[Edu-sig] Acadmic gender gap (was Thoughts)

[Marilyn Davis]

I've been pondering everyone's thoughts on this.  It left me
speechless that such an article would come forward.  But it does
reflect my personal experience.

My son, 23, is a gamer and a wonderful guy, outgoing and comfortable,
thank Goodness.

However when he started playing games as a little boy, I saw a big
shift in his personality.  Luckily there was a study at that time that
resulted in a small article in the paper saying that children who play
computer games too young become more aggressive and impatient, more
driven and difficult to get along with... something like that.  The
theory was that the response of the computer is so fast that small
kids come to expect that sort of feedback from all of life.

It fit Charlie exactly and so games, and computers, went away until Jr
Hi, when he was playing games at school anyway.  By then though, he
had a solid presence about him and he didn't seem to suffer.  And he
was also learning computer languages, and system administration from
his dad, not just playing games.

Starting in kindergarten I could see that the classroom was slanted
toward girls.  At those young ages, girls naturally like to sit more
than boys.  Boys need to run around.  Both need to socialize.  The
classroom disallows all but the sitting quietly and following
directions.

The Jr Hi years saw lots of shakeups for us.  We finally took him out
of school because the place was simply too mean.  In particular, the
teachers were too mean and it made him sick to his stomach.  He was
skinny and pale.  It was a frightening time for this mother.

First we tried a private school that let children do whatever they
want, and he loved it.  It was a school patterned after the Sudbury
Valley School near Boston.  They have been raising "free" children
since the 60's.  From their studies, it turns out that if kids are
left alone, they want to learn.  Kids want to grow up and want to grow
up to be useful and successful.  They are born with a sense of
direction and huge curiosity, and self-knowledge.  In our culture,
this is systematically drummed out of us by adults who had it all
drummed out of them -- all with the one word "should". The result is:
we have not yet seen the adult of the species.

But, this private school was, in fact, girl-biased.  At a potluck, one
of the main teachers chided Charlie to me: *Charlie* made this dish?
I tried to say something about it to her later, that she doesn't want
to be reinforcing the assumption that boys don't cook.  She said that
she figured that the system has been so slanted toward the boys for so
long, it was time to slant toward the girls and even things up.  I was
irate, but I bit my tongue and didn't say anything.  Charlie had to
live with the situation, not me.

Some months later Charlie came home complaining about how they treat
the boys and I told him he didn't have to go back if he didn't want
to.

So, from then on, I kept him at home and we hid from the authorities
until he was 16.  I couldn't sign the school system's home-school
papers and promise that I'd teach him this and that, because he wasn't
interested in this and that.  I did insist that he study 3 hours a
day, but whatever he liked.  It was math, science and computers.

So, I can see what the article is saying.  

I have to say that any imposed gender-slant in the culture is
detrimental to both genders.  All the generations and cultures where
the male had (or has), to a large extent, exclusivity on
intellectuality and on power outside the home, he is also not allowed
to cry, or to access to his feelings.  Which gender suffers the larger
loss?

One more thing.  The fact that women aren't in computing as much as
men totally escapes me.  I don't get it at all.  Coding seems very
much like sewing to me, requiring artful careful well-planned and
often tedious work.  I remember that, when typewriters first came out,
it was men's work.  And then it changed.  So I wouldn't count it as
decided yet.

What do you think?

Marilyn Davis