So Mrs. Obama says that her daughters had bad math teachers and so took themselves out of STEM, and this is "what happens to girls". Hmm...so what happened to the boys who had the same bad teachers?
Maybe nothing. Or maybe something. Either way, we won't find out if we approach what she's saying without curiosity. Incredulity toward what she's saying serves to preserve the status quo, not effect change.
In fact the paper the NPR article talks about actually says "We show that there is large variation within schools in this measure, and that it has a significant effect on the academic achievements of both genders during middle school and high school in math, science and language and also on the choice of the level of math and science study programs in high school" it also has this line "Math teachers' assessment in primary school, on the other hand, is on average gender neutral (0.01). However, these means hide quite a large heterogeneity among teachers."
They also say "In terms of effect size, these estimates indicate that increasing the average stereotypical bias against girls from zero to its maximal value of one will reduce girls' outcomes by 0.317 of a standard deviation"; which doesn't sound huge (given that's with the most amount of bias), but I guess it all adds up.
The physics one is perhaps the most interesting since it says that male German teachers had no bias, and hypothesized that anti-bias training worked there, which if true is a positive sign.
I'm sort of rambling without a point, I guess I was just surprised how directly you could measure this effect. I had always assumed it was much more indirect.
So we need to get women out of early childhood education?
(Both referenced articles talk about female teachers, who are the vast majority of teachers at that grade level, transmitting their anxiety about or dislike of math to female students)
So we need to rethink how we teach and how we think. Like approaching a problem of gender bias by assuming that's the only root issue, which it obviously isn't here, since there's also the problem of bad teachers, in general.
Here's one change you may benefit from: exclude solutions that exclude a class of people. Otherwise, we'll need to wait for bad teachers to die out before a solution excluding them can really take hold & that's not a possible outcome because no system is perfect.
Edit: more specifically, we need to immediately start training teachers how to handle their anxiety,which means we probably need to qualitatively study their anxieties. Without shaming them or excluding them or threatening their livelihoods.
I've encountered plenty of adult men who seemed to say they hated math or were scared of it. Apart from gender issues, there seems to be a strong thread about young people having bad experiences with mathematics education.
I'm reminded of Paul Lockhart's work as an example of the claim that contemporary mathematics education is broken across-the-board. And then there are lots of reports that say that the U.S. is doing considerably worse than other countries at teaching mathematics and other technical subjects. This is a theme that dates back at least to Sputnik and the Cold War.
I think that forms of the Sputnik crisis have repeated themselves in subsequent generations, even if there isn't a single event that triggers this anxiety as dramatically as the Sputnik launch did.
It's hard to tell from this summary of the presentation how Michelle Obama felt that this interacted with gender (although maybe the recordings would make that clearer). One possible interpretation would be that girls' enthusiasm for mathematics is more fragile and easier to throw off-track through poor teaching. Another is that the bad teachers treated boys and girls differently in a way that discouraged the girls. A third is that boys and girls might be best interested or motivated by different teaching methods or projects.
I attended a rural high school that provided a subpar education (including STEM). I was not exactly "college ready" and graduated not having even taken a calculus course. I was at a disadvantage entering college, since pretty much everyone I knew attended a magnet school or a well-taught high school where their teachers were PhDs in the field. High schools that offered upper level mathematics courses. Kids like this very well may have already taken data structures/algorithms, linear algebra, real analysis, abstract algebra etc. prior to entering college with 30+ credit hours and 5s on all AP exams. Compare those kids to someone like me that never had the chance to even take an AP class... Anyways, how did I turn out? I completed a pure math degree, but it took me much longer to get there since I started much further behind.
Isn't that just annoying politician speech? If she has an idea how to make education better, she should say so. If not, she has nothing to say. It is a trivial thought that "education could/should be made better".
I have some experience of this, and I've read a lot of the research. In general, and on average, boys and girls react differently to bad teaching. In general, and on average, boys and girls react differently to a lot of things.
In general, and on average, when asked questions, boys tend to just shout out answers, sometimes with no apparent care or concern as to whether they are right. They compete to be the loudest, most noticed, and to get the most reaction from the teacher.
In general, and on average, when asked questions, the girls will sit quietly and try not to be noticed. Those who are actively engaged with the subject will try to work out the right answer, and will still not react or respond when called on.
I keep repeating "in general, and on average" because some children behave according to the opposite characterisations, but these differences are over-whelmingly obvious to anyone who works with children and takes the time to notice. Proving it scientifically is hard, because society in general frowns on experimenting on children in ways that can potentially damage their progress. But the signs are there to be seen.
So yes, a bad teacher really can put children off doing STEM subjects, and this can happen depressingly quickly. What's more, it really does seem to affect girls more than boys. I don't know why that should be the case, but the same story is told over and over again. Your implied scepticism is most likely honest, but misplaced.
Edit: To whomever downvoted this: I just spent several minutes trying to share my experience after giving literally thousands of workshops in math with young people, and attending dozens of conferences on the question of how to increase and retain engagement in the STEM subjects. Given the submission, if you think such a response is inappropriate for HN then I'd really like to know why.
So I guess your thesis is that STEM teachers are worse than non-STEM teachers and this funnels women into non-STEM careers because they react more to bad teachers.
I could buy that I guess, but it's hard to believe that the schools that the Obamas sent their children too would have any bad teachers. Though I guess they were in primary school before he was president.
Still, if the most well off people can't find good teachers for their children, what hope does anyone have?
I'm also a little confused since she calls out the ages 8-11; I don't think I had any significant amount of math or STEM teaching at that age. I think all the math I knew at that point was how to multiply (and divide?) numbers.
What do her daughters do now? Would Michelle even have preferred them to do something in STEM? If so, why didn't she push them to do STEM things?
Edit: according to Wikipedia her daughters are 19 and 16 years old - not too late to study a STEM related subjected, are they? Michelle, if you can't make your own daughters go into STEM, what message are you sending to young women of the world?
"If you can't make your own daughters go into STEM, what message are you sending to young women of the world?"
I feel sad when I hear anyone say they think forcing others into a career path is a wise or sustainable decision. Doubly so for their kids.
The message she's sending is she doesn't know what the solution is. And that's OK. The first step to resolving a problem is acknowledging you have one.
Denying the existence of gender bias both prevents the human mind from perceiving it and persists the problem, if there is one. Denying someone else's individuality and autonomy isn't a sustainable solution. In complex systems, it leads to pathological, extreme states/transitions.
See the US's political climate for perfect examples on both sides of the aisle.
The claim that STEM is biased against women might be one of the biggest detractors for women to go into STEM. So it is very irresponsible to claim there is such a bias, without verification.
Same thing happened. I didn't have a great experience with math in school which led me to non-STEM. Now that life brought me back into STEM field I feel sad that to get into it I had to go in a completely roundabout way which would have been significantly shorter if only my teacher managed to get me to "grok" the math.
