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In a landmark study involving over a million students, it appears that the reason boys dominate girls in STEM fields is not that they are better than girls at it (the reverse seems to be true) but, perversely, that gender differences are lower in non-STEM fields.
About the STEM grades, which are often abused as an explanation:
A classroom with more variable grades indicates a bigger gap between high and low performing students, and greater male variability could result in boys outnumbering girls at the top and bottom of the class.
“Greater male variability is an old idea that people have used to claim that there will always be more male geniuses – and fools – in society,” O’Dea says.
The team found that on average, girls’ grades were higher than boys’, and girls’ grades were less variable than boys’.
But girls' and boys' variability were much closer in non-STEM fields.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @05:40PM (5 children)
Spanish grammar lesson time...
According to the DRAE, the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy which is the authoritative dictionary in Spain and highly influential elsewhere, the Spanish word for computer is "ordenador".
This translates to: something that orders (organizes or sorts) things.
Note that the word is MASCULINE.
Outside of Spain, nobody says "ordenador." They use a word adapted from English. In most of Latin America, they say "computadora" which is feminine. However, I have also heard with as much frequency the word "computador" (same word, without the final a) which is masculine.
So what does this all mean? Absolutely nothing.
You've got to get out of your head the idea that grammatical gender corresponds to some direct concept of male or female for a thing. Most of the time, it does not at all and we might just as well think of the genders, instead of being masculine or feminine, as being Gender A and Gender B. The only exception to this is when the noun refers to a person and there are 2 different forms of the word: one form for the sex of eachnperson.
Example:
doctor = male doctor
doctora = female doctor
When there is only a single form of the word, there is really no correspondence with the sex of the person.
Example: victima (English: victim)
Victima is always FEMININE, even if the victim happens to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:07PM
Some more examples...
Three different Spanish words for breast, as in boob:
seno (MASCULINE)
mama (FEMININE)
teta (FEMININE, vulgar "tit")
Different words for penis:
pene (MASCULINE)
verga (FEMININE, very vulgar)
pinga (FEMININE, vulgar)
See the pattern? There isn't one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:16PM (3 children)
Apologies, I don't know about received pronunciation from Spain.
I do know that Latin America speaks a completely different version of Spanish.
I assume though it's like RP English, only people over there speak it and it's a minimal spoken dialect just as RP is minimally spoken dialect of English because American English is the dominant form in terms of sheer number of speakers.
I sure as hell wouldn't know what you're talking about if you asked me to open the bonnet or boot on my car. Most native practical English speakers would be clueless too.
I lived in Mexico for a decade and Latin America as a whole for nearly 2. So I can hold my own when I speak with someone from Latin America, never really tried with someone from Spain though.
In my 2 decades in LATAM, never once did I hear the term "ordenador", I'd challenge you to google that term vs computadora and see how many links pop up.
Yet it is undeniable that in languages and cultures where objects and jobs have gender it is typically because of historical gender roles in the vast majority of cases, even if it isn't the case now.
Case in point, "cocina". The "A" at the end makes this a female thing, and let's admit it, the kitchen is historically a female space across almost all cultures. The job of Cocinera or Cocinero obviously has it's own gender specific words, yet honero and batidora.
Honero is obviously historically male, it is associated with fire. Batidora is a device that mixes and in the home it was always women's work, so when it became a machine, it received a female title.
Tejedora, is an excellent example as well. The act of weaving was done by women for so long, that when machines took over they maintained the historical title of the women who performed the task.
Compare this to "forjador", a device for forging steel. This was typically a male dominated profession and thus the device for doing it maintained the historical title of the men who performed the task.
My point was and is that the act of computing as a basis for your job, i.e. doing math for a living, especially math in bulk, was historically a job primarily staffed by women and as a result when devices were created to automate this they maintained the same title as the person they replaced including the implied gender of the worker that used to do this job. English is less likely to add these gender terms to objects or jobs and as a result it causes us to forget the times when there were gender roles and what was expected of each gender during those times. Instead we've been sold a false narrative that women were excluded from these professions and it was not ever the case. There were occasionally specific jobs for which women were prohibited, but the field of work has always had women and in many cases there were vastly more women than men. As we have developed automation, we have automated tasks that used to require the collaboration of many people, this has had the effect of automating away jobs that were historically filled by women.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @07:09PM
You completely dismiss my post because the facts therein destroy your pet linguistic theory?
Um, OK. Continue being proudly ignorant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
I smell cognitive dissonance. Ignore the whole point fixate on one point of something slightly wrong. This is their brain saying 'ignore everything'. Give it a couple of days and come back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:36AM
I was not interested in discussing anything about the person's post except for the common but erroneous notion that grammatical gender in a language generally corresponds to some concept of the thing described as being "male" or "female." It rarely does.
If you want to go on about the unrelated topic of women's standing in society, have at it among yourselves.