Science and Maths: Playing 'boys' games help Girls

The observation that males appear to be superior to females in some fields of academic study has prompted a wealth of research hoping to shed light on whether this is attributable to nature or nurture.

Although there is no difference in general intelligence between the sexes, studies over the past 35 years have consistently found that overall men do much better in tests of spatial ability than women.

This difference may have something to do with why there are still fewer women in tertiary education studying science, technology, engineering and math – all subjects where it helps to have good spatial ability.

More in-depth assessment, however, reveals that this might be an over-simplification of the facts.

A new review, published in Springer's journal Sex Roles, sheds light on one of the factors contributing to these gender differences in spatial ability, that of gender-roles.

Although children are born either male or female, individuals differ in their degree of masculine and feminine identification and endorsement of masculine and feminine gender roles.


The review was carried out by David Reilly and David Neumann from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.

Reilly and Neumann note that studies in their review reported finding larger within-gender variations in spatial ability than between-gender.

This then led them to look more specifically at the data on variables within males and females which might be able to explain this.

The researchers analysed twelve studies which had looked specifically at one aspect of spatial ability, namely mental rotation, in high school pupils, college attendees and young adults.

Collectively these studies showed a significant association between masculinity and mental rotation performance for both men and women.

In other words, men and women with either a strong masculine or androgynous gender-identity fared better in mental rotation tasks.

The authors suggest that it is the considerable variation in the levels of typically masculine and feminine traits and behaviours, that children of the same sex develop, which account for the inter-gender variability.

Masculine identification leads to cultivation of mathematical and scientific skills whereas feminine identification facilitates verbal and language abilities.

These gender-roles are not mutually exclusive, with some children of both genders developing a healthy integration of both roles.

Development of spatial ability is refined through play and recreational activities, with traditionally masculine activities helping to promote development of spatial ability.

Therefore improving girls' performance in subjects which require good spatial ability may involve the deliberate inclusion of what are commonly seen as stereo-typically male activities into their daily lives, rather than encouraging sex-segregation of activities.

The authors conclude: "We have seen many changes in society's beliefs about gender equality in the intervening decades since Sharon Churnin Nash (Stanford University) proposed her gender-role mediation hypothesis of intellectual development in 1979.

However, for spatial ability at least, this association seems as relevant today as when the claim was first made."

More information: Reilly, D. and Neumann, D.L. (2013), Gender-role differences in spatial ability: a meta-analytic review, Sex Roles. DOI 10.1007/s11199-013-0269-0

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? 

New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behaviour, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.

"The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as 'approaches toward learning,'" said Christopher Cornwell, head of economics in the UGA Terry College of Business and one of the study's authors.

"You can think of 'approaches to learning' as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization.

I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that."

The study, co-authored by Cornwell and David Mustard at UGA and Jessica Van Parys at Columbia, analyzed data on more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

It examined students' performance on standard tests in three categories—reading, math and science—linking test scores to teachers' assessments of their students' progress, both academically and more broadly.

The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favour girls.

In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.

The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or "how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills."

They even report evidence of a grade bonus for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts.

This difference can have long-reaching effects, Cornwell said. 

Read the full article here

Girls Approaching Puberty Before Age 10 - A New ‘Normal’?

One day last year when her daughter, Ainsley, was 9, Tracee Sioux pulled her out of her elementary school in Fort Collins, Colo., and drove her an hour south, to Longmont, in hopes of finding a satisfying reason that Ainsley began growing pubic hair at age 6.

Ainsley was the tallest child in her third-grade class. She had a thick, enviable blond-streaked ponytail and big feet, like a puppy’s. The curves of her Levi’s matched her mother’s.

“How was your day?” Tracee asked Ainsley as she climbed in the car.

“Pretty good.”

“What did you do at a recess?”

“I played on the slide with my friends.”

In the back seat, Ainsley wiggled out of her pink parka and looked in her backpack for her Harry Potter book. 

Over the past three years, Tracee — pretty and well-put-together, wearing a burnt orange blouse that matched her necklace and her bag — had taken Ainsley to see several doctors. 

They ordered blood tests and bone-age X-rays and turned up nothing unusual. “The doctors always come back with these blank looks on their faces, and then they start redefining what normal is,” Tracee said as we drove down Interstate 25, a ribbon of asphalt that runs close to where the Great Plains bump up against the Rockies. “And I always just sit there thinking, What are you talking about, normal? Who gets pubic hair in first grade?” 

Fed up with mainstream physicians, Tracee began pursuing less conventional options. She tried giving Ainsley diindolylmethane, or DIM, a supplement that may or may not help a body balance its hormones. 

She also started a blog, the Girl Revolution, with a mission to “revolutionize the way we think about, treat and raise girls,” and the accompanying T.G.R. Body line of sunscreens and lotions marketed to tweens and described by Tracee as “natural, organic, craptastic-free products” containing “no estrogens, phytoestrogens, endocrine disrupters.”

None of this stopped Ainsley’s body from maturing ahead of its time.

Read more of this article here: Puberty Before Age 10 - A New ‘Normal’? - NYTimes.com

Is LEGO for Girls a Stereotype too far?

The first female minifigure, those 4-centimeter people with the yellow heads, to appear in the January 2012 LEGO catalogue is a doctor ably holding up the back end of a stretcher with her male colleague in a new ambulance set.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t show up until page 12 of the catalogue, after dozens upon dozens of male ninjas, firefighters and all manner of villains. This is the paradox of LEGO for parents, especially parents of girls.

Lego, the famous Danish toy maker could provide an oasis from the anachronistic gender stereotypes so rampant these days, especially in its City line, where women might be employed in all sorts of capacities, as they are in real life and yet the fantasy lines such as Ninjago, Kingdoms, Hero Factory, and of course, Star Wars, are relentlessly male, with the rare exception of Princess Leia.

According to a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek, focusing on boys was a specific business decision to get the LEGO Group out of a major financial crisis back in 2004 when they were losing $1 million a day. The strategy worked so well that revenues increased by 105% from 2006 to 2010, and sales in the U.S. topped $1 billion for the first time last year.