Having been chided by Alec for talking about military hardware, I shall return to the more customary topic of the insidious influence of patriarchy, leaving the tough stuff to the boys.;-)
I have been (for fun, you understand) reading the Programme for International Student Assessment's report on science and maths. You too can read all about it here. But be warned, the executive summary runs to 56 pages.
I'm intrigued to discover that they found little difference between how good boys and girls were at science:-
Males and females showed no difference in average science performance in the majority of countries, including 22 of the 30 OECD countries (Table 2.1c). • In 12 countries, females outperformed males, on average, while males outperformed females in 8 countries. Most of these differences were small. • In no OECD country was the gender difference larger than 12 points on the science scale. • Some partner countries showed larger differences. In Qatar and Jordan, females were 32 and 29 points ahead of males, respectively.But the difference they did find was in the kids idea of how good they were at science:-
Of the attitudes measured in PISA, the largest gender difference was observed in students’ selfconcept regarding science. In 22 out of the 30 OECD countries in the survey, males thought significantly more highly of their own science abilities than did females.Plus ca change, eh?
3 comments:
It's not just in science either - check this article which says that women consistently underestimate their own IQs (and men overestimate) based on a meta-analysis of 25 intelligence studies.
Now, here's an interesting point. This dataset shows that depression is far more common among women than men - 60 per thousand vs. 20 per thousand.
And, according to the theory of depressive realism, depression actually makes you more rational than healthy people.
So maybe the reason for the difference is that there are more depressed women, who are better able to assess their own intelligence than the (mentally healthy but deludedly optimistic) men?
"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."
--Virginia Woolf
Perhaps the causal relationship is not as you describe. Perhaps both women underestimating their abilities and them suffering more from depression have a common cause. Perhaps popular culture repeatedly lionises men and undermines women, leading to men and women viewing themselves differently.
Ha. Good point. It's always interested me that depression is the only mental illness more prevalent among women - schizophrenia, bipolar, etc are all much commoner among men.
Depression's also the commonest, and responsible (as I learned from watching QI) for more time off work than any other medical cause.
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