What we need to investigate about.

Jayasree Subramanian Eklavya

Hoshangabad

Different disciplines have asked if men and women have equal opportunity to get faculty positions at the university level. If not, is that because of discrimination against women?

Humanities and Social Sciences departments where there are more female students at the undergraduate and graduate level were found to have disproportionate number of men holding academic positions.

How do we understand the exclusion? Lead to questioning the nature of the disciplines

Underrepresentation of women in mathematics and sciences has also been matter of investigation for more then three decades now.

Why are there so few women in mathematics?

What percentage of faculty positions are held by women? How well do the career graphs of women match that of men?

What is women’s share in the editorial boards of prestigious journals, membership to academies, awards and recognition?

Unlike social sciences and humanities, mathematics and sciences are considered to be objective. So it is believed that bias cannot operate to exclude women in mathematics and sciences. If women are not there, it is because they are not good.

An hypothesis that is still active in explaining underrepresentation is ‘there is a gender difference in the inherent ability to do mathematics and science’

There have been and still are attempts to investigate and explain the ‘inherent difference in ability’

Size of the skull, weight of the brain, hormones, genes left brain/right brain dichotomy all of them came to explain why women are inferior to men in their mental ability or why men are capable of logical and analytical thinking and women are emotional and intuitive.

The inherent difference hypothesis is reflected in some of the following assertions by researchers in math education as quoted by Fennema in one of her early papers

"Sex differences in mathematical abilities are, of course, present at the kindergarten level and undoubtedly earlier“ (Aiken)

"The evidence would suggest to the teacher that boys will achieve higher than girls on tests dealing with mathematical reasoning“

Several studies conducted not just in US but in other countries also indicated that ‘the phenomenon of sex differences in mathematics learning was not restricted to the United States. In a study conducted in 1964 in twelve countries, results showed that overall, males surpassed females in mathematics achievement. Males scored higher on the mathematics tests in all populations both on computation and on verbal problems’ Fennema, 1979

Women scientists and feminists thinkers have engaged with the issue of exclusion and tried to shift the focus away from biology to sociology.

Biographies of women who sought to pursue mathematics and science documented their struggles. Based on data, studies compared the career graphs of male and female scientists and showed that women with equal competence were either in soft positions or were placed at a lower rung compared to men.

Women went to court arguing they were denied an opportunity because of their gender.

Gender audit of institutions were done.

Workplace was scrutinized- ‘are there enough restrooms for women?’ ‘do women get the same kind of office space and support staff as men?’, ‘does the institution have child care center?’

Practices were studied- do men collaborate with women, do women get the credit due to them, does their work get noticed and cited?

Are reviews objective? Wenneras and Wold for example argued that there was ‘Nepotism and Sexism in peer review’

Studies were done to understand to what extant ‘Marriage and motherhood’ affected research performance.

Affirmative action for women was introduced

MIT report on the status of women faculty in 2002 and 2011 shows substantial improvement as a result of proactive measures taken.

Underperformance of girls in mathematics has been a focus of study for more than three decades now.

Text books were scrutinized from gender perspective, classrooms dynamics, peer interaction, self concept of learners, teachers’ notions about gender difference in ability and their implication for children’s performance, unconscious bias for example in remembering students’ work, the kind of expectations placed on the learners- more demanding on boys but easily pleased with girls’ performance

Fennema – Sherman mathematics attitude scales were designed to study the gender difference in the attitude towards mathematics and how it affects/correlates with the performance in mathematics.

Mathematics Anxiety, Attitude Toward Success in Mathematics, Confidence in Learning Mathematics, and Mathematics as a Male Domain.

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more boys than girls believe that mathematics is a male domain

More boys than girls believe that math/science would be useful for them

girls and boys learn in different but equitable ways

girls learn better in cooperative groups whereas boys learn better in competitive groups

single sex or classrooms adapted for female learning styles should be established

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there are differences between boys and girls in spatial skill- in particular spatial visualization

while spatial visualization is positively correlated with mathematics achievement not all girls are handicapped by inadequate spatial skills, but perhaps only those who score very low on spatial tasks.

Along side studies were conducted to find if there is any difference in how gender figured in different cultures. Argentina, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, and Thailand were countries with neither significant gender differences nor significant variation in gender differences in mathematics performance. Boys and girls performed equally well in mathematics across all schools in each of these countries.

Quest, Hyde and Linn (2010) meta-analyzed 2 major international data sets, the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Programme for International Student Assessment, representing 493,495 students 14–16 years of age, to estimate the magnitude of gender differences in mathematics achievement, attitudes, and affect across 69 nations throughout the world.

This meta-analysis provides further evidence that, on average, males and females differ very little in mathematics achievement, despite more positive math attitudes and affect among males. Yet, these findings of mean similarities in math are qualified by substantial variability across nations. Moderator analyses indicated that considerable cross-national variability in the gender gap can be explained by important national characteristics reflecting the status and welfare of women.

France Germany Ghana Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland Indonesia Iran, Islamic Republic of Ireland Israel Italy Japan Jordan Korea, Republic of

Very few women in research institutions (8%?)

Very few women holding faculty positions in universities

Abysmal representation in Mathematics Olympiads

Very small numbers in IITs

Roughly 20% in Engineering colleges

girls in government run schools while their brothers go to private/ English medium schools

Notions such as girls cannot do operate only in the west. There is no gender bias in Mathematics in India. Women opt out because of marriage and family responsibilities

There is very little research to understand under representation at the higher level or at the school level in mathematics.

Clearly we are happy with personal theories and do not seem concerned that girl and women should be so under represented.

A strong resistance from within the math-science community to study and report on forms of exclusion- Leelavati Daughters is an example

Vineeta Bal, Rohini Godbole, Sumathi Rao, Nileema Gupte, Bamba

Lalitha Subramanian, Abha Sur,

Neelam Kumar, Radha Chakravarthy,

P.V. Sukhatme, Sugra Chunawala, Swati Merotra and Chitra Natarajan,

Anita Kurup and Maithreyi

Upasana Bora Sinha and Dipak Sinha

Meena Gopal and Veena Poonacha,

Namrata Gupta, Jayasree Subramanian

There is reason to believe that girls and boys do not interact academically.

Boys demand more attention,

Boys who do well, check answers with each other, but do not include girls who do well into this.

when asked who studies well- boys or girls, boys responded by saying ‘boys study well. girls are fit for only sweeping and mopping and washing vessels’

This was strongly objected to by the one girl who did equally well.

There is reason to believe that mathematics is seen more as a male domain

During an interaction with BlEd students a large number of girls said they and their teachers believed that mathematics is too hard for girls.

Some government run girls schools near delhi do not even offer mathematics and science as options

A girl who manage to make it to NMO said she attracted so much attention from everyone to the point of being distracted

A women scientist said when she topped the class in mathematics the boy who came second was told he should wear bangles.

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There is reason to believe women are not seen as capable of logical thinking and reasoning

‘Women by nature are far too emotional and their minds are not tuned to logic. ….They want an easier path to security such as materiality.’

‘Women are bookish probably because books represent authority. Women are comfortable working under authority as the society constantly forces them in to subordinate positions’

There is reason to believe exclusion and ignoring starts right at school

Male scientists and research scholars admit that when they were in school, there was no communication across gender, only competition

That they never thought girls understood anything- irrespective of performance in the examinations.

Scientists also said ‘girls work hard, but boys ask more questions, boys were better at conceptual understanding’

If there is difference in performance between boys and girls- keeping in mind a range of differences that separate children- rural/urban, social class/caste, the family background, kind of school they go to ….

What notions teachers have about their students’ ability

What kind of attention girls and boys get in the classroom

How do gender segregated schools figure

1. If and to what extent classroom and outside interactions between students on mathematics are constrained by gender?

2. When does this begin to appear- at the pre-primary and primary school level itself or, later?

3. Do socio-economic, cultural, rural/urban and other factors make a difference to how academic interactions happen between male and female student?

HSS Physics, Chemistry, Biology

CBSE, IIT-JEE, Olympiads

‘How well are girls represented in the more competitive and coveted examinations?’.

We can conclude that CBSE data suggests that girls are well represented in the merit lists.

For IIT-JEE, 24% of the candidates appearing are girls. However, only 9% of girls are able to make it to the final selection list of IIT. There appears to be a small increase in the percentage of girls appearing (22–26%) and girls selected (8–10%) over the last three years. However at this slow rate, it would take several decades for girls to catch up with boys

For Physics Olympiad, on an average 32% girls enroll to appear for NSE in physics (NSEP). Only 6% girls are eligible to take part in the next stage, viz. INPhO. The situation worsens when we select top 35 candidates for OCSC camp (data not presented here). Not surprisingly since 1998, when we started sending Indian teams to Olympiads, only one girl and 59 boys had represented India at the International Physics Olympiads Chemistry data tells the same story.

The fact that girls performing better than boys in CBSE exams and at the same time, are not able to secure admissions in top level engineering colleges in India raises many questions. In any case it is not a healthy sign for any academic institute.

The results of the study have revealed significant relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance. It means that students who have high mathematics anxiety tended to perform fewer score in mathematics performance. However, those who have low mathematics anxiety tended to perform high score in mathematics.

According to the result obtained from hypothesis two (H2) entitled “There are significant differences between boys and girls in mathematics anxiety, mathematics performance and academic hardiness”, the consequences revealed that there is significant gender difference only on the scores of mathematics anxiety, whereas there is not significant gender difference on the scores of mathematics performance and academic hardiness.