PB women aren't good at maths. What Fred wrote is correct. But what matters is the why?
Surprising though it might be to some people, men and women are different.
My theory on why women aren't as good as men at mathematics and related subjects such as engineering and science is as follows. First though, stupid men, and dopey women's lib feminists should realize that we are talking about 99th percentile brain function here, not down in the caveman realm. Stupid men shouldn't think themselves better than women in general or any particular woman unless individually tested. This is statistics. Which means ignorant women needn't point out some particular woman they know who is really a top notch PhD mathematician as though that voids the theory.
Female brains mature about 3 years younger than male [in humans]. That means their brains are fully grown with no more bulking up to be done. From when brains are fully-grown, further development is a matter of fine-tuning only. That's why it's pointless to try to become the world's best anything unless the learning process was started before puberty when brain development is nearly all done. The younger the better.
To coin a phrase, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That's why people learning foreign languages don't lose their accent if they are older than 25 when they learn the new sounds.
Females also have other differences such as a lack of a Y chromosome and a testosterone deficit, which could be observed in the obverse as being males lacking an X chromosome and being polluted with testosterone which addles the brain. Not to mention women being inherently good looking whereas males are like ugly pigs who smell like bears. Ignore those other differences and stick with the development process and the implications.
In a nutshell, females are deprived of mathematical education during the years in which their brains are rapidly growing. Males get a bonus three years of development time during which their brains are growing and during which time heavy duty mathematics is introduced.
To get to the top of any sport, such as mathematics, physics and golf, one needs to start young. The top 1% who get to enter the realm of big time maths and physics need to get to grips with it while young. Nobody decides to take up maths, physics or golf at age 25, having never been involved with them, and then becomes world champion.
A related issue is that boys do badly at school. That's the current worry in NZ education circles. They blame it on a lack of male role models [boys being brought up by single women and taught by nearly all female teachers]. Of course they do worse than females. Their brains are only partly developed. Females of the same age go swanking into class packing a big brain. If they are continuing subjects which they've already been tuned up in, then of course the boys with their child brains struggle compared with young women of the same age with adult brains.
Education needs to be tuned to the individual rather than whether they are a boy or a girl. Dumping them all into an age cohort and giving them the same stuff to learn by rote is child abuse. The females generally miss out on mathematics because they are given it too late.
Females, of course, choose subjects in which they've developed along as their brains have grown. Which means verbal subjects.
So, of course women don't win world championships in maths, physics and so on. They are being deprived of a full education. Unfortunately, they have 3 years less than boys in which to feed their brains new stuff before their brains are fully grown. That's just how it is.
Women shouldn't whine though. They should see what it's like to be contaminated with testosterone and the Y chromosome - the poor guys live fast, die young, suffer emotional and medical problems at a high rate, die before they collect their full share of pensions, are imprisoned and conscripted as cannon fodder. Women have it easy! Blokes [at the top end] having an advantage in maths is small consolation. Such guys are a great advantage to communities who can use their inventions, such as CDMA2000 phragmented photons. Women put on make-up and have fun while those competitive mathematical guys slave over 3rd order partial differential equations and Fourier Transforms in sublimated sexuality. It's just not fair.
So, there you have it.
Mqurice |
