, and they weren't typically the sort who were bound for University anyway (although a fair number have gone on to Uni in my experience, after realizing life is kinda hard without an education/realizing their friends were fuck ups and there was no reason for them to stay in the same boat).

The computer options were a little different, I saw more dudes in my programming class in Grade 10, but the Design class (with CAD) was close to even AFAIK.

[Xon]

I never said that poor teaching wasn't an issue, however that in no way invalidates my central point that the way science courses are currently taught contains bias, and any reform of science teaching should take this into account.

I was just asserting there are also larger structural problems which aren't doing anyone any favours, but if it's being actually fixed instead of made worse of course this should be one if the issues they should try to fix! From memory, there have been several studies which show varing nutrition (ie breakfasts & lunches) can have a significant impact on student's education. Just changing when the science classes occur relative to food intake should make a massive difference, provided the kids are actually fed somethng health rather than just a sugar high.

Given the resistance to just feeding children properly at schools, auditing all the examples and methodologies used in a class and ensuring they a meet some arbitary politically charged standard, and creating new examples & methodologies when they don't meet that standard would be a long, expensive and costly exercise. and lets not even get started on the shitstorm trying to create a worthwide standard on the issue would be in current political climate in-general. That said, actually starting to make changes to correct this type of stuff is also important, as it's easier to sneak changes up rather than hit people with them all at once.

I see the bias in how science is being taught of a symptom of structural problems. Simply bandaiding the problem by doing a search & replace on poorly concieved word problems isn't going to fix very much. Just ensuring children are recieving proper nutrition going into school and during school time has demonstrated and real benefits, yet even this low hanging fruit for improving education has been largely ignored.

But it's also a true statement that the language you use shapes your thoughts, and that includes how people talk around you. [...] It is a morbidly amusingly fact that speaking proper language rather than 'baby talk' around a infant or toddler aids in thier development of language skills.

Almost completely wrong and mostly wrong, respectively, Xon.

You are right, I'm completely wrong about the baby talk. No idea where I got that idea from. It doesn't even make any sense when you consider how humans learn, Stuff like simplified langauge, high contrast between words, and positive feedback on correctish responses and mild negative feedback on blatantly incorrect responses.

Something later education appears to like to ignore.

I can explain why you'd think that's correct because they're both obvious ideas that make sense, yet they're wrong; but that'd be a threadsplit right there.

I'm actually interested in why Linguistic relativity would be wrong. It does make a lot of sense and at least appears to be supported, and in my experiance of a software developer(it's mostly a job of talking with people, and writing in a formalised structured language(s) with little rational sense) where the nature of the langauge and constructs in that langauge have a massive difference in the outcome.

Of course, how strongly something linguistic relativity affects people is something I don't know and am poorly equiped to discover.

[Duckie]

Yeah, I was a bit harsh there- obviously language makes a huge difference in how you think, because there are entire categories of stuff like 'animate vs inanimate' or 'flat object vs wide object' or 'moving away from mountains or moving closer to mountains' that languages encode in them that english speakers, for example, don't speak of, and english speakers have to obsess over time with things like "will have been having had sex" or "I would be" or "I will have then been" or whatnot so it's not like non-european languages are the only exotic ones.

And obviously japanese people are more conscious of social respect and hierarchies, as they can't speak without referencing them, just like anglophones are stuck thinking about time.

A: Saphir-Whorf would be a more convincing argument if the creators hadn't done everything possible to fuck it up, including making sure every single example they cited in their work was obviously wrong or later shown to be exaggerated for effect. If anything about it is right, then it's certainly by accident on their parts.
B: There is never a case of something being literally impossible for someone to think about in one language that can be thought about in another. That's the key thing- the hardest s-w people who are like "language limits how we think" are right sort of but it is not at all a hard limit like they claim, otherwise we couldn't learn to speak other languages obviously (and yes, if a guy speaks japanese for 50 years and learns it back and front, dude's effectively a native speaker, there is no je ne sais quoi that he doesn't grasp about the language that a true native would intuitively know). Language affects what we think about, but it doesn't affect what we can think about or what we could think.

As far as Language learning as a child, you might be surprised to learn that positive and negative reinforcement by parents do not work at all. Parents don't have to correct a child's grammar or anything, they do that on their own. Further, parents don't even need to speak to their kids really in the proper cultural environments though I don't recommend testing this (there are some cultures, though I can't remember where, where until a child forms a comprehensible sentence of its own accord no one talks to it as it obviously has nothing worth talking about). As long as they hear someone talking they're fine, which is the absolute kibosh on any idea that corrections could possibly help.

[Xon]

Anything more will have to be thread split.

Language affects what we think about, but it doesn't affect what we can think about or what we could think.

I was rushed when posting, but I never ment to imply the language you learn limits what is possible for a human to think of. There are some computational theries (turing completness). which describe the expressive power of a language, and one of those properties is a turing complete language (which natural language qualifies as) are functionally equivalent. What must be said, and stressed, is that not all modes of language and concepts have the same level of abstraction or ease of use.

A completely exaggerated example; explaining the concept of relativity is hard enough, but try doing it without maths having formal concept of 'zero'. Or how maths that uses complex numbers is actually usefull when someone has never hear of a square root or a vector.

As far as Language learning as a child, you might be surprised to learn that positive and negative reinforcement by parents do not work at all. Parents don't have to correct a child's grammar or anything, they do that on their own. Further, parents don't even need to speak to their kids really in the proper cultural environments though I don't recommend testing this (there are some cultures, though I can't remember where, where until a child forms a comprehensible sentence of its own accord no one talks to it as it obviously has nothing worth talking about). As long as they hear someone talking they're fine, which is the absolute kibosh on any idea that corrections could possibly help.

I vaguely remember something like this, but couldn't for the life of me find anything actually backing that up when find it when replying so I conceeded.

[Lusankya]

Hey, give me a break. I am not attacking you, I'm pointing out a problem that can turn around and bite me if I try to do something like the Paris Hilton problem

I wasn't really attacking you. I was more getting pissy with the thread up to that point in general.

The problem is just that the trend here is going to be, by necessity, towards gender neutral problems, or more accurately 'neuter' problems, where anything interesting about them that might be gendered has been removed because it's more trouble than it's worth to vet your problems for being gendered-but-not-too-gendered. Especially when the definition of how to give gender to a problem to draw the interest of female students tends to shift, depending on what the most recent round of studies tell us the two genders care more about.

You won't find any argument from me that the vast majority of questions should be gender-neutral. Gender-neutral questions, by their nature, should be easily relatable to a far greater audience than gendered questions. I also don't think, however that completely moving "gendered" questions is adviseable. By completely moving those questions, you are removing a vast number of possible topics from your repertoire, which does nobody any good. The secret, really is to make sure that when you use gendered questions, you should try to keep as even a balance as possible. People will put up with a few "boring" questions in their study, as long as there is other content in there that keeps their interest.

I don't even think that the balance has to be "perfect". As long as each individual teacher puts some effort in (and I really don't think it's quite as hard as you make it out to be to at least include something more exciting than boxes on ramps), and makes sure the ratio is more-or-less equal, then that should be enough effort for any individual teacher. The important outcome is that the ratio of gendered questions improves from 90+% male to something that more approaches equilibrium. Pulling out the statistics and making the "perfect" mix of gendered to non-gendered questions is a job for curriculum co-ordinators and textbook authors, not for individual teachers, and as far as I'm concerned, those people damn well should be looking to research to determine what kinds of topics would work best with the target audience.

And if it's really that hard for current teachers to do this, then maybe the way teachers are being trained isn't good enough.

This illustrates another problem: how much effort does it take to keep up with the latest research on what women are, statistically speaking, more interested in than men? If I try to guess I'll probably guess wrong; I would never have guessed 'weather' and I doubt you would have either.

Yeah. I wouldn't have really guessed "weather" either (even though I, personally am a huge fan of the weather). However, looking at the first chart on the site I linked to, you can see broad patterns in what interests women vs what interests men: namely, conflict vs non-conflict. Two thirds of the stories on the list of stories of greater interest to men could be classified as conflict-related, vs none on the women's list.

Interestingly, this:

Yet there were no gender differences in interest about the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto earlier this year; 33% of men and 32% of women followed news about this story very closely. Bhutto's murder attracted a relatively high level of public interest for an international news story -- it was the second most closely followed story during the week of Dec. 30, 2007.

seems to suggest that conflict-related material can be made interesting to women, when the conflict in question is seen to relate to women (a bit like the way the conflict in this thread is seeing a lot more female attention than most of the other arguments on SDN). I will get back to this later in the thread.

This may sound stupid, but what classes DO girls take? Once they're able to select what they take, that is. This is more aimed at the middle school and pre-University (ie, College for us Americans) coursework. I think that's really the time when you need to interest people in physics and such.

In Chinese universities, girls learn languages and boys learn engineering and economics, with other courses being more easily mixed. (Although anecdotally, language classes are more dominated by girls than engineering classes - minus civil engineering - are dominated by boys. I have no idea about economics class, because I think that even walking past one would put me to sleep.) Maths is about 40-60 in favour of boys. They don't really get as much choice in high school as high school students get in the west (basically they can choose the "culture stream" or the "science stream", but there's still an awful lot of subjects in common), so that's not really a good time to look.

I'd comment on what everyone studied in my high school, except I went to an all-girls high school, and all-girls schools do have statistically different results from co-ed schools, so it wouldn't really be representative. What I do remember, though, was that by year 12, all of the science classes were dominated by A students or near-A students. You saw very few B-students sticking with the sciences. This was particularly evident in the Maths I&II class, which at the time I was there had not had a single student receive less than an A in the year 12 exams for about a decade. Credit should go to my maths teacher, of course, however what those results also meant that for that entire time, not a single B student at my school had taken that course, even though state-wide there would have been plenty of B students taking it. I guess this is all anecdotal, but it leaves us with two questions: are there fewer female B students taking science courses than there are male B students? And if so, why?

Why am I focussing on the B students, you ask? Well, the best students - those with the intelligence, ambition, talent, passion, etc. to really exceed at a task - will engage and perform regardless of non-academic pressure. If a barrier to entry exists, they will pass over it with ease.

The B students, however, are still quite competent students. They're quite capable of doing the work. There's nothing wrong with a B. So these students should be choosing to do these courses in reasonable numbers. If these students aren't choosing to do science courses in comparable numbers to male students, then it suggests some non-academics related reason for not choosing science courses. The barriers to entry that exist are somehow stopping perfectly capable students from choosing courses that they are good at. It is an issue, I think. (Well, assuming that I'm right about the lack of female science students coming from the group that would be B students, rather than being evenly spread amongst students all abilities.)



Xon: I am not denying other problems in the educational system, many bigger than the one I brought up, however it is only by managing to provide some evidence that school nutrition is somehow gender-related that you will be able to convince me that any of your post is actually relevant to a thread about gender equality. If you really want to discuss pedagogical issues, by all means start a new thread, and we will undoubtedly have a lovely time agreeing with each other.

As far as Language learning as a child, you might be surprised to learn that positive and negative reinforcement by parents do not work at all. Parents don't have to correct a child's grammar or anything, they do that on their own.

Hey, this reminds me of a quote I heard in a language acquisition class, though I forget who said it. It went something like "If positive and negative reinforcement mattered with language learning, children would speak honestly, but with terrible grammar." I bet you know the real quote and the person who said it.


Anyway, moving on from the education thing and talking some more about those other social barriers to entering male-dominated professions as a woman: I want to talk about how different attitudes towards conflict impact the work environment, and how they make it harder for a woman to enter a male-dominated workplace. In my aunt's , they have a policy of gender-segregating brainstorming committees, because with mixed gender committees, you end up with the women showing vastly decreased productivity compared to the single-gender committees, because they effectively get drowned out by the men. I think this relates to the two genders' attitudes towards conflict. A woman is far less likely to have a positive attitude towards conflict than a man, and thus does not perform as well as she otherwise would when she is placed in a more conflict-heavy masculine environment.

What's particularly telling about this, really, is that it is a very clear example of women being held back not by their capacities to do the job (since when given the same job in a single-gender environment, they do just as well as the men), but rather by social factors that are clearly gender-related. This does create a barrier of entry for women going into male-dominated professions, because while gender-segregated meetings are doable in a large gender-balanced organisation like my aunt's department, they are not so practical when women are just entering an industry, and are unlikely to make up a large enough part of the workforce to even be able to make up a committee. These women must then face the challenge of making their voice heard in a male environment, so they must meet three requirements: first, to have the ability to do the job; second to have the training for the job; and third to also be far more confrontational than your average woman. Any woman with the first is capable of getting the second, however it does not follow that these woman will necessarily possess the third.

The question is, how much of these attitudes towards conflict are innate and how much is learned? I would put my money on it being neither 100% innate or 100% learned, and depending on how much is innate, it's something that we'll all have to live with and accommodate for. Perhaps courses designed to teach women how to be more assertive in male-dominated environments* would help women thinking about going into these professions, as well as a revision of the social expectations we place on each gender when it comes to dealing with conflict.

And yes, I know that the last suggestion I made is a lot easier said than done, however everyone can help to do that by encouraging women to be more assertive and less wary of conflict, and to reassess our own attitudes and actions, and to call people out when you do see them reinforcing what really should be outmoded cultural expectations. It takes a bit of extra mental work, but not that much, and as an added bonus, very similar habits can help you to combat other social problems such as racism, classism, and so on. I, personally, do the last bit quite a bit by calling people (well, women, really) out on being prejudiced against short men, even though it's quite clearly against my own interests, as by encouraging other women to date short men, I'm just creating extra competition for myself.


*And courses to teach men how to be more conciliatory in female-dominated environments. Hell, you could even make the courses gender neutral (since I know that plenty of men exist with the same problem**), though I feel that the fact that the issue is seemingly gender related makes the prospect of making the courses truly gender neutral would be a difficult prospect.

**I really didn't want to put the point in brackets in, since one would hope that it should go without saying that I am talking only in the sense of broad statistical trends, and that obviously outliers exist on both sides, however I still have very low expectations of this thread, despite the marked improvement it has faced in the last 16 hours, and still rather expect that even this qualifier will not be enough to stop certain people from thinking I am making some kind of value judgement about all men.

[Formless]

On the Sapir Worf tangent: one flaw with strict linguistic determinism is that not all thinking is done in linguistic terms, especially as the ideas get more and more concrete (such as with physics, to tie it in with the rest of the thread). Even some abstract thought can bypass linguistics; if I ask someone what a hero is, chances are the first thing that will come to many people's minds will be the face of whatever person or character they have come to associate with heroism rather than any particular virtue defined in their language. That's why, for example, so much of advertising and propaganda is a visual affair. Just something to keep in mind.