I don’t think I can add anything, but these comments especially resonated: David Wees (#4), Andrew Stadel (#6), Chris Lusto (#25), Johanna Langill (#26), and Grace (#51), and I love love love the comment from Kate Nowak (#45) about what we are missing in our current universe. And thanks, Dan, for your response in #57. Frankly, I hesitated to raise the issue in the first place, but this thread made my day.

Is this still true? It certainly was true 40 years ago when I was a college undergrad, but the only recent figures I’ve seen (which were for only one college) showed that math had gender parity up to the bachelor’s degree (unlike the engineering fields, where gender parity peaked about 15-20 years ago and the imbalance is now back to levels not seen seen the 1960s). I did a quick Google search for a larger sample of data, but did not find one in the 3 minutes I was willing to devote to the search.

Women are certainly underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering, which may be due to math instruction in secondary school, but I’d like to see some hard data for math still being a field in which women are underrepresented–can any one point me to the data?

To apply my analogy of Dan’s blog as a classroom, him as teacher, and all of us as students: Suppose you have a math classroom, and suppose you, like Shawn Cornally, allow students to demonstrate their understanding in whatever way they choose. Suppose the boys tend to like making videos, while the girls tend to prefer writing about math concepts on their blogs. As long as they’re all engaged, does it matter how they show what they’ve learned?

The things that frustrate me in masculine-dominated environments are completely non-existent on 101qs. Even the competition aspect of the top 10 is minimal intensity. My guess is that the gender imbalance has a lot to do with comment #11.

That does make more sense. Thanks! Knowing that maybe these points will help explain why this is a big deal.

Math is a subject of which women are underrepresented. If we see any type of gender bias in something that is a subset of math instruction, we would be doing a disservice by not looking into it. Girls do not have a problem learning math compared to men. From most studies and experience, it seems to be the opposite. But men are much more likely to select a math related major in college than women. Math loses a gender somewhere.

I think the reason why myself and others find this bias interesting and something that would need to be fixed is because 101qs is a sort of microcosm for the classroom. If there is a bias, as an educator I would like to know why and how it could be fixed. While it is true that everyone has different interests. After all, a room of 30 students will have at minimum 30 different learning styles. I do not have the luxury of a small tutoring environment. I know 100% will not be fully engaged. However, if ~50% of my students are disengaged, that is too much.

Now the exciting part. The classroom is a noisy place for data collection. 101qs is a simpler system with far fewer variables measuring perplexity/interest/engagement. This type of system is much more likely to identify gender bias and its solution than a classroom.

Everybody who’s participating in any way is engaged. (in the subject) But our interests vary by topic. We’re all interested in different aspects of the subject, and we accomplish the goal of improving our students’ learning in a variety of ways. For example, although I’m not participating in 101qs, I’m reading and commenting on the blog.

I hope that makes more sense.

“engaging all the students is the important thing”

I do not fully understand how interest and engagement are discrete entities. If there is a problem in interest, I would wager there is a problem in engagement.

As somebody said above, engaging all the students is the important thing — but if you think of us as Dan’s students, does it matter if we engage in different ways? Some write, some make videos, some mostly lurk but then use the ideas in their work. If we learn how to improve our students’ learning, that’s the bottom line, right?

Otherwise, who cares what the gender distribution is for this or any other tiny subculture in the math teaching profession.

Elizabeth first. Me second. Then other people after that.

The M/F split is nearly even for high performing students – those taking AP Calculus or those scoring 600+ on the SAT. I would be concerned if the split was not fairly even.

The M/F split for the small sliver of students scoring at the highest level on math tests is heavily skewed male: 2 to 1 for 800’s on the SAT, and as much as 10 to 1 or more for the AMC top performers (writing is skewed female). This difference, by itself, just doesn’t seem like much cause for concern.