Baby Bias

Elizabeth Spelke and Ariel Grace analyze the factors claimed by Harvard University’s president, Lawrence Summers, to account for the underrepresentation of women in the STEM fields in their essay “Sex, Math, and Science.” They provide research to counter or support his claims on the influence of motivational, cognitive, and discriminative differences between men and women. They begin their essay with research of infants and their innate predispositions that may be the first signs of these differences between males and females.

There is no difference in either gender’s capabilities for mathematics and numerical magnitudes as infants or toddlers (vanMarle, 2004), but sex differences do emerge at older ages, which raises questions as to how these differences are being tested. Girls are more apt to solve complex problems algebraically, while boys are more apt to solve the same problems using spatial reasoning. These differences in strategies may affect scores on standardized tests because one approach may take less time. This is supported by statistics that women get equal grades in math classes in college (Gallagher & Kaufman, 2005), but they were outscored by men on the SAT-M. Due to this, Spelke and Grace assert, “the SAT-M systematically under-predicts the college mathematics performance of women in relation to men.” They can conclude that men and women have equal aptitude for math despite what the SAT-M indicates.

I find this very interesting because several of the essays have called into question the validity of standardized tests as this essay does. There is other evidence as demonstrated in the first and third essay of Why Aren’t More Women in Science, that standardized tests cannot conclude that men are favored for math. Those essays approach it from the incremental perspective that scores can be improved with further effort and dedication. The scores of standardized tests imply a fixed difference between men and women that would explain the difference of gender representation in STEM fields, but this does not consider the room for growth.

While their is no indication of difference in cognition from birth, there is a perceived discriminative difference as soon as the infant enters society. When parents estimate their child’s performance in math and science, the parents overestimated the competence of their sons over their daughters even though there was no difference measured (Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2003). This is significant because even parents who have the best intentions for their children cast doubt at a young age on the equal abilities of their children based on gender. Employers will later in life acknowledge this same invisible difference between the genders based on those biases. The research continues to show that knowledge of an applicant’s gender influences the assessment of their qualities, even if they have the same record (Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999).

I do not believe that parents would genuinely set their daughter up to be less successful than their son, which just shows how vulnerable everyone else is to these unconscious discriminations. In Israel, sixth grade students were tested by their classroom teacher, who was aware of their gender, and an outside teacher, who was unaware. The classroom teacher gave the girls lower grades and the boys higher grades on the math test than the external teacher, suggesting the classroom teachers had an unconscious bias in favor of males. (http://www.npr.org/2015/09/01/436525758/how-teachers-unconscious-bias-play-into-the-hands-ofgender-disparity)

These girls were discouraged from taking more challenging math and science courses in high school, which adds to the gender gap. The message they received in sixth grade is what Dweck warned against in her essay “Is Math a Gift.” She explained the problem of women losing confidence when facing obstacles because of their fixed mindset and the reinforcement that math is a gift. The teachers in Israel sent the young girls the message that they did not have this gift. This is a shame because the discrimination affects females much earlier than I had imagined, and some may have been discouraged from math and science before they could truly decide whether they had any interest there.