Last year there was a WSJ article on how women in the workplace tend not to treat each other well, to such an extent that a majority feel their male bosses treat them better than do their female bosses!

Anybody who doesn't understand this hasn't worked in an office full of women. However it is incorrect to assume women in power treat other women badly. A significant percentage treat EVERYONE badly. Some men have egomaniacal problems but that is NOTHING compared to the evil of women in an office setting.

/the scars run deep

McKellar instead sees individual girls acting counter to their own best interests


On the other hand, it could be that individual girls are acting in the best interests of their reproductive success.

Culture provides another aspect of selection.

Over the last few hundred to several thousand years males, it could be said, have created a unique economic environment. It is one that they work hard to fit into when they grow up.

However, given that females need resources if they are to successfully rear their offspring, they face a choice: Do they rely on a male to provide those resources, or do they try to acquire the resources themselves. While there are some traditional avenues for females to acquire resources themselves, a new one is to either fit into some role in this new economic environment males have created, or to pry open the door to more lucrative positions in it through legislation :-), because, let's face it, unless they are tomboys, they have not developed good skills in existing in a male culture.

I could definitely see this working for the purpose stated in the title ("to survive middle school math"). However, I doubt that it will get many more women to seriously get into math, to the level that they become math majors or co-author theorems like the author.

Why, you ask? For the same reason that reading a book about social situations that described the people as if they were subatomic particles wouldn't somehow magically turn me into a people-person, who loves to socialize and who suddenly is an expert on why others behave the way they do. A book that explains social behavior using arguments from evolutionary theory could in fact give me some insight, but even that kind of understanding would be very different from the intuitive grasp possessed by those gifted in that area, and also I don't know what the analogous approach would be in the other direction (i.e to teach scientific thinking to those people).

Mathematical concepts are mathematical concepts, whether the quantities being described are colors of make-up, home runs scored by a baseball team, or planets in a galaxy. Math is all about generalization, and if you can't move beyond a specific real-life example to see the underlying conceptual framework, it seems to me that your brain is likely not "made" for higher math (whether it's "made" that way by genetics, hormones, early environment, or whatever doesn't really matter). It seems to me that the girls whose brains are "primed" to think mathematically shouldn't care whether boys are mentioned in the examples, just as I'm sure I would grasped algebra well even if all the examples had been about make-up, relationships, and other stuff that in and of itself bored me. I mean, do you really think that a woman will do better when asked to mentally rotate a cute teddy bear than when asked to rotate a football? That's the kind of thing I sometimes think some people assume will happen.

The only girls I see being driven into advanced math by a book like this is those few who have a strong attraction to both girly subjects AND math, and who would only shy away from math in order to look good to boys. It won't do anything to give girls more of the cognitive aptitudes necessary to do math at a high level.

It also won't do anything to change the fact that some guys prefer women who are not into math, though judging from some of the comments on the linked-to blog posts (and comments from other guys on here :-) ), there are certainly guys who aren't that way!

By the way...

This is kind of off topic, but I didn't get to read the post below about "free lunch learning" until yesterday. One of the things I wondered while reading that was that maybe FLL is responsible for some of the general group differences in cognitive aptitudes.

One of the common arguments made by social constructionists against evolutionary "ancestral environment" explanations for group differences in the ability to do math, science, or engineering is that these fields didn't exist back then (i.e. they must be taught in a very lengthy and specific manner). Another is that there are not enough genes to specify the circuitry needed for the complex mental functions that set apart the top performers in the actual career world. The idea that a small number of connections may prime a neural network to learn a complex behavior lends some plausibility to the idea that there may be biological factors that enable performance in specific domains. If a brain has some pre-wired connections that encode a readiness to process spatial information, for example, these may allow processes like FLL and the Baldwin effect to construct a sophisticated visuospatial processing network, while contributing much less to performance in other areas.

I could definitely see this working for the purpose stated in the title ("to survive middle school math"). However, I doubt that it will get many more women to seriously get into math, to the level that they become math majors or co-author theorems like the author.

Sure, but there's a vast chasm between helping with the survival of middle school math, and co-authoring a proof that results in an Erdos number of 3. I would hazard that many active research scientists couldn't do the latter.

If the book gets some women to continue with math long enough to realize that it has applications in many other areas, it will have done a great service.

orthodox "women in science" activism

??? not sure what this means, but it sounds like I should be hearing it as "cranky fat broads with hairy legs ranting about the patriarchy."

People interested in women in science only have validity if they're also hotties?
Isn't that an awfully broad stereotype?

Hmm.

People interested in women in science only have validity if they're also hotties?

Well, I'm just saying which views I agree with -- the fact that the mean levels of looks and femininity for these women happens to be higher than the means of those I disagree with must have some underlying cause, which I have nothing to do with.

It's easy to see what it is: the more attractive and feminine women, who were stylish or cheerleaders or what-have-you in high school / college, are more likely to be sick and tired of their fellow "sisters" attempting to shame them away from looking pleasant and professional, carrying themselves gracefully, and embodying "conventional femininity" in general.

The orthodox activists see getting more women into math & science as part of a larger social / cultural re-engineering ("transformation"). The ones I agree with are suspicious of such plans, and it's no surprise -- the girly cheerleaders and style icons are the first ones the orthodox activists would send to re-education camps once the revolution began.

Looc says--women in offices, bad, evil--"scars run deep>"

Sorry to hear that, but hear ye:
Men love a catfight.
I learned this from Seinfeld, when guys at work meowed Elaine for her unflattering comments about a co-worker, whom they had already mocked in an even nastier way. She was just playing along--but how can you meow men? Can you bark them? Snake them? Wolf them? Those damn rules.
This "women in offices" article has repeated through just about every year yours truly has been in the workforce, rather like the "women in prison" movies, because there is always a new young group of females entering the workplace. Office-men less ruinously egomaniacal than office-women!? uh--whatever and maybe, but I beg to differ. I have known some odious females in offices and elsewhere, but when the male of the species focuses on a goal, he does it with concentration and to the hilt. This can be good: to wit, electricity. OTOH, whole populations have been dragged to hell by male egomaniacs. They just play by certain rules that women take too personally or don't take at all. Ego? Let me testify--I work in Washington, D.C.
but there's no time to go into the History of the World, and your scars run deep...
I, too, have both kinds of gender inflicted stigmata that I conceal, for the world contains 6 billion people and one never knows when one will have to work in offices with some of them.
I am sitting here in an office of mostly women, most of whom I like and respect as colleagues and this is not a terribly rare situation for any of us. At various times, I've had problems and been a problem, but that is chemistry. Two of the bosses I most admired were females, two of the worst were females.
Regarding those scars, and hoping you have inflicted none yourself: get a perspective.
I do suspect that women who wend or weasle their way to what they consider the "top" may have certain exaggerated qualities. But an inordinate number of whistleblowers on corporate and political wrongdoing have been female, perhaps because they just don't fit in or feel the pressure to play by the rules, and nowadays it takes bravery. I have known whistleblowers and do-gooders who got killed for doing what they did.
Catherine Austin Fitts was too well known for them to destroy though they dismissed her when she questioned the disappearance of billions of dollars during a certain administration; she is one of my heroes--oops, heroines--she is incredible. She worked in an office. http://www.solari.com/about/ca_f...t/ ca_fitts.html.
The fair sex was disproportionately involved in societal reform and urging more humane treatment of animals going back to the 18th century. Sometimes they even worked in offices while doing these things.
Years ago, a sexy friend of mine told her employment agency she didn't want to work for a woman because of jealousy. She liked other women, but just not in that situation. But now--she has had female bosses she's liked in a major D.C. law firm. You never know until you've worked in offices long enough to find out.

"It also won't do anything to change the fact that some guys prefer women who are not into math, though judging from some of the comments on the linked-to blog posts (and comments from other guys on here :-) ), there are certainly guys who aren't that way!"


When I was in highschool I heard that smartest kid in our elementary school class, a girl, deliberately got poor marks in math because "boys don't like girls who are good in math."
She had changed from a friendly, down to earth kid, into a puke-inducing entity. For her own good, I hope she either grew out of it or snagged some rick sucker, because i don't think she was really popular with anybody. Phonies never truly are. Probably she ended up like most females these days, supporting herself, hampered by poor math skills.

I for one certainly like women who are good at Math.

I generally get on best with highly intelligent women, who have an aptitude for Math, Logic or quantitative thinking... to me that's more important than anything else...

Well except having a big ass of course ;)

"looking pleasant and professional"

And you know, I can think of oh *so* many MALE scientists who conform to that ideal....
Should men also kick things up a notch, then? Cause the guys around here are sure letting the team down. :D

Bug girl, please read the post you're commenting on. From paragraph 6:

(And guys, lest you think you're going to get off easily, I have a post in the works on improving your personal appearance, as befits a mature and responsible professional.)

lucrezia deskset

I hear what you are saying but I worked for 3 versions of this woman over my last 5 years in Corporate America.

http://www.nbc.com/The_Office/bi...ios/ #bio=kinsey

I should note that the clones I worked for ranged from 200% to 500% more evil than the TV character.

/will never go back to corporate America

agnostic: The obvious guess here is that women who are more successful being feminine tend to be less interested in de-emphasizing femininity. Similarly, men who are more successful at being masculine (say, they're good at sports, athletic, good with tools, etc.) have little incentive to de-emphasize that stuff.

bug_girl: Yeah, ranting about the patriarchy is a turn off. But developing a mathematical model of the patriarchy and how it's maintained, now *that* would be hot. :)

Razib:

I suspect keeping girls interested in math in middle school is a bigger win than you think. If you keep up, you can start finding math really fascinating later. If you decide you don't like math at 12, maybe you won't ever start finding it that interesting, or maybe you'll have a much bigger uphill climb catching up than you should.

That's probably not primarily about making mathematicians, though it may affect that. It's about making scientists and engineers, who will have a much easier time if they jump right into calc and stat their first semester of college, and if they aren't starting college with the assumption that math is something they'd rather avoid or that is dull but necessary.

I was responding to your comment, not the post.

And you haven't written the post about men yet, either :)

When I was in highschool I heard that smartest kid in our elementary school class, a girl, deliberately got poor marks in math because "boys don't like girls who are good in math."

That's the kind of thing I hope doesn't happen too often anymore. As you say, there's nothing to gain in being a phony. I would take a girl who is naturally interested in typically feminine things, and disinterested in math and science, over one who is a math/science type and acts like such, but an impostor is worse than either of those.

I participated once as a datapoint in a survey about women in science. When I've read the output, there were again these yadda-yadda tiresome cliches about them poor girls turned from maths for ever by an insensitive remark of their high school teacher.

To this I can only say a hearty "bah" - if the girl can't cope with an insensitive remark, I can't imagine how this shy flower would do in the rough world of grant applications or peer reviews ;-)))

I was a math major many, many years ago. I did manage to finish the program, but I had to change direction after hitting a brick wall with first course in advanced calculus. So the grad school dream of complex variables, topology, etc. had to give way to more earthy stuff like statistics. Oh well.

I do remember a couple of girls back then who were exceptionally good at math, although I don't known what they wound up doing with it.

I have never noticed gender differences among my applied maths students.

With reference to the above comment: perhaps those girls became university lecturers.

"It is telling that the only two anecdotes in which a girl is made to feel awful about her math skills involve female adversaries."

* * *

"That the true sources of present-day female underachievement have little to do with patriarchal oppression could only be a surprise to someone who just landed here from Mars."

The fact that it is sometimes, frequently, or even *always* other females who provide the direct influences that push girls away from math is *completely* orthogonal to whether it is a result of patriarchal oppression.

You are either extremely clueless about feminist theory, or you are being disingenuous in making this argument.