I remain really skeptical.<p>If you believe this, then doing a fifteen-minute writing exercise at the start of a fifteen week course in which you "write about your values" rather than a different fifteen-minute writing exercise where you "write about other peoples values" leads you to understand introductory physics significantly better at the end, if you're a woman, or understand introductory physics significantly worse, if you're a man.<p>I could start speculating on mechanisms for this, but I think it's better to wait until the same effect has been replicated in a different place and a different time (and let's hope that none of those future test subjects have read this article or else they'll know what's up).<p>On the other hand, if one were to repeat this experiment one would have to wonder whether it's ethical to force male students to do a writing exercise if you have reason to believe that it will hinder their ability to learn physics.<p>Update: My alternative hypothesis is that all the competent male students who showed up for a Physics class and were given a silly "write about your values" exercise got so offended by such a frou-frou exercise in what was supposed to be a physics class that they dropped out and enrolled in something else.
<i>"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields."</i><p>I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth.<p>Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one.<p>Further, this is an <i>introductory</i> course.<p>The overwhelming number of <i>top</i> scientists are male. IQ tests (FWIW) also place more males at <i>both</i> the top and bottom ends, with females clustered more around the middle. One interpretation there is that nature can afford to take more chances with males, so there are more extremes.<p>I can think of at least one factor that <i>is</i> physical, even though it doesn't have to do with mental capacity <i>per se</i>. A major impediment to learning tends to be psychological laziness; anything that gets us to push past this means we are using more of our capacity. Testosterone increases risk-taking behaviors and reduces complacency. This drive to constantly seek out the new and challenge the old might be sufficient by itself, even if there are no relevant neurological differences otherwise.<p>I also don't understand this push to try to equalize gender distribution. Even if the ONLY differences are social, it doesn't follow that it's <i>better</i> to socialize females in ANY given arbitrary manner just because they're female.<p>Clearly any field should be open to any individual who wishes to pursue it. Trying to equalize the numbers, given the current disparity, means pushing a <i>lot</i> of females into pursuing subjects they aren't interested in. Even if we posit that these fields have been traditionally male-biased, the <i>majority</i> of males are not interested in them.<p>This has to be open on an individual level, and whichever way it shakes out with regard to gender, it shakes out.<p>It's profoundly unfair to cite social differences and then blame colleges who only get people after 18 years of social indoctrination.
Odd results, with the male scores <i>dropping</i>, but I suspect that merely has to do with a small sample size (399 in the whole set).<p>This makes sense, especially as a number of people I know feel stupid because they have test anxiety. My wife included. "Non-"tests such as these seem like they could help quite a few, as they have the exact same physical location as real tests, but break the trend of habitual anxiety because little to nothing is on the line. Practice tests elsewhere don't share the classroom setting, and there's quite a bit of evidence that location influences memory / emotion, so it would seem they should be about as effective as they are at combating anxiety (ie: not much, and not for many (anecdotally)).<p>edit: <strikeout>Though, to be potentially inflammatory, this <i>does</i> seem to support the opposite stereotype of men having more control over (non-anger-based) emotions than women. Especially when you look at the original article (linked below by Locke1689: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596</a>), and see almost no difference in score distribution for men but <i>huge</i> changes for women in the B and C categories (A had almost no change - surprise, surprise, the ones without testing problems showed no gain).</strikeout>
Men dominate the physical sciences and mathematics, with the disparity growing as the subjects get more advanced. The notion that a 15-minute writing exercise can close this gap strains credulity.<p>For a hard-headed introduction to this subject, I recommend <i>The Blank Slate</i> by Steven Pinker. Women and men have different cognitive strengths: on average, women are more verbally fluent and are better at inferring emotional states from facial expressions and body language, whereas men are better at spatial rotations and abstract reasoning. Women do better or worse on typically "male" tasks depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles and the corresponding levels of androgens ("male" hormones) in their bloodstreams. Patients undergoing male-to-female sex-change operations do progressively worse on "male" tasks and better on "female" ones as the estrogen therapy progresses, with the opposite effect in female-to-male patients. And so on. While the bell curves substantially overlap, the notion that men and women are cognitively identical is scientifically untenable.<p>Perhaps the continuing disparity in the abstract sciences points to discrimination against women in those subjects. And yet, women make up approximately 56% of college graduates, with men at 44%—a 12-point gap. I find it telling that virtually no one decries <i>this</i> disparity, nor infers from it a systemic anti-male bias in higher education.<p>The authors of these kinds of studies clearly <i>want</i> there to be no gender gap. (The results of this study could reasonably be described as "the 15-minute writing test that boosts female learning and suppresses male learning".) When the political biases of the researchers are so evident, it's difficult to trust the results.
Can someone who has access post the original paper?
<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234</a>
If this is true, it seems we can completely replace all affirmative action, "women in X" programs and special resources, and all that other stuff with 30 minutes of writing.<p>This is fantastic - now we can stop spending millions on "women in X", and instead spend the money on real science. Right?
I can't believe that the article didn't even mention once that the exercise <i>decreased</i> male performance. The text was also full of assertions that are clearly politically motivated.
A popular but fairly comprehensive summary about stereotype threat research is at <a href="http://reducingstereotypethreat.org/" rel="nofollow">http://reducingstereotypethreat.org/</a>.
>Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you.<p>What has this got to do with physics and why are universities so interested in students' private lives?
Did values affirmation actually make men score lower? Or were they just ranked lower because women, on average, had higher absolute scores than the control?<p>Speaking of control, writing about values in a physics class could cause people otherwise interested in physics to lose interest in the class.
The fact that they tinkered with the Y axis scaling on the graph makes me quite suspicious of their results. I admit it is knee jerk, but anytime I see charts asking me to compare things and the scales are different I just wonder what else someone felt the need to obscure.
When I was 12 years old we were forced to take Tae Kwon Do in school for some odd reason (yes an American school). At the end of the practice session we would all sit around in a circle in the brightly light gym/dancing room with the instructor in the center. He would tell us to close our eyes for 2 minutes and when we were told to reopen them the lights seemed brighter. We were told if we did this once a week every week in life we would succeed no matter what. Well I have in my opinion succeeded in life so it must be because of the eye drill.
I've always been offended that there's a gender gap when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Perhaps a writing exercise could be devised that would erase the horrible, oppressive and misogynistic stereotype that prevents men from becoming pregnant and giving birth. That is necessary if we are to ever achieve true equality.<p>(cheek <- tongue)
confirms my everyday anecdotal observations - for women to get better men should get worse. Why women can't just reach men's level without need to lower the men' level? While taking a bit longer and more work, wouldn't that way it be more beneficial for human species?