Women's Math Scores Affected by Suggestion

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR2006101901862.html?referrer=email

Telling women they cannot do well in math may turn out to be a self-fulfilling statement.
In tests in Canada, women who were told that men and women do math equally well did much better than those who were told there is a genetic difference in math ability. And women who heard there were differences caused by environment -- such as math teachers giving more attention to boys -- outperformed those who were simply reminded they were female.

The women who did better in the tests got nearly twice as many right answers as those in the other groups, said Steven J. Heine, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "The findings suggest that people tend to accept genetic explanations as if they're more powerful or irrevocable, which can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies," Heine said.

Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math, along with reading, comprehension tests conveying different messages about women's math aptitudes. Their findings are in today's issue of Science.

[Branjor]

1. That's no surprise to me...

I could have told them that without any expensive study at all, but they would never have believed me, after all, I'm only a woman.

Feelings of inferiority and needing to do well not only to acquit yourself well but your *entire sex* drains off mental energy which would otherwise be going towards solving the math problems.

[SharonAnn]

2. And none to me. I had my moment of awakening at age 24 when

I was coming back from lunch with my co-workers, we were talking about different subjects in college and careers that needed them, and I flippantly said I didn't want a career that required much math because "I'm no good at math."

All of a sudden, for some reason, I realized that was not true. I was a member of Mensa. I always did very well in math classes but still was convinced I wasn't good at math because I was a girl. So I self-selected out of several majors and careers.

Interestingly, I stumbled into systems engineering and had been working as a programmer and doing well at it.

Yet, I had "bought" the belief, and lived it, that "girls aren't good at math." So therefore I believed that I wasn't.

What a crock!