apricot7

This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.

The article you linked had a different take—that women are more adversely affected by pressure than are men.

The article had a different take, because I don't think your hypothesis is true: And I went through the American public school system very recently. There wasn't a single year in which it wasn't drilled into our heads by predominantly female teachers how much better girls are than boys at everything. Boys were the victim of daily jabs. There wasn't a single year in which we weren't told that the only reason girls have been traditionally worse at math is because mean boys make girls think they're worse.

This article...

http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discrimi...

...mentions something that I witnessed personally. Teachers tend to despise boys who act like traditional boys. Those boys are treated more harshly. Their answers are never given the benefit of the doubt. They're mad to feel like failures.

So I think the meme of "girls are taught they suck; boys are taught they're great" doesn't apply to the United States, and opposite has likely been true since the 70s or 80s.

Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable

I think they spend a lot of time and money giving special treatment to girls and women, trying to close innate performance gaps. If they wanted to be truly equitable, they'd do the same for boys (and maybe they're starting to, and we'll soon see results).

But even if Sweden were to do that, what then? They've spent a lot of time pursuing equal results, as though it's a goal in and of itself. Why should it be?

If you have two people, one of whom innately excels at math and the other innately excels at editing prose, why not encourage and foster those skills instead of fighting against them? Specialization isn't a bad thing; it's necessary for real progress to be made.

It wasn't roundly denounced as shoddy research, unless you're referring to certain groups being angry with the study.

Posts on Jezebel, Feministe and Tumblr were angry, and they tried to spin the results inaccurately. They claimed that the results indicated that female brains were different because of culture, and they claimed we should stop acting like there are innate non-physical differences between men and women.

Unfortunately for them, the differences in brain chemistry became pronounced not during the brain's most plastic years, but rapidly during puberty during the flood of sex hormones. And the study made that clear.

I don't know why the notion of different brain chemistry is so threatening to some groups, but it is what it is.

It depends on how we define "equal". Imagine a human society in which the physical strength of men and women are equal, and are kept equal through academic and government policy.

On one hand, that's an equal society. On the other hand, that's a tyrannical society which forcibly boosts girls and women at the expense of boys and men.

I think the Wikipedia article you linked to tends to support the theory that girls are receiving special treatment—countries in which girls are closing the gap in mathematics also tend to be the countries in which girls are extending their gap in reading.

You specifically mentioned Sweden as an example of equality. In Sweden, girls slightly outperform boys in mathematics, AND girls outperform boys in reading by a much larger margin than boys outperform girls in mathematics in any country.

Why is that touted as an example of equality?

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Sex differences in juvenile activities, such as rough and tumble play, peer preferences, and infant interest, share similarities in humans and monkeys. Thus if activity preferences shape toy preferences, male and female monkeys may show toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls.

We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization.

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Male monkeys preferred roughhousing and toys that developed their spatial intelligence. Compared to boys, female monkeys preferred dolls that developed other forms of intelligence.

Gender differences vary widely by culture. Stuff like gender differences in IQ is wholly inconsistent across different racial groups.

Interesting. I can't really find anything on this, and Wikipedia doesn't have anything either:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_psycho...

Are you referring to a study about a village where women were able to solve a puzzle faster than men?

For instance in some countries it's women who test better in math.

This would be shocking if it weren't true.

I'm curious to here what countries those are, because I suspect the countries that women test better in math will be the same countries that spend a disproportionate amount of time and money trying to improve women's math scores.

A possibly relevant example: Men and boys tend to have better spacial intelligence than women and girls. But as an Israeli (I think) study showed us, spending extra time instructing students how to pass a specific type of spatial intelligence test resulted in everyone doing well on those tests, not just the boys.

Let's think about this.

We know there are differences in brain chemistry between males and females, and those difference surge around puberty when sex hormones are flooding the system (rather than appearing gradually over time as a result of playing with different toys).

That said, the fact that males and females have different brains doesn't preclude other culture differences.

But why are these differences so similar across nearly every culture?

A close relative of ours might explain this: Monkeys! Male monkeys prefer playing with traditional male toys, like trucks and balls, while female monkeys prefer playing with traditional female toys, like dolls. Predisposition to prefer certain types of stimulus is quite likely hardcoded in every one of us. The study was conducted on two different species of monkey:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pre...

Are those boys to blame for their decision? If not, why are you campaigning to only push money in the direction of girls?