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When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because – as I realize in hindsight – he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys – in her opinion – were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.

I don’t think you can really blame them for making such inferences, although there is an obvious problem with such behavior: It is a problem of self-perpetuating stereotypes in which teachers think girls are worse at math, girls get away with lesser effort in their math classes, which reduces average math scores for girls, which makes teachers think that girls are worse in math, and so on…
Sometimes, poor science, or even pseudo-scientific data add to the anecdotal observations, such as when George Roman announced in 1887 “that mental abilities were secondary sex characteristics attributable to brain size” (not quite the statistician, he seemed to have neglected the fact that brain size correlates with women’s average smaller body size and lesser weight…), or when Eleanor Maccoby concluded in 1974 that “gender differences in mathematics performance were scientifically well established” when she showed data that “boys and girls acquire early number concelts similarly in the preschool years, [...] and that their performance throughout elementary school was similar, (thus apparently indicating similar early math socialization) but that then “boys’ skills in mathematics increased faster than girls’ beginning around 12 or 13 years of age, creating a significant gender gap in performance by high school”.

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The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?

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