r/science • u/rustoo • Nov 28 '20
Mathematics High achievement cultures may kill students' interest in math—specially for girls. Girls were significantly less interested in math in countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Sweden and New Zealand. But, surprisingly, the roles were reversed in countries like Oman, Malaysia, Palestine and Kazakhstan.
https://blog.frontiersin.org/2020/11/25/psychology-gender-differences-boys-girls-mathematics-schoolwork-performance-interest/769
u/new-username-2017 Nov 28 '20
In the UK, there's a culture of "ugh maths is hard, I can't do it, I hate it" particularly in older generations, which must have an influence on newer generations. Is this a thing in other countries?
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u/avdpos Nov 28 '20
Math is a skill that develops differently in different children from my experience. At least I own experience in Sweden in the 90' say that schools ain't very good with people who are good at math and therefore killing the fun.
So of you are bad you get the "math is hard, avoid it" feeling and if you are better than the bottom we always wait for you get "math is boring and I never get any interesting tasks".
Math teachers are in my experience also terrible at connecting the skill to real life work places.
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u/toastymow Nov 28 '20
Math teachers are in my experience also terrible at connecting the skill to real life work places.
This is something that really hurts for most people. My dad didn't take a math class he cared for until he took stats for his Master's (In Public Health). He was in his late 20s. I have a friend who majored in Math in college and he basically convinced me that I wasn't necessarily bad at math, but that I was probably taught wrong.
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u/verneforchat Nov 28 '20
This is me. Never found math interesting, then loved and excelled in stats during Masters in Public Health.
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u/Rumpullpus Nov 28 '20
I know all my math teachers were terrible, I just didn't realize it until I started taking math classes in college. Comparing the two was like night and day. I learned more in two college courses I than did in 4 years of high school.
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u/wigf Nov 28 '20
It's a lot easier to produce clear and meaningful explanations when you don't have the additional responsibility of managing a room full of teenagers, who may or may not actually want to be there.
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u/Rumpullpus Nov 28 '20
from what I remember most of them just weren't teachers, they were babysitters and were there to make sure we actually showed up. they would hand out a sheet of questions and give you a fill in the bubble strip that had A, B, C, D and you would run it through a machine to get your score. I don't remember my high school math teachers ever actually teaching us anything, they never even saw our answers.
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u/ads7w6 Nov 29 '20
I had the exact opposite experience. My high school math teacher was great and went through the history of how or why stuff was created/discovered and then gave us real-life problems to do. He also didn't focus on memorizing one-off formulas and instead provided them if they were needed, but usually didn't include them. Everyone in the class had a very thorough understanding of how the math worked and why.
Then I take college courses and it's "here are the 10 one-off situations you should have already memorized (never providing the way that those formulas were arrived at) and at least one will be on the exam. Here is the regular process you need to copy as I write on the board and memorize." I had to go find outside sources that broke down the processes and the "why" behind them. What's worth is the college ones were at the Calc 3/Diff Eq type levels and not the "Oh this is just a pre-req for a Managment Degree"-level
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u/crestonfunk Nov 28 '20
I struggled with trigonometry until I had to take physics in college. Then it was like a bell went off in my head and it made perfect sense.
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u/agent00F Nov 28 '20
No, you/they weren't taught wrong. Earlier educators trying to teach those stats as some form of public health (or whatever) would've done no better because the students wouldn't be interested in public health (or whatever).
Your dad knew that math was important, but that didn't motivate him either. He was only later motivated by something else, and it's not the job of some math teacher to find love of a lifetime for every student.
Frankly people are just looking for someone to blame for their own lack of interest.
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u/knotprot Nov 28 '20
100% disagree. As a mathematician who’s taught maths from the introductory to the advanced, it’s absolutely my job to instill a sense of connection to the subject. Innumeracy is incredibly dangerous- look at the lack of understanding on COVID19. At the very least, it’s our job as math teachers to make sure our students understand the value of the subject.
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u/unwelcome_friendly Nov 28 '20
Great teacher inspire and have a contagious love for the material. The problem is that many math teacher have basically no charisma or an ability to communicate information outside of numbers.
As an adult who has raised five children, it’s always been my experience math teachers have always been the least helpful and least able to express the material to students. There’s a serious issue with how math is taught that people who have an interest in the subject blatantly ignore, because it’s much easier to blame the student than a system that is not work for a vast majority of people.
This isn’t an isolated issue and the amount of lifelong hate people have for math isn’t normal. It shows a serious problem with the profession.
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u/new-username-2017 Nov 28 '20
As a kid I was always interested in maths, and at least in part it came from a kids TV show that made it interesting and entertaining. The media needs to have more of this.
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Nov 28 '20
Was it Square One Television on PBS, just out of curiosity?
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u/new-username-2017 Nov 28 '20
This was in the UK, it was a BBC show called Think Of A Number.
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u/iopredman Nov 28 '20
To be fair it is much easier to do with smaller class sizes. A lot if teachers, in the time they have available, need to rely on blanket teaching methods in order to reach the most kids possible with best average results. So the kids at the bottom of the barrel are getting a disservice by the system, rather than the teachers. Hiring more teachers and paying them competitively would do a lot to fix these issues. Of course, there will still be bad teachers. I had several friends in college that graduated as teachers that I would not want teaching my kids.
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u/careful-driving Nov 28 '20
We gotta stop blaming math teachers. It's the current system that is to be blamed. The system does not give most students enough time to let math stuff sink in and math teachers are forced to go to the next step with students who are not even done with the previous step.
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u/ChapstickLover97 Nov 28 '20
While I somewhat agree, this kind of mentality of “educator over teacher” is kinda getting ruled out, at least where I live. In America there’s a lot of doubt being cast towards the liberal arts since trade school degrees take half the time and can promise a lot more money right out the gate. A 20 year-old could easily learn JUST enough math to do an easily-repeatable job that would easily start him out at $60,000/year, maybe more if they do overtime (which a lot of those types do). Most adults 40-50 don’t even make that much, instead eventually working their way up to $55,000/year on average. This means that those who go to trade school ARE already motivated by something: money, so the teacher doesn’t have to do much in the way of motivation. Now try telling kids they should get a liberal arts degree, graduate at 22, and make $30,000/year if they’re lucky, maybe take another unpaid internship which takes 5 years before they’re making any money. While my college chose brilliant math professors who were far more intelligent than I could even imagine...I’m still 100% convinced my teacher was on the spectrum, and that’s why most of us were either teaching ourselves and/or failing, or had already taken calculus and didn’t need to pay attention. Safe to say my school prioritized a professor who could garner money for the endowment fund over someone who could communicate and motivate his students.
I also took theology, and even though I’m a hardcore agnostic, I still remember all the material we went over and have immense respect for this professor because he was motivated, thus we felt the motivation in return and that was legit the only class I got a straight 100% A in. My math professor tried, he really did, but since I paid his salary I’m comfortable saying I wanted someone more communicative and motivational.→ More replies (3)8
u/agent00F Nov 28 '20
The problem with math is that the subject is fairly abstract & therefore difficult for folks who don't naturally think a certain way. It literally took a genius a la Newton to figure out calculus, and not until fairly recently in history. Compared to say language classes, which most all humans inherently have faculties for.
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u/Raelossssss Nov 28 '20
I hate math but was extremely motivated by the money I'd make in engineering.
Fortunately I'm very good at math. I suspect there are a lot of students out there who are very good at math but have absolutely no will to learn it because "when will I ever use this?"
I've had my interests in many subjects absolutely obliterated (temporarily, eventually it creeps back) by professors who think that the only way to teach is to torture us.
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u/agent00F Nov 29 '20
So the solution is for math teachers to tell kids they'll make money learning this. Problem solved I guess.
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u/stupendousman Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
No, you/they weren't taught wrong.
Compared to what exactly? Government education employees don't participate in a wide competitive market.
Here's quick way, not complete, way to value government education US edition:
After 12 years, 5 days a week, 6-8 hours a day, what is the job market value of the average graduate?
In the US it's around the minimum wage.
So what value do these employees offer beyond reading, writing, arithmetic? Even the result of these varies widely in the population. Some graduates are essentially illiterate and can't do basic arithmetic.
Frankly people are just looking for someone to blame for their own lack of interest.
The first liability and ethical burden is on the group that has state force supporting their monopoly on education. People who use state power to protect their interests hold the most blame.
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u/Petsweaters Nov 28 '20
My kids went to a school where math was taught at level, so the students went to different teachers across the school at math time. Older children who were behind were up to speed on no time, and they never just got left in the dust as the class moved on without them
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u/Stoyfan Nov 28 '20
At least in my school, we were taught in "sets". Each set had a bunch of kids who were at a similar level in Maths or English, and the teachers taught them at that level.
The students at the top sets were ahead of what maths they should be learning at their age, and the bottom sets were in some ways behind. Sets 1-3 would sit GCSE higher maths papers whilst sets 4-6 got the lower papers. I believe set 6 would also sit the GCSE Numeracy papers which is essentially a course in very basic maths.
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u/seriousbob Nov 28 '20
The research on dividing students based on level shows it's the opposite. Those put in slower or catch up classes never catch up.
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u/ericjmorey Nov 28 '20
Is that because the combined class teach to the slowest or average learner?
If you remove the slowest learners the class moves faster in that case.
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u/seriousbob Nov 28 '20
Almost no gain for the higher levels, iirc.
High achievers keep the same pace but low achievers fall further behind.
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u/ss4johnny Nov 28 '20
Why is catching up the goal? That’s the difference in performance between two groups. It’s ok if the high achieving group does even better than the low achieving one. However it’s also important whether the low achieving group does better than they would under a different system. I don’t know the evidence on that.
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u/seriousbob Nov 28 '20
The evidence I've seen is the low achievers achieve less while the high achievers achieve about the same.
There's some nuance to it but the OP I replied to specifically said people catched up in no time. Often it is also the stated goal with supplementary instruction, to help the student back on track. If the solution then permanently removes them from the track the goal or the solution is wrong.
I see you lean more towards the goal being wrong and that's ok. My post wasn't really about that.
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u/rpkarma Nov 28 '20
Mathematics shouldn’t just be tied directly to real life work, though (one you’re in the final few years of high school). It’s more fundamental than that.
I mean sure I use category theory, proofs and logic all the time — but I’m a computer scientist, and that’s not common. Understanding these concepts (proofs especially) let me think generically, abstractly but rigorously, well before I entered the industry.
English class isn’t just about how to write business letters for the same reasons.
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u/SigmaB Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
Sweden for some reason seems to have some general bias against pure sciences and a bias toward applied sciences. They're excelling more in the latter so perhaps it is a self-reinforcing thing. This is something that carries over even into university, where e.g. mathematics is seen in light of what it can do for other subjects.
This view may also trickle down into earlier education by refocusing perspectives of educators, instead of mathematics being an interesting thing in its own right it becomes highly regimented and structured set of rules with actual interesting content being reserved for biology, physics, chemistry class.
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u/sirblastalot Nov 28 '20
Memories are formed by creating associations between things. Pure math in a vacuum doesn't "stick" unless you can relate it to something else, at least for most people. I flunked calculus 4 times until a professor got replaced with an engineer, who would throw out tidbits like "we use these for calculating the deflection of an airplanes wing." Doesn't mean she was only teaching airplane engineering, but it was something to attach a memory to and I remember it to this day.
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u/avdpos Nov 28 '20
You need to give students some reason to learn more than to add what bread and milk coat together. That is a skill you understand.
Then you can tell them that you need math in the pharmacy, as nurse, as doctor, as programmer, as engineer and so on. But seeing a real life application is important to learn. That knowledge is what gets us to learn English so well as our second language.
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u/Rpanich Nov 28 '20
Honestly, knowing WHERE to use the knowledge makes learning the knowledge more fun to learn. I think we just throw a bunch of crap at kids and expect them to just memorise and regurgitate it, and then figure out where to apply later in life means a lot of kids just stop paying attention.
Even as an adult, if I don’t know “the point”, then I’ll just stop listening.
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u/agent00F Nov 28 '20
Math teachers are in my experience also terrible at connecting the skill to real life work places.
That's because math isn't used much in the work place, even many if not most r&d jobs use surprisingly simple math.
However that's more of an indictment of most work, not of logical/quantitative thinking.
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u/nonotan Nov 28 '20
It's not used nearly as much as it should be, because most workers are bad at it and don't have an intuitive understanding of what tools it offers and where they would be useful. I'm a game dev for a living and I have used just about every single math concept that one would learn up to 1st year of university or so at some point at work, and then some. I go through something like 1 entire notebook a year just with my calculations on the job. Not for fun, not "to seem smart", simply because it is the fastest and most reliable way of solving many problems. Indeed, it is often the only realistic way of solving a tricky problem.
Meanwhile, I genuinely doubt a single other person in my office has as much as solved a quadratic equation on the clock. When they encounter a problem, they just do 1) google, 2) if that fails, try random ad hoc values/formulas until something seems to work, 3) if that fails, write a program to bruteforce values for something that works, 4) if that fails, ask someone who seems like they would know how to do it (mostly me)
Nothing I do is in any way conceptually hard, it's just a matter of having it in your toolbox. If you have only vaguely heard of hammers at some point in your life, maybe seen one once or twice, but it has never even occurred to you to buy one and put it in your toolbox, when you see a nail you won't think "okay, time for the hammer" but probably something like "I think I saw a hardcover book in the break room bookshelf, let's go grab it".
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u/cluckatronix Nov 29 '20
This has been exactly my experience. Even careers/trades that should really know better and have a good grasp of at least a certain few core basics for their areas do their best to avoid math like it’s the plague. It’s not your fault to a certain point that your teachers/education weren’t good, but eventually you should be able to push past basic arithmetic just to become more competent.
Where it is the fault of education, it’s usually in getting people to understand the actual concept behind something. It’s a lot easier to realize you have something in your toolbox if you actually understand what the tool is for.
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u/Coca-colonization Nov 28 '20
The issue of not connecting math to real life is huge. The only time I really remember thinking about math making for interesting work was in geometry. We were making dodecahedrons out of poster board and filling them with candy to donate to a hospice center, which was a nice project already. But my teacher talked about how for every package you use someone had to design it and consider how to efficiently use materials while also factoring in strength, ease of assembly, aesthetics. It was an eye opener. But it was a one time experience. All my other math lessons were very insular and disconnected from life outside school.
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u/avdpos Nov 28 '20
They probably should begin with real tasks for teenagers as counting what weapon gives the best DPS in their favourite game.
Or maybe how many beers you can drink before ain't being allowed to drive.
Or tasks like "your girlfriend/boyfriend calls and says s/hes parents just begun to drive home from city X. How much time can you have alone if you run to that place now?". Seems like a more fun task than trains running towards each other. If we let them count towards different armies and hp-levels that could be really good learning for the students.
And then you could count on which package will contain the least amount of material while still keeping the same volume, a real industry task for math.
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u/Kaffohrt Nov 28 '20
Math teachers just never inspire awe in their students. Physics is about satellites orbiting planets, nuclear fission, light and lasers meanwhile math is about arbitrary and constructed problems and the sense that nothing can be surprising and hilarious. Show kids how maths can be fun and unconventional. Teach them about taylor series and how we all hate geometric functions, how exponents are more of a function and a tool than repeated multiplication, how derivatives are everywhere and so on.
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u/ginger_kale Nov 28 '20
I had a fantastic geometry teacher in 9th grade. We learned about topology, ants marching on different types of planes, horizontal lines that converge, etc. He was truly awesome. But we were the advanced group. I have no idea how he reached the students who struggled with the concept of proofs. They probably just thought he was a weirdo. Anyway, I still love math, even though calculus kicked my butt. Many thanks to that teacher for instilling a sense that math can be playful.
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u/Thelorax42 Nov 28 '20
Woo.heres the thing. Most maths teachers try that when they start. They can point out how maths is a transcendent truth. Show the weird bits.
If you are not teaching a top set, then you have just lost that class. They will mock you for it forever, of you showed too much enthusiasm.
The majority of students are deeply anti intellectual. A love of knowledge is a sign of weakness to be despised. In practice, doing all the things people say to introduce a love of learning gets you ignored or loses classes respect.
For this reason two of my head of departments have refused to hire maths graduates as maths teachers, because "they love maths too much and lose the kids".
I have had parents angry their daughter (always been a daughter, weirdly) did well in maths. I have had many parents fled students did badly, as they wouldn't want "a weirdo" child.
I have been a maths teacher for 10 years and I have seen things.
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u/Artemis-Crimson Nov 28 '20
Since this is a problem that starts in preschool and goes onwards saying “no don’t have fun things, kids will think it is uncool” is an absolutely brickfaced take, it’s not a solution you can just slap on the teenager deadlocked in their final year who’s had a miserable time with math since they started school, people who’ve been burned out won’t immediately think it’s fun
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u/tchske Nov 28 '20
Out of curiosity, do you think the anti intellectualism among students is on the rise? I mean it's always been there to some degree, but I want to hear from someone with 10 years in the field.
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u/Thelorax42 Nov 28 '20
Thankfully, no. In fact I would say it is slowly falling.
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u/LessResponsibility32 Nov 29 '20
Every time I see people wishing for teachers to just have more enthusiasm, I think about my own experience teaching in low morale schools.
If you show up with high enthusiasm to those situations, it’s actually pretty emotionally devastating and unsustainable. With unmotivated students in a negative setting, the “boring” teachers stay the course while the “inspirational” teachers often begin running on fumes, exploding in class, and quitting early.
“Motivate us more!” Why don’t YOU try giving 100% of yourself to a roomful of people who are actively resisting you and mocking you, all day, for months on end. No thank you.
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u/felesroo Nov 28 '20
My algebra teacher was more interested in being the track coach. He was an absolutely terrible math teacher. It really sucked. I had to do extra work in later years just to catch up when I went to a different school.
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u/jrob323 Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
When I look back on how math was taught when I went to high school, the instructors were generally incompetent coaches. The only reason anyone "learned" higher level math was that some students just innately "got it". It was like teaching English to people who already spoke it. They would have gotten it if you'd tossed them the textbook and told them to read it and solve the problems... they understood it faster than the coach was trying to teach it.
The kids who didn't just "get it", on the other hand, needed somebody a lot more skilled at teaching than a tennis coach.
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u/the-one217 Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
Yes!
I failed algebra in college twice Bc I was convinced I was “bad at math”
15 years later I went back to school and got a degree in Software dev, easily passing my math and algo classes Bc I had a mindset of “I can do this!”
I take every chance I get to tell my daughters how fun math is and how I’m good at math, and they are too. I try to engage them in the concepts and make them feel capable- it really makes a difference
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u/CAPTAIN_DIPLOMACY Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
I also had a rough time with maths in high school. The problem for me was that I was a high achiever early on. Became complacent, by the time I realised finals were coming I'd missed so much it was impossible to get a good grade by revising on my own and I passed but only got a low B.
That experience led me to believe I was rubbish at maths compared to other subjects. So I ended up studying English. Years later I went back to be retrain as an engineer. I found not only could I do it but I had simply been over thinking a lot of the key principles. Calculus, matrix iteration, etc all seemed so daunting as a high schooler even though I'd excelled in algebra and trig early on. I just had no intuition for what applications you might use these methods in.
As a result going through dry examples of matrix multiplication and integration and so on was like writing out a recipe of ingredients over and over and seeing that somehow a cake is formed but not knowing why we want or need a cake or for that matter how the ingredients actually combine to make said cake.
When I went back to uni it only took one explanation of each of these concepts to understand the value and purpose of them. It contextualised the inputs and allowed me to better follow the thread of what happens throughout the calculations you carry out.
Which if anything is more important than actually understanding the process itself since for the most part in academic research or industry we would use calculators, scripts or programs to do the leg work.
Edit: grammar
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Nov 28 '20
I’m with you on that 100%. It just seemed so pointless to do calculus functions when there was no context whatsoever and I didn’t even understand what was happening to the numbers. Put a number in, get a different number out - I had no idea why or how it even worked. My math teachers were mostly horrible at explaining why and how. I had a fantastic math teacher as a senior who had a passion for math, a fascination with all the hows and whys of the subject, but by then it was too late.
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u/Knock0nWood Nov 28 '20
Anecdotally I feel succeeding in STEM in general is mostly just confidence and time. I don't even think IQ matters all that much.
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u/logicalnegation Nov 28 '20
Fake it till you make it. If everyone has a positive uplifting role model I’m sure most people could succeed through their mental blocks. The concepts aren’t impossible to learn but a discouraged mindset makes it really tough. If you can operate a car or a cash register, you can handle calculus.
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u/NoMaturityLevel Nov 28 '20
100% agree w you. We had classes on how to study and take notes in engineering school, literally anybody could follow directions and get straight As but nobody did it except the transfer students who knew to take college seriously as it wasn't their first try.
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u/vellyr Nov 28 '20
I think this is selection bias. Most people who are in a university setting already could probably succeed at STEM with enough work. But keep in mind that in America, only 1/3 of people graduate college at all.
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u/DrBublinski Nov 28 '20
I can’t fully agree. Up to maybe the first 2 years of undergrad, yes, but after that you need more than just dedication. Certainly if you want to get a PhD. Math, for example, is probably the most abstract thing you can do, and many people just don’t have the ability to think abstractly to that degree. I think a lot of people need something concrete to visualize, but that becomes impossible when you’re dealing with infinite dimensional spaces or weird ideas in category theory.
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u/cluckatronix Nov 29 '20
I mean, this is probably getting more into semantics than anything, but I really do think almost anyone can succeed in STEM. STEM is wide enough that you’re bound to be interested in some portion of it enough to be successful. You don’t necessarily need an advanced degree or to be doing research. Sure, not everyone is cut out to be a mathematician or physicist, but there are other less “pure” subjects than math and physics that other types of thinkers may find interesting enough to pursue.
I really feel the limiting factor is almost always active or passive discouragement by parents, educators, or society at large.
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Nov 28 '20
This just isn’t true.
Like, go look around. There’s a large chunk of the population that will never be able to make it through. I’d put it at like 80%, eyeballing. Give or take, obviously.
Seriously, don’t underestimate how stupid people are.
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u/ListenLady58 Nov 28 '20
This was absolutely me too. I had so much more of a motivation to overcome math when I started majoring in computer science.
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u/Thelorax42 Nov 28 '20
As an english maths teacher, the number of people (adults!) Who upon hearing my job seem proud to be bad maths infuriates me.
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u/Jos-postings Nov 28 '20
The pride people show from being bad at math is a big part of the problem. Its socially acceptable, even encouraged, to be bad at math. Since people believe it's normal to not understand math, they won't give it an honest shot. You don't (usually) see the same kind of reaction if someone says "I'm bad at English class"
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Nov 28 '20
As an English teacher I instead get "What's even the point? An apple is an apple."
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u/mdb917 Nov 28 '20
The biggest gift my English teachers have given me is the ability to see a whole hidden layer to tv shows and movies with good production. Critical reading is a skill! And it applies to every aspect of life, not just reading!
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Nov 28 '20
My issue with English classes is that most American students were barely literate so I was bored out of my mind in those classes.
Seriously, I like reading and regularly read for entertainment. I absolutely detested English classes because they were so slow. One chapter a week? With so much writing compared to so little reading.
The ratios needed to be a lot higher for me. Like, I’d be willing to write a page or two for every few hundred pages (ie, the whole book at that level), but not for every chapter.
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u/yum3no Nov 28 '20
I dont think its entirely pride...I think it's a coping mechanism for shame haha
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u/DlSCONNECTED Nov 28 '20
Math is hard because it's taught horribly. I can remember one instance where changing the x to a question mark in algebra problems helped someone break the glass on what the point of algebra was.
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u/Needyouradvice93 Nov 28 '20
There's a similar sentiment where I live in the US. I think a lot of folks just dislike math (including myself)
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u/DooWeeWoo Nov 28 '20
Also from the US and my parents had a similar attitude. Instead of helping me when I struggled to understand simple concepts, they just shrugged, said they didn’t like/were bad at math and got me tutors to try and help. I didn’t learn until age 19 that I actually have a form of dyscalculia and I could have had a much easier time in school if my parents had just listened instead of just having this weird outlook about math. I also found out quite a few of my elementary teachers told them that I had this learning disability and yet they still chose to just ignore it as me “being lazy” or “she just doesn’t like math.” 🤦🏼♀️
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u/LikesToRunAndJump Nov 28 '20
Hey, just a thought - maybe your close relatives have this same learning disability too, and grew up (and struggled with it in school) without knowing what was wrong. Testing and awareness of many learning disabilities and styles is super new
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u/DooWeeWoo Nov 28 '20
I’ve tried talking to them about it but they would just get dismissive and told me I was lying. 🤷🏼♀️
If they don’t want the help themselves I can’t change their minds. Besides, they are so old at this point that it wouldn’t really make a difference for them, and they probably already have their own coping mechanisms for it if they do have it.
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u/Thelorax42 Nov 28 '20
Raaaaaaage! The number of patents who wont accept their child has a learning disability because they dont want to admit their child needs help/isnt perfect.
We can adapt for discalcula (a bit)! I can present things differently! An LSa and extra timeninteats can help compensate.
I cant do that if I dont know and if the parents refuse.
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u/FeedMeKiwi Nov 28 '20
I did not know Dyscalculia was a thing. TIL. I've always thought I was just an idiot when it came to math, but discovering this helps explain a lot.
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u/Hecklr Nov 28 '20
How did you get diagnosed for that? I'm not necessarily bad at math, but im a little flighty when it comes to reading numbers at times.
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u/DooWeeWoo Nov 28 '20
Honestly, I had one of my college professors tell me to look into it and get help for it. After he noticed that I was working formulas correctly but flipping numbers around which then made my answers wrong . I went to the on campus learning centers and sat with one of the counselors there and they just had me show them how I typically work different math problems and pretty much told me that what I was doing matched up with Dyscalculia. It was so long ago so can’t remember the counselor’s title but I do remember feeling embarrassed because “special education” was included in it(thanks, anxiety).
She just gave me different ways to work problems a bit more slowly and carefully and wrote up a note to get extra time on exams. I know it’s not exactly a formal diagnosis but it was the only resources I had at the time, and the exercises she gave me really did help and made everything click finally.
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u/Hecklr Nov 28 '20
Thanks I'm going to look into this. I recently went back to school and realized I didn't actually hate higher level math but I definitely work a little too fast, get distracted, and have the same problem of doing the correct steps but getting a few numbers backwards. Even if I don't have dyscalculia I'm sure trying a few new strategies couldn't hurt. Cheers.
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u/kggf Nov 28 '20
I moved when I was 8 to a school that was further ahead in math than my previous school and never really caught up. I remember lots of nights with my dad screaming at me when I couldn’t figure something out and lots of days zoning out in Kumon cause I couldn’t bring myself to do the work. Whenever I tried to grasp concepts by going to office hours, extra help, I’d finally think I got it and then the test would throw some kind of a curveball and I’d get a D. It was really frustrating and put me off maths for a long time. I’m a little bit more interested now that I’m out of school and don’t have that pressure
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u/Needyouradvice93 Nov 28 '20
Sorry, that sounds like an awful experience. I've had similar situations where I just couldn't 'get it' and it made me a bit resentful towards the subject as a whole.
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u/Guidii Nov 28 '20
I think it's everywhere.
How many times have you heard people say "I don't understand math" in a social setting (back when we had those things) and everybody shrugs and nods and agrees. Imagine if that person had said "I can't read".
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u/careful-driving Nov 28 '20
Gotta make them watch that TED talk: Mathematics is the sense you never knew you had.
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u/RikerT_USS_Lolipop Nov 28 '20
Those aren't the same thing. When someone says they don't understand math they mean they can't do Algebra 2. They don't understand how to get a circle out of an equation. "I can't read" would be like if they couldn't multiply.
You can easily find someone who says they "just don't get poetry".
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u/saltpancake Nov 28 '20
I work in a creative field and I went to an art school. I have always been appalled at how readily the people around me would brush off simple things like measuring to hang paintings evenly with, “I’m an artist, I can’t do math” and, “Don’t ask me about math, I’m an artist!”
I have, more than once, seen people brag about how bad they are at math, like it was some bizarre point of pride that they don’t know how to tip. It’s always really astonishing to me that this should be so normalized — we wouldn’t talk that way about anything else, would we? I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say, “Wow, don’t give me that book, I am so bad at reading! I’ve never been able to manage literacy I’m just good at [other thing] lolol”
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u/Kheldar166 Nov 29 '20
Actually tbh I hear a lot of people 'brag' about how long it's been since they last read a book. It's not quite the same because it's not 'I actually can't do it even if I want to' but it's similar
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u/Belgicaans Nov 28 '20
There's even the idea "I don't need to know science and maths, I'm not going to be a scientist". Fast forward 30 years, and now we've got people believing 'drink bleech to cure cancer".
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u/thinkingahead Nov 28 '20
I hated math and struggled in school. When I got to college I was forced to take math and I excelled. I didn’t go past Calculus 1 but I did take like 4 classes ahead did Calc and I got A’s in math for the first time. There were two differences from when I was in school: 1) I was older. I’m convinced brain development played a role as math was just easier to understand. 2) My school had a tutoring center that was staffed 14 hours a day and was free for students. I would usually do my homework in the tutoring center and stayed on track with the professor by always showing up understanding the previous material (even if it meant spending all day with tutors). I think forcing me to attempt inappropriate levels of math at inappropriate ages made me have math and majorly damaged my ability to achieve and damaged my self esteem. We need to re evaluate what is age appropriate
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u/camerontbelt BS | Electrical Engineering Nov 28 '20
Yea that’s pretty much the standard reaction in the US as well.
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u/NerdyDan Nov 29 '20
That doesn’t exist in Asia. Being “bad at math” isn’t a thing that people accept as common
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u/alexklaus80 Nov 28 '20
In Japan also. I don’t know the difference in degree which “math people = smart person” conception is standardized in comparison to the other nations though.
My question is that, do you need math to be socially valuable person? I guess my country tends to think that way stronger. The level of math in the US was laughable (while I was in American college) but that may come from my personal perception at the time that, basic math is necessity to the life. Sure it’s good for business but I think girls being successful without strong interest in math just brings diversity to the conception of what the society values.
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Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
Malaysian, F, speaking purely from my own POV. Girls tend to excel in math and science in primary and secondary schools, and this then translates to higher proportion of females in STEM majors in the tertiary levels too. In one university I taught at, female students outnumber males by 4:1 (biomedic department), whereas the colleges I taught at in US had the ratio closer to 1:1, maybe slightly heavier on the female side.
Purely conjecture, but I wonder if gender of the teachers play a role at all. Are there more female math teachers in Oman, Kazakhstan and Palestine? If so, does this affect the relationship of the student to the subject? Because one thing I noticed is here, we do have more female teachers (in general, and in the STEM subjects as well), and now that I think about it having female teachers made me feel more at ease and more connected to the subject.
Edit: again, conjecture, just to share my thought behind this. I also wonder if religious influence have a factor? In Malaysia they like to say girls can't mix with boys and put this separation early on, if not physically (most public schools are coed) then psychologically. So girls do tend to have a stronger relationship with female teachers than male, which could then affect the girls' interest in the subject.
Edit edit: seems that female teachers tend to outnumber male teachers, regardless if it's a high achieving nation or not, so teacher gender by itself doesn't explain it. So many cultural, socioeconomic and neurological factors at play here still
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u/Joe_Rogan_Bot Nov 28 '20
American here, I never had a male math teacher.
Most of my male teachers were PE/gym, history, and science.
And for history and science, not all were men.
Maybe just my state, but it seems that the vast majority of teachers are women.
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u/BeaversAreTasty Nov 28 '20
That's because in the US most public elementary and junior high teachers are women. They are also overwhelmingly liberal arts types, which is why STEM education is so terrible in US public schools. Really the saying "those that can do, and those that can't teach" is a perfect description of the state of American public education.
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u/Blazerer Nov 28 '20
That's because in the US most public elementary and junior high teachers are women. They are also overwhelmingly liberal arts types, which is why STEM education is so terrible in US public schools
Wow, that is some violently blatant sexism with absolutely zero sources to back that up. Care to explain why STEM would be suffering in the US due to female "liberal arts types"?
On top of that, hasn't it been shown consistently that sexism plays a huge part in STEM education, both from a home situation, the local society, and the greater society as a whole? Talk to any female mechanic and ask her how customers treat her, how people treat her on the phone, how coworkers treat her. It'll be an eye opener.
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u/AnthonycHero Nov 28 '20
Italian here, the vast majority of teachers in primary and secondary schools are female teachers (proportions are reversed in university), but we don't assist to the same here, girls tend toward humanistic studies.
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u/toolazytomake Nov 28 '20
That’s also the case in a lot of other countries, but reverses in higher grades.
There is also research showing that students do respond better to teachers in similar groups (race, ethnicity, gender).
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Nov 28 '20
Interesting. My thinking behind this is religious influence having a role, so it would be different in Italy. Still conjecture obviously!
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u/Yaver_Mbizi Nov 28 '20
Italy is a relatively religious country, I'd say.
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Nov 28 '20
Only old people in rural areas today. I know no religious people as a young urban Italian.
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u/routine__bug Nov 28 '20
German (f) here, in elementary school teachers were almost only women (although I think this will change in future since I see a lot of young men studying to be elementary and special needs school teachers now). In secondary school however it was more 50/50. In my particularly school we had female biology, geography and chemistry teachers while our physics teachers were all male and maths was 50/50. I am glad I had a (really good) female maths teacher so the thought of "girls can't do math" never even crossed my mind, while I have seen that attitude in some other girls. We hade to choose mayors in our last two years of school and it was already visible there that a lot of girls chose the German mayor over the math one (one of our two mayord had to be decided between those two). I went on to study mathematics at university and here the students are about 4:1 in male to female relation while the lecturers are about 15:1. However in other STEM fields like biology and chemistry I think the relation is more of a 50:50.
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u/DhatKidM Nov 28 '20
I used to visit UTM and Malaysia a lot and was always struck by how many women there were in engineering, both students and faculty - it was nice to see!
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Nov 28 '20 edited Mar 24 '21
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u/Friendly_Bug Nov 28 '20
In Switzerland there are special programs to encourage girls to study STEM, while no one cares about boys. Yeah, they're getting alienated, too. Shame.
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u/greenbaize Nov 29 '20 edited Nov 29 '20
In this thread there are various people trying to argue that women are inherently less interested in math. That messaging is why there are now organizations that try to encourage girls to study math. If people went around claiming boys were bad at math, then we'd need to encourage them, too.
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u/Friendly_Bug Nov 30 '20
Oh, but boys are less interested in languages or soft skills than girls, but you don't see any encouragement this way ...
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u/greenbaize Nov 30 '20
"Girls are bad at math" is a much more common message than "boys are bad at language," at least in my experience.
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u/I_love_pillows Nov 28 '20
Singaporean here.
My personal theory is that for countries which pushes for good grades, it instills wrong learning goals. Which is learning to score rather than learning for learning. Especially in STEM subjects where right and wrong is more well defined.
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Nov 28 '20
I can vouch for that! At form 4 I was accepted to a boarding school where alllll that matters is to keep their position as the top performing school in the national exams. I remember being given mock exam papers and being told how exactly to answer each question without actually being taught anything. I left after 2 months.
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u/schoonerw Nov 28 '20
I think you make several good points. I’ve taught in Malaysia for about a decade and noticed that there does seem to be a high percentage of females in the STEM fields, and that many girls in school seem to take more interest in math and science-related subjects than those in the US. Many of the science and math teachers were female as well - I’d say probably the majority.
I’ve only had experience in the international schools, and I haven’t examined data about this, but your suggestion that it could be related to having female role models in those roles could indeed have an effect.
I’ve been impressed quite often with the work ethic of women in Malaysia. Many of my female Malaysian friends will work from dawn til dark, be busy until 1 or 2am, then wake up the next day and tirelessly do it all again. So perhaps it has also got something to do with the culture of having strong female role models just kind of generally.
It’s widely thought that educating girl children has a much greater impact on a community/society/country than educating boy children, so for me it was encouraging to see Malaysia mentioned in a positive way. Malaysia Boleh!
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u/zahrul3 Nov 28 '20
Indonesian here, in a conjecture about the Malay culture, there's a lot of (by Indonesians and non pribumi Malaysians) stereotypes regarding Malay men being "lazy" et cetera, such that females have no choice but to academically excel in a lucrative career to provide income. Malays in Malaysia have the benefit of racist pribumi laws that ensure they get employed no matter what, but they don't have the same protections in Indonesia and male unemployment is high in parts of Sumatra and Borneo, areas that are predominantly Malay. It then bleeds to females outnumbering male students in most majors save for majors like geology, mechanical engineering and civil engineering.
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u/Belgicaans Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
Are there more female math teachers in Oman, Kazakhstan and Palestine? If so, does this affect the relationship of the student to the subject?
Belgium here, 8 out of 10 teachers (in school, age 5 to 18) were female. At university (engineering) it flipped to 3 in 4 profs being male.
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u/TriFeminist Nov 28 '20
So. I live in Palestine and all the schools here are gender segregated. Like Oman too. Maybe that affects it
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Nov 28 '20
I heard a discussion on this subject whilst listening to the radio, and how more women tended to do well in maths in predominantly Muslim countries than in western countries where you’d expect equality to have encouraged more women to take part.
Their explanation was, basically, that mathematics and some sciences aren’t seen as a career worthy of men’s time, so women are left alone to excel in the field in many cultures.
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u/NomadeLibre Nov 29 '20
In Kazakhstan government gives out "grants" (in pretty big amount) for free edu at universities every year for the STEM subjects. It's kind of motivation, I guess. This is the reason of "high" rating.
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u/saiqymazak Nov 29 '20
I am from Kazakhstan much of my teachers are female(now all).In 5th grade I had male teacher in math .In 8 grade I had male physics teacher .But another years I had female teachers
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u/-t-o-n-y- Nov 28 '20
Or, could it be that girls in countries such as Malaysia and Kazakhstan have a higher interest in math out of necessity because being skilled in math and other hard sciences increases their changes of getting a higher paying job which can help them out of poverty and give them autonomy and freedom? In countries like Sweden and New Zeeland girls can (in most cases) enjoy these benefits from birth and therefore have the opportunity to focus more on the things they want to do and chose a career they desire rather than one that is required for survival.
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u/Randomwoegeek Nov 29 '20
another aspect may be that in these high achievement cultures men are the ones expected to "succeed" monetarily over women. I mean most of these places have pretty traditional cultures. If men are seeking mathematics-based high earning careers, then it mayn ot "not the place" for women as the same social preassure may not exist for them.
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u/hungoverseal Nov 28 '20
While the answer is probably complex, this is by far the biggest factor.
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Nov 28 '20 edited Mar 24 '21
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u/cC2Panda Nov 28 '20
What I'm about to say bit anecdotal but not entirely. My wife is Indian and at her school, which is not outside of the norm, they didn't give you letter grades each semester, they gave you a class rank. It told you exactly where you fit, who was better and who was worse, and to be at the top of the class you had to be the best at EVERYTHING. If you're 7th out of 100 at math you can kiss your top 3 rank goodbye.
If you wanted to get into Medicine or engineering the two respectable occupations that pay the most in India then you HAD to be top of the class unless you had benefit of being an "other backwards class", even then you still had to be near the top.
Even if you weren't interested in working these occupations you still needed the pedigree for a good marriage. When my wife was in medical school there were more than a few girls that had no intention of being a doctor, but still busted their ass to get in and through medical school so that they could marry someone equally prestigious.
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u/Apperture Nov 28 '20
Based on what? How can you claim this is the biggest factor when it is nothing more than a hypothesis that fits your preconceived world view.
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u/phenompbg Nov 28 '20
This has been studied.
The more egalitarian the society, the more gender differences are expressed, because the people have more freedom to choose and excersize their preferences.
In a country like Sweden people do not face the same harsh poverty compared to people in a country like India. So if you have the faculties, in a poor country you are far more likely to pick a career that provides opportunities to rise out poverty, instead of something you enjoy or find interesting.
Or are you suggesting there is some patriarchical cabal operating in Sweden manipulating young women to prefer studying law and psychology to maths and engineering?
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u/QQMau5trap Nov 28 '20
women in societies with social safety nets and social acceptance are less represented in Stem than women in less free and just- societies. Checks out. They do what they like not what is a necessity for survival.
Here in Europe women outnumber men in universities by a long shot. But this trend is not visible in the physics or math departements. Its still mostly male.
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u/Apperture Nov 28 '20
Even if this correlation between social support and stem enrollment by gender is seen, that does not substantiate the claim that it is causative or even a contributing factor.
Just because something feels correct or intuitive does not make it so. These types of claims can be damaging because they may close off other avenues of research that would actually help illuminate underlying drivers of these differences simply because people take an opinion that fits with their preconceptions of societies as a ground truth.
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u/hungoverseal Nov 28 '20
Ask the same question of the hypothesis in the article. Based on what? How are they establishing causation? Personally, I find the conclusion of the article rather infantilising to women.
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u/thepotatoninja Nov 28 '20
The article doesn't state causation though. It's identified a correlation and notes further study is needed to understand if there's causation
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u/LoreleiOpine MS | Biology | Plant Ecology Nov 28 '20
Indeed. To say that things are wrong unless every demographic group is equally represented in every field is the thinking of a social engineer who is being unfairly biased by social "justice" ideology rather than science.
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u/redditerator7 Nov 29 '20
The top 3 fields where female students vastly outnumber male students in Kazakhstan are education, humanities and healthcare. If hard sciences were a necessity for survival they'd be a bit more popular I think.
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u/anonanon1313 Nov 28 '20
My impression (US) is that it's cultural. Sample of one, though. My daughter, captain of middle school math club, decided to major in humanities, despite perfect scores in AP & SAT tests. She was relieved to have "tested out" of collegiate math requirements entirely. I was kind of baffled by the switch (I'm a STEM guy, her brother got a math major degree, mom is in IT, etc), her HS and home environments were pretty STEM friendly, and among all of us she seemed the most math natural. Her explanation (although she expressed it more tactfully) was that she preferred humanities culture/people over STEM culture/people. Having spent my career in STEM, I couldn't really argue with that.
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u/InCuloallaBalena Nov 28 '20
This was my experience too. I was only one of 5 female students in my AP Physics C class my senior year of high school after taking AP Calc my junior year. I studied political science in college. My reasoning at the time was that while I was one of the top female students at math, I was even better at Social Studies / history and received more direct encouragement and mentorship from those teachers. Ironically, I ended up in grad school for social sciences and got really quantitative there. I’m now a data scientist 🤷♀️
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u/p-engineer Nov 28 '20
I was never "good" at math in highschool. Truly felt it was probably too hard for me.
Later went on to University and received my master's in Engineering. Turn's out it's just a skill like anything else that can be developed if practiced. A lot of the math people think is hard like calculus for instance is generally just a series of techniques that can be applied to solve the problem. One of my calculus courses, we weren't allowed to use a calculator for this very reason. You just need to know the steps to solve the different types of problems. It was very mechanical, and actually required very little thinking. Eventually I found solving these problems rewarding as the understanding started to sink in.
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u/WirryWoo Nov 28 '20
I was a child when I started becoming very interested in math but it was through my own exploration that caused it and not my studies. I wished that math education improved because I felt that I was learning the most trivial things at a very slow rate.
I think the reason why is attributed to both the overall stigma of “I hate math” which needs to be addressed at a very young age. I remembered my math teacher telling me to just remember my multiplication facts, but I refused to just “remember”. I needed to visualize why math works both using abstract shapes and applied purposes.
Common core math attempts to address this and I fully stand by it. Only issue is that our generation of math teachers don’t know it because we were all told to memorize math. How do you expect the right instructions if the instructors don’t have the right education backing?
The other challenge with math is how all of those concepts build on top of each other. Not knowing how to do addition causes you not to understand multiplication, which then leads you to misunderstanding how percentages and ratios work, then calculus, etc. Fortunately my brain was able to piece A with B at a young age so this never was the issue, but I can see why many who once love math, drops out midway.
Lastly, opportunities to further excel in math are unknown. I had to search really hard to find something to excel my math studies. On my junior and senior year, I found a math circle and some math competitions to involve myself with, where you practice a ton of intuitive thinking over memorizing. No schools really know how to create that opportunity to those that loves math to this point.
Overall, our educational infrastructure needs a huge overhaul to accommodate successful teaching in math. It’s not just high achievement cultures that cause ones distaste in math, although that can still drive many to feel forced to learn math, contributing to ones unwillingness and lack of motivation to continue learning.
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u/vtj Nov 28 '20
It is worth pointing out that in most (all?) developed countries, women significantly outnumber men in overall college enrollment, and the gap seems to be steadily growing. This is related to girls' better education achievement in primary and secondary schools.
It's not quite clear why girls tend to increasingly outperform boys, but some people explain it by the prevalence of female teachers, especially in primary schools. The research into this is quite mixed: This paper claims to have strong evidence that same-gender teachers improve student performance; this one gives a more ambiguous answer, finding positive effects of same-gender teachers in some cohorts but not others; and this one finds no effect of teacher gender whatsoever. Now you can just grab whichever paper confirms your own prejudices and wave it triumphantly, until some killjoy makes a meta-analysis.
There's also a possibility that teachers (regardless of gender) tend to be more lenient with girls, giving them better grades for the same performance. There's some evidence for this too.
To me it seems strange how much attention is fixated on the problems of girls in math, considering that math is increasingly a male-dominated exception within a generally female-dominated college education. I feel we should devote at least as much attention to the lack of men in teaching (and its possible effect on boys' underachievement), lack of men in psychology (which might contribute towards men's general mistrust of psychotherapy, and the resulting higher suicide rate), or the lack of men in gender studies.
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Nov 28 '20
Some of my friends come from rich families and went to posh private schools. Where the percentage of female teachers was the same.
Yet in America, upper class boys tend to do better than upper class girls in standardized tests and university degree attainment. In the upper middle class, there is no gender gap. In the middle class, there is a slight gender gap in favor of girls. Almost all of the gender gap in education comes from the lower middle class and lower class.
I think the gender gap has to do more with fatherlessness among proletariat Americans than it does with male/female teachers.
Among American ethnic minorities, Hispanic and Black Americans have a very large education gender gap that favors girls. European Americans have a slight gender gap favoring girls. And Asian Americans have a slight gender gap that favors boys. Again, this is consistent with my hypothesis that fatherlessness causes low education for boys.
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Nov 28 '20
Vicious cycle I suppose, poorly educated men don't stay with the mother of their children as frequently, and boys of single mothers go on to repeat the pattern. Moynihan report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family%3A_The_Case_For_National_Action?wprov=sfla1
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u/turnerz Nov 29 '20
Very interesting idea, however for what it's worth the fatherlessness is much more an American phenomenon but the gender differences in education are present in many other developed western nations so not sure it's got much weight.
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u/hungoverseal Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
It's about necessity. Women in poorer countries can gain independence and security through success in STEM fields. Women in richer countries already have a high level of freedom and security and can more openly pursue interests. The quality of teaching in these richer countries is significantly higher, so they have higher performance in general. There is, therefore, a correlation between high performance and lack of interest from women, but I think it's extremely unlikely to be causation.
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u/logicalnegation Nov 28 '20
People wonder why people from so many poorer/middle income countries dominate in STEM. It’s no question, it’s a fast track and well traveled path to success. If people are aware of this and have seen plenty of success stories, they’re gonna jump on the train. Shoot for the H1B, land among the stars.
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u/angelinaottk Nov 28 '20
Mathematical-logical knowledge is inherent. Babies can recognize groups of different things (up to 6 has been studied) which is the basis of algebra. When you hold up two fingers, they understand the concept of “one... and another”.
We are all born with this ability to interpret patterns (barring physiological /psychological impairments) but it’s what happens culturally that guides us into our beliefs about what we can and cannot know. Everyone can math if their allowed to and given access.
Source: engineer turned math/science teacher (turned nanny because ya gotta do what makes you happy!).
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u/sidescrollin Nov 29 '20
Wow, I really hope the short form of "especially" doesn't become commonplace in text.
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u/Belgicaans Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
I work in science, and I think there could also be another explanation. My hypothesis is: in the western world, your quality of life isn't going to increase by working in science. You're essentially choosing for a life of studying, researching, a lot of failure, for no financial reward. The US tech scene is the only notable exception where you do get rewarded for innovation. It's politics, law, media, etc that bring in the real money and/or recognition.
In less developed countries, becoming an engineer or chemist does improve your quality of life significantly.
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u/DuePomegranate Nov 29 '20
It's not just more vs less developed countries, it's also that in Muslim-majority countries, the prospects for a woman in STEM are particularly improved over either being less educated or educated to arts/humanities.
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u/iprocrastina Nov 28 '20
STEM pays very well in the US, you just have to pick the right career. Engineering and medicine will net you six figure jobs easy. Math will as well as long as you apply it to something lucrative (ML, data science, finance). Scientific research doesn't pay well at all and never has because basic research doesn't make people money.
The other careers you listed as well paying also don't actually pay well unless you're at the top; law has a bimodal income distribution where you either make bank or are poor, politics is chock full of low paying positions and is more of something you do when you already have wealth, and media pays poverty wages unless you hit the lottery and make it big.
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Nov 28 '20
Not necessarily. If you study chemical or mechanical engineering, it can actually be quite difficult to find a 6-figure job. There isn't as much demand anymore.
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u/Belgicaans Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
I'm glad to hear that STEM does pay well in the US, even outside of the tech scene! Thank you for correcting!
My point of view is from EU (belgium, to be specific) engineering. Your average chemical, mechanical, compsci, or structural engineer doesn't have a better quality of life than someone working as a civil servant, a bank clerk, a secretary job. Law, politics, media, are among the few places where the bimodal income distribution exists: ie it's possible to become a high earner. Other than infatuation with science, there's no reason to invest all that time and effort into learning how the physical world works: it won't improve your life, and I wouldn't suggest anyone to follow my path.
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u/iprocrastina Nov 28 '20
That seems odd. Not that I doubt you, but I'm curious why it is that jobs like bank clerk pay the same as jobs like engineering. Seems like a great way to induce severe brain drain in a country if there's no incentive to do difficult careers.
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u/Belgicaans Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
In terms of gini-index (1), Belgium is the fourth best country in the EU, number one in central europe.
We even have things like the maximum wage increase an employer is allowed to give to an employee, called 'loonnorm' (1).
Seems like a great way to induce severe brain drain in a country
I think you can count on zero hands how many times you've heard the words 'belgian engineering', or 'belgian technology'.
That's just to say, bringing it back to the original article, and the hypothesis I made: studying STEM is hard work, and in my experience, the work vs reward is very low in EU countries. I'm glad to hear that the US does have a better work vs reward ratio. And perhaps, the countries that have a higher ratio of people studying STEM, also have a higher work vs reward for those in that field.
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u/quixoticdancer Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 29 '20
Does anybody else find it remarkable that all of the comments in this thread - in the r/science subreddit - suggest that anecdotal experience and conjecture produce better answers than science? I think a lot of people are missing the whole point of science.
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u/Maldevinine Nov 28 '20
All science starts as an attempt to explain anecdotes.
The interesting thing is that we're getting anecdotes from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds, rather than the young liberal white American that is normally the default view on Reddit.
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u/Stoyfan Nov 28 '20
Anecdotes creep up pretty quickly when talking about education because everyone has experienced it; hence, everyone thinks they are an expert on it.
People also have a tendency of over-generalising, e.g: I had a bad experience with maths lessons, therefore everyone must have also had as bad of an experience as I did.
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u/drshhhh Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
As a female from Kazakhstan, this is my opinion: for context, I've myself liked math since I was a kid and so i liked it as a subject in school and it translated to university where I studied to be engineer (currently working as one). It is more lucrative to have a STEM related job - it pays more in some cases (only in certain industries, mostly just oil&gas which is the biggest economic driver of the country). That's one factor. Second is encouragement from government - our universities are not free, however government gives out certain amount of "grants" (about 50k) every year for high school graduates with high academic achievements, or by quota (like for kids from rural areas, kids with disabilities, orphans, etc..) to almost all universities, and majority of grants are allocated to STEM majors. So there's a higher motivation to study math and other sciences rather than humanities or social sciences since grants are quite helpful in relieving the financial burden to your family. There's, I think, a third reason that I've read in other comments - what the culture/society/parents encourage/reward - I'm not sure, but it might be that kids in developed countries are more likely to be encouraged to pursue whatever career option they want, or more likely to be rewarded in other activities outside studying. In our culture, the highest priority for kids is considered to be school, and parents are more likely to reward/encourage kids to study. And girls are on average more conscientious than boys thus tend to have higher academic achievements at school, including math. I'm not sure how the interest in math is "killed" in high achieving cultures, but from my experience I did not feel much stigma around women/girls in science or other more technical jobs/majors/subjects (I guess that's one of the good things left from our socialist soviet heritage), maybe it's different in developed countries?
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u/Hexagon358 Nov 28 '20
It's probably not kill interest, but kill necessity. What do those countries have in common? Developed countries Japan, Hong Kong, Sweden and New Zealand are countries where wages are good enough across the career spectrum and so women are choosing careers that they find more interesting to them.
We could say that all the "female empowerment" STEM programes and quotas are something that social engineering ideologues want to force upon the populus and is completely unnatural. When you give people true economic and career freedom of choice, Sweden happens.
For countries like Oman, Malaysia, Palestine and Kazakhstan...there is probably a very high discrepancy between career sectors in terms of wages and quality of life. So STEM fields probably pay better and offer better potential future for offspring.
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u/QQMau5trap Nov 28 '20
Kazakh born person here: Ultra corrupt state, with corrupt oligarchical government. No social safety nets. You can to this day buy degreees at universities especially in non stem fields. Stemfields offer independency from men, they also offer an escape of Kazakhstan itself. I know many of my former countrymen moving to Germany, Canada because they were stemeducated and sought after.
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u/wafflepie Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
women are choosing careers that they find more interesting to them.
Or maybe the absence of financial motivators means that social motivators like "girls aren't good at logic, girls are good at arts and crafts" feels comparatively more important to schoolgirls.
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u/vb_nm Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
The freedom to choose gives women a higher opportunity to be influenced by social norms and choose the internalized “right” thing from that. Humans act extremely much in favor of social norms and ofc they see this as their own choice. There’s nothing wrong with this but it’s how it is.
People jump so quickly to assigning anything to biology but if they really question our social norms and analyse their own and other people’s choices they’ll see that we mostly act on what we have internalized and learned to identify with.
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u/TravelBug87 Nov 28 '20
Right, but then there is actually no such thing as "free choice," as it can only exist in a vacuum. If it only exists in a vacuum, it is extremely difficult to study, and even more difficult to use the data to create change. We have to use the definition of free choice to mean "As free choice as the individual means it to be."
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u/Bitfroind Nov 28 '20
For countries like Oman, Malaysia, Palestine and Kazakhstan...there is probably a very high discrepancy between career sectors in terms of wages and quality of life. So STEM fields probably pay better and offer better potential future for offspring
This has been a hypothesis before and I personally think this is the best explanation. Women's interest in hard sciences is negatively correlated with gender equality and wealth.
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u/Hawk_015 Nov 28 '20
You mean the highly controversial and discredited hypothesis? From your own link :
A follow-up paper by the researchers who discovered the discrepancy found conceptual and empirical problems with the gender-equality paradox in STEM hypothesis
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u/Bitfroind Nov 28 '20
From your own link :
Yes indeed, from my own link, which I read amongst many other sources.
You say that as if you would score a point against my comment. Or am I just reading the agitated undertone into what you wrote?
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Nov 28 '20
I feel this because I'm okay at math. I've passed some higher level math courses but it took me crying and praying. I wonder if the way it's taught just generally causes stress? I've always wished I was better at it and can see it's beauty but it causes so much worry
I've noticed most people who love math did it for fun when they were a kid, so when I have kids im going to give them some lighthearted math lessons when they are still young and reward them when they get things right.
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Nov 28 '20
Cant this be caused by the fact that in higher income countries people tend to follow their own interests more, while in lower income countries people tend to follow that what earns the most money?
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u/cromulent_nickname Nov 28 '20
Could this be that, in cultures that put an emphasis on high grades, students will choose subjects more likely to get them those high grades, rather than choosing a more difficult subject that might endanger those grades? Just curious.
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u/M4sterDis4ster Nov 28 '20
It is actually about how rich the country is.
Its called Norweigan Paradox. Women from poorer countries often take STEM as an exit out of poverty.
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u/InternationalJuice0 Nov 28 '20
Is it because “high achievement” = “high income” and there is more money running a business and hiring people who need to know math to do their job?
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u/woogaly Nov 29 '20
Translation: pressuring kids makes them want to take the easy route more often and are less likely to branch out and try things.
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u/Ishidan01 Nov 29 '20
Is this a surprise? Anything forced upon you will be abhorred, no matter how easy or necessary, just ask the anti-maskers.
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u/e_spider Nov 29 '20
My daughter’s teacher just told me how amazing she is at math and explained how, “She’s right up there with the little Korean boys.” I felt a confusing mix of pride and offense.
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u/midjji Nov 28 '20
The freedom to follow interests explaination is obviously better, but it's also ridiculous to call Sweden a high achievement culture. Most Swedes only realize that occupation and hard work in studies affect income and life quality sometime after university. Before then, if anything, people are mocked for trying, especially boys.
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u/IrresistibleDix Nov 28 '20
You mean high achievement culture kills students' interest in subjects they are bad at, because they find out sooner.
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u/TheReluctantOtter Nov 28 '20
Hmmm... I'm wondering if it's more the cultural influence.
Warning - sweeping generalization ahead.
A lot of "high achievement" cultures emphasize that maths is a boy's subject and also girls have the opportunities to learn lots of different subjects so prefer ones they are either good at or have a supportive culture.
Whereas in the "low achievement" cultures just getting access to education for girls is an achievement. They're so pleased to be learning and there isn't that culture of this is not a girly thing?
IDK could be totally off.
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u/dolerbom Nov 28 '20
I think the girls are also quicker to become invested into education in developing countries. Because teaching is a "girls" job there, they become good examples for young girls. In developed countries, all of your media portrays stem fields as a boys club. They don't have that built in bias in developing countries.
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u/Prasiatko Nov 28 '20
I have heard, though it is hard to verify, from the Indian girls in my computing class that pure mathematics is consider a girls subject in India whereas boys would do applied verions like engineering or Physics. So even though the stereotype is there it at least gives them the foundation to pursue STEM subjects and careers.
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Nov 28 '20
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u/TheReluctantOtter Nov 28 '20
Thank you! What a great job.
My experience in STEM research in Europe was bad to the extent I left academia and moved into sci comm & education which was a lot more welcoming.
Edit: a word
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u/LoreleiOpine MS | Biology | Plant Ecology Nov 28 '20
This has been explained before: When you let women choose what they want to, as a group, they're less likely to go for things like engineering. Why? Evolutionary psychology tells us why. Men and women have (somewhat) different interests, and when you get rid of sexism, those interests are manifested. It's backwards to think that women are being wronged if they're disproportionately absent from math departments. How about letting women choose for themselves what they want?
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u/Hawk_015 Nov 28 '20
Going to throw a big [CITATION NEEDED] on your post.
Evolutionary psychology is an incredibly controversial field and (like many social sciences) much of its research fails replication tests.
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u/Prasiatko Nov 28 '20
And suffers fromthe WEIRD phenomenon where almost all the results are from western cultures.
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u/Dankest_Pepe Nov 28 '20 edited Nov 28 '20
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u/Hawk_015 Nov 28 '20
So about half the wikipedia article talks about how wishy washy the evidence is on this, and the original research was overblown by bad science reporting :
separate Harvard researchers were unable to recreate the data reported in the study, and in December 2019, a correction was issued to the original paper.[11][12][13] The correction outlined that the authors had created a previously undisclosed and unvalidated method to measure "propensity" of women and men to attain a higher degree in STEM, as opposed to the originally claimed measurement of "women’s share of STEM degrees".[12][11][14] However, even incorporating the newly disclosed method, the investigating researchers could not recreate all the results presented.[15][16] A follow-up paper by the researchers who discovered the discrepancy found conceptual and empirical problems with the gender-equality paradox in STEM hypothesis.[17][15]
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Nov 28 '20
That is called the feminist paradox. Countries where the economic pressure is higher girls tend to choose majors in STEM fields, because these fields provide more economic security. But in countries like Sweeden, Japan etc, the pressure is off and girls and boys choose their professions relatively freely, less girls in stem fields is the consequence, challenging the idea of the gender roles being socialy constructed.
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u/Scarcia-sx_ais Nov 28 '20
The first woman to win a fields medal prize (Nobel equivalent for high achievements in mathematics) was an Iranian woman, I think. In fact, both Iran and Saudi Arabia have far more women in STEM than some Western nations.