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\n[1] Dar-Nimrod, I., & Heine, S. J. (2006). Exposure to scientific theories affects women’s math performance. Science, 314(5798), 435-435.<\/p>\n
This post was originally published in 2006 on the Alphapsy blog.<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/p>\n Comments<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. On Friday 20 October 2006 by olivier<\/p>\n I happened to be reading Michael Dummett’s “Grammar and Style”, in which you can read, in the entry titled “Gender and sex”:<\/p>\n “The word gender used to be applied exclusively to nouns, pronouns and adjectives in Indo-European and semitic languages to indicate the distinction between masculine and feminine (or between masculine, feminine and neuter. one of the uses of the world sex was to distinguish between male and female human beings and animals.<\/p>\n Anthropologists borrowed the word gender from the grammarians in order to distinguish social from biological classification: a transvestite might be of the female gender, though of the male sex. For a reason obscure to me, feminists have recently promoted the use of gender as a substitute for the word sex in the use mentioned above, even when the distinction is purely biological; they still, however, speak of sexism and not of genderism.<\/p>\n The change seems pointless, and is surely toi be depreated; it make sit impossible or at least clumsy, for example, to explain that in English the gender of the third-person pronoun depends on the sex of the person referred to (…). It also ruins the immortal line spoken by Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, “It’s a whole different sex”.<\/p>\n 2. On Thursday 26 October 2006 by Sandy G<\/p>\n This is an important experiment, but the results should be interpreted in a slightly different manner, with more emphasis on the differences in the underlying conceptualisation of Mathematical ability instead of that based on stereotype threat model alone.<\/p>\n I have attempted exactly such an interpretation in my blog post on The Mouse Trap<\/em> : “Gender bias in Math skills : a case of Traits Vs. Environment\/Effort feedback?”; in the absence of the mediating mechanism based on different conceptualisation of Math ability, it seems problematic to me that experiential explanation do not prime the gender stereotype, but genetic explanations do! What could be the rationale behind that?<\/p>\n 3. On Thursday 26 October 2006 by hugo<\/p>\n I’ve read your post, and I like your explanation. The explanation based on stereotype and yours are not incompatible (I guess). 4. On Monday 30 October 2006 by olivier<\/p>\n There are 2 nice posts at Cognitive Daily about stereotypes.<\/p>\n They say you can smother the cognitive impact of stereotypes by telling people how they work. Or you may expose them to positive stereotypes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An interesting study (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2006) [1] sheds some new light on the “gender and math” controversy, (in)famously reignited last year by Larry Summers. Ilan Dar-Nimrod and Steven Heine have just published a paper entitled “Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women’s Math Performance”. At first I though “oh, more science education means that women are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":693,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nTwo things I liked: you try to explain how the difference in the way skills are perceived (traits vs. acquired) can cause the difference in results (with people trying harder in the second case). I find this explication intuitively appealing. Moreover, you could link that with a huge literature (in personality psychology) on the ways people attribute their successes and failures to different causes (internal vs. external, etc.). It has been shown that depending on your ‘attribution mode’, the success with which you cope with failure (sic) will be very different.<\/p>\n