Summers' Free Speech Friends at Harvard Skew Facts

[Triana]

I can't stand this Summers creep - or his mysogenist friends in academia or the media. I can't BELIEVE Obama put this bastard in our Treasury. THAT JOB belongs to Brooksley Born, NOT him. Ms. BORN could DO THE MATH that Summers FAILED at - along with Rubin and Greenspan - Ms. Born predicted this MESS we are now in - and they silenced her. But she was RIGHT.

...

What Are the Facts?

But what are the scientific facts? Since the Summers brouhaha, more evidence has emerged that there is little basis for an argument that women are inherently inferior to men at math.

Girls are rapidly catching up to boys in all areas of math performance. But you'd never know it from the news media. "The Nation's Report Card on Math and Science Abilities," released in February of 2007, found that girls were on a par with boys on a range of math abilities, including algebra, geometry, measurement properties, data analysis and other areas. But of 37 newspaper articles I found on the report, not one mentioned this fact.

There's no evidence that girls are innately inferior to boys at math, reports Elizabeth Spelke, co-director of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Inter-Faculty Initiative at Harvard. There is, she notes, a biological foundation to mathematical and scientific reasoning that emerges in children before any formal instruction. These systems develop equally in males and females. "There's not a hint of an advantage for boys over girls," she says, in any of these systems.

Do males occupy the upper reaches of math scores while women trail behind? Once upon a time, yes, but this is changing.

Studies Find Equality

In recent years, studies of mathematically talented boys and girls found that equal numbers of both sexes majored in math. And they got equal grades. The SAT-M not only under-predicts the performance of college women in general, it also under-predicted the college performance of women in the talented sample.

The University of Wisconsin's Janet Hyde, who has studied gender differences in math for more than a decade, consistently finds such differences small to non-existent.

And, if gender is the issue, male supremacy should be universal. But in tests that compared grammar school kids in the United States, Taiwan and Japan, Asian girls scored almost twice as high as American boys. This fact is rarely reported in the U.S. news media.


ENTIRE story:

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=3941

[TellTheTruth82]

1. This story was reported

in the Kansas City Star

[backtoblue]

2. math teachers...

In both high school and college my professors were women. It stands to reason (to my own observation anyways) that women are just as capable at math and science as men. The men that say otherwise are just insecure with their brilliance and it makes them feel better to believe they are superior at every type of problem solving.

[TellTheTruth82]

3. Math Major

AS a math major, I took more math courses than most people (duh!). I have to say, that my teachers were predominantly men, though I did have some women teachers. Both men and women did a great job, understood the material, and were capable of teaching it to me. I never gave their gender a thought. I figured if they were teaching, they had to had proved their qualifications to somebody, and I was there to learn.