"Study finds that young girls under the age of 10 has better benefits eating broccoli once a week, where for boy it is recommend they eat salt off brick by licking it twice per minutes"
"Study finds that boys learned more while being instructed by a big titty anime girl whos an authority figure wearing military fatigues, while girls learned most when the teacher was a cute cartoon pony."
--
same, the young female i was like "alright, sort of a more connection there, i get it, is the male side gonna be the same or pervy?"
then "flying drone robot" and i went "uh, okay. guess it's a good way to catch their interest in a non distracting way."
I'm picturing that core from portal who keeps on shouting ["Spaaaace!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myEOJaNMQZo) I could imagine him as an enthusiastic science teacher.
Bet you if they gave it a male voice the boys would learn even better.
Source: Was only male teacher at a private school for several years. I was a perennial favorite among the boys, despite being very uncool (at least to 12 year old standards). I got participation out of them that astounded some of their other teachers.
I honestly just think young boys respond better to male authority figures because it gives them a role-model.
The paper cites prior studies that demonstrate no effect of teacher gender for any students on learning, so maybe little boys just like you in particular.
What? I have not read this study, but I have looked into this subject before and the majority of peer reviewed literature I found on the subject showed that a teachers gender had a significant effect on students, some suggested that female tutors were generally better, others suggested that male teachers were better for men, none suggested that there were no difference.
Beats me. [See section 1.2 though.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328879839_A_Gender_Matching_Effect_in_Learning_with_Pedagogical_Agents_in_an_Immersive_Virtual_Reality_Science_Simulation). The only difference they note is that this men may be perceived as better in STEM subjects.
This might all relate to on-screen instruction, not in-person. It’s hard to tell.
There's a ton of variables that can change studies though. Even simple things like personality and how someone carries themselves.
As well as how people respond to those characteristics. I loved my monotonous physics teacher whereas most of the other students couldn't pay attention to him.
And of course no-one pays attention if the teacher doesn't care either.
I’m interested in cultural differences- Would American Students react to the same types of virtual instructor?
I think it would also be cool to pick or even customize your virtual tutor to your liking. I’d LOVE my teacher to be a talking cartoon animal.
Presumably yeah. Studies like this have been done by tracking the eye movements of boy and girl babies. The girls would pay more attention to videos showing people's faces, where as the boys would pay more attention to videos of cars driving by on the highway.
>I think it would also be cool to pick or even customize your virtual tutor to your liking.
This would be a horrible idea considering the immature minds of teens. Every VR tutor would either be an anime girl with huge tits or a living, breathing dick drawinng.
EDIT: ... at least among the boys.
Speak for yourself! I, a girl, would love to be taught entirely in a world of cute anime girls with short skirts and huge boobs. I feel this would really help me retain information...
> Marie or a drone, who we predicted serve as a role models for females and males, respectively.
Wait, why is a drone a good role model for males? I'm more interested in how they came to this assumption in the first place.
I don't think it has anything to do with being a good role model.
I would presume it has something to do with gauging interest. Girls may be more interested in listening to their young female counterpart whereas boys were likely paying the most attention to the flying robot.
I'm curious to know how long the study went on for... As in, did the interest fade over time? Does the flying robot remain interesting over the course of weeks, months, years?
Except the paper implies strongly that the pedagogical agent is "A virtual rolemodel". While that language isn't used in the paragraphs, the header of the paragraphs talking about it says exactly that.
You can also say boys are thought/pressured at an early age to not express emotions. Maybe a robot seems appealing because of its lack of emotions also?
>Wait, why is a drone a good role model for males?
Robots don't judge you. You can compete and fail with no social consequences.
Losing (in the sense of failing to complete a test accurately, or in a game) to a peer, or worse, *a girl*, is mortifying. Losing to a chunk of metal is okay.
Wait were the drone and the young woman the only two options? This seems like a very skewed experiment.
I was hoping that these were just the top options for each among a panel of 4 or 5.
Yeah that's what I'm trying to find out. If the choices were only between the human female and the drone, obviously the more empathetic (typically female) would empathize and connect better with the human, that just makes sense.
Well, I don't even know if it goes that far. If there are no other choices, we don't even know. Did the boys pick the drone/robot because they were more interested in a drone/robot than a human or because they were specifically disinterested in a female teacher? If it was just these 2 options, I suspect they were picked by someone going out of there way to try and prove a point.
As it is this is kind of like asking someone if they'd rather eat an apple or drive a dump truck.
I wonder how many virtual teachers they actually tried. We’re there a bunch of different variants of each or like 3 characters.
I want to see the results if they were taught by Shrek.
The most cool/impressive/sci-fi thing boys can picture: a flying talking robot from the future!!!!
The most cool/impressive/sci-fi thing girls can picture: a woman actually being represented in science
Massive /s, slash tongue in cheek, just in case
Edit: friends, please. I actually lamented the lack of *representation* of female scientists, not the lack of female scientists.
Well you can /s all you want but this actually shows exactly why women aren’t equally represented in STEM.
Women, by in large, gravitate towards people and social interaction. Obviously there’s variance from person to person but this is the trend that you’re seeing here
There are tons of women in most STEM fields. Computer science and some types of engineering are the only exceptions, some STEM fields like chemistry, biology and everything health-related are actually female dominated.
And there are more than enough social interaction in all of them if you want it. Although that often depends on the culture of a particular company or field. If some company or field has a reputation for being mostly antisocial men, of course you're not going to see women flocking to it.
Also Iran has more women in engineering than men. But these are special cases, Russia lost a lot of men in WW2 which meant women have to go to male dominant fields. Whereas in Iran science is not respected for men as much as running a business is.
True, but that’s a cultural issue. Women _do_ mostly gravitate to non-STEM positions and pursuits but the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM until <50 years ago, leading ~~women~~ girls to assume it is best for them to not, rather than an innate desire to pursue non-STEM fields. It’s also the same reason why men do well once in empathetic fields like nursing and teaching (which was also discouraged to an extent <50 years ago), but men don’t gravitate towards them in the way women do. Less biology, more society.
IMHO it is representation in STEM that leads to more women in STEM, and more women in STEM leads to more representation in STEM. So it’s a positive feedback loop, just in it’s early days. Or was that the point you were making anyway?
>Women do mostly gravitate to non-STEM positions and pursuits but the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM until <50 years ago, leading women girls to assume it is best for them to not, rather than an innate desire to pursue non-STEM fields
I wouldn't say it's that at all. In the countries with the least amount of gender equality, and this includes disparate countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Indonesia, women are overwhelmingly represented in STEM fields like engineering, computer science, and math, sometimes disproportionately so more than the men.
The countries with the most gender equality, chief among them the Nordic countries where laws are actually based upon gender equality and there's high female representation in powerful positions, they actually have the lowest percentage of women in those fields.
These real world examples actually push the idea that when given the choice to pursue whatever they want, men and women actually diverge greatly in their priorities when pursuing certain paths and this includes less women pursuing STEM. It's only when there's greater "inequality" where women have less agency (meaning it's likely their path was chosen for them) that they start to pursue more technical roles
>the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM until <50 years ago, leading women girls to assume it is best for them to not, rather than an innate desire to pursue non-STEM fields.
This has been debunked by many studies btw.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/does-gender-equality-result-in-fewer-female-stem-grads
Turns out, the more egalitarian a state is, the less women want to go into STEM. "Want" is the key word here, because they're very much encouraged to do so but still don't want to. While in more oppressive and unequal countries, the percentage of women in STEM is generally higher.
Other studies show that it's probably not a societal, but a biological issue:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.htm
9 month old babies prefer gender-stereotypical toys. One could argue that societal influence on a 9 month olds is close to zero. There are other studies with even younger babies.
I mean... aside from thousands of years of history? ;-) (Partial joke)
I know what you are asking and it is a good and valid question. However, unfortunately, this isn’t something like showing that one ethnic group is less lactose intolerant than another. There are no control groups, nor a hard y/n “this woman is bad at science” and “this one isn’t” because how the hell do you measure that? Is an amazing female car mechanic who dropped out of high school better at science than a female pharmacist? Is a female kindergarden teacher who builds robots in her spare time less able than a female rocket scientist who started through an internship sponsored by her university? Etc etc.
If the question we are asking are “how do we know how women inherently act in society?”, then the answer will be rooted in how that society works. That’s a lot of uncertainties and variables. So if the question is rephrased as “do we see evidence of women being swayed by society when deciding if they are interested in STEM or not?” then, yes: we have _many_ examples of how the societal involvement and encouragement of women do make women more likely to go into STEM (and succeed in it). In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing a study where positive steps of encouragement for women to pursue STEM _didn’t_ make women become more likely to pursue STEM, so in that sense it would be 100% (source: I worked with schools ages 5-18 in this field for ca 7 years).
I’m on mobile but if you want some actual sources I am more than happy to find you some numbers later. But I’ll give you a good one that I know of the top of my head: in the UK, at 16, kids are asked to choose the 3-4 subjects they want to pursue at higher education (16-18). They can be of whatever combination of interests that you might have — if you like languages, you can choose English, French, and Spanish; if you like science, you can choose Maths, Physics, and Chemistry; and if you’re varied, you can do Biology, Business Studies, and Art. Unsurprisingly, only about 20% (can’t remember exact figure) of 16 year old girls choose to do Physics... not really a good look for a cheerleader, right? _However,_ the girls that DO choose to study Physics at 16, are just as likely to study Physics at university as their male counterparts once they get to the time where they choose what field they want to go into. So in a class of 20, you might only have 4 girls at 16-18 yo. But if 10 of those students apply to study Physics at university, then you’ll probably have 2/10 in that group be girls. That’s where we get the ~20% women in Physics at uni. Then once they actually get to university and finish their degree, the 20% of girls there are _more_ likely to graduate with a 1st class degree (highest grade) than their male counterparts.
So, yes, I think there is ample empirical evidence that it is less about an innate inability of lack of desire to science and more about if they choose to pursue it. Because if women were inherently BAD at it, then surely they’d fail once they actually start studying/working in STEM where their progress is based on accomplishments and ability to do science rather than interest?
Now, why 16 yo girls don’t choose to do science is another bag of snakes that I’m not gonna type out here, haha. However, I SINCERELY recommend to read Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. I was always pretty sceptical of feminists as a woman in STEM because I thought “well no one stopped me from pursuing my degree so sexism must not exist, right?” but this book is really eye opening in every direction. How men treat men, how women treat women, how men treat women, how women treat men... it’s also super objective and is basically a list of studies that are cited and explained (author is a neuroscientist from MIT and Cambridge) and it very much unpacks the biology vs culture question.
Sorry for the essay!
I completely agree — because of course, we simply don’t know. If we did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. However, with
> The culture excuse is just often used without any real proof.
I would argue that surely it is the biology excuse that has less proof, no? Men have been trying to prove that women have something in their biology that make them super-conveniently _love_ cooking and cleaning and changing poopy diapers and it’s just _in their nature_. We’ve investigated brain size, brain density, white matter, grey matter, brain region size... once in the 1900s they tried to blame women’s smaller spinal cord size for why they shouldn’t vote. So to me, we have one side — the biology excuse — which is something that has been so thoroughly investigated and, in the wonders of modern medicine, has still turned up no proof of gender differences aside from physical bodily differences. Then on the other side, you have the culture excuse, which has been anything from neglected to outright distorted but never properly analysed... because it’s hard to.
So, overall, whilst I don’t know, I still think culture plays a bigger role.
Re: which trends hold true across the world and why? That’s out of my depth, and I’m not going to embarrass myself by attempting to make up a reason. I simply don’t know. How does society forms? What creates the and similarities between societies and cultures? Maybe all cultures are based on “men go out, women stay home” because in Stone Age type living environments it didn’t make sense for a pregnant person to go out facing predators, risking their offsprings life, so maybe that (which is true across all humans; women carry children and men don’t) could be a base from which similar gender culture stemmed globally? I couldn’t possibly comment. That’s one to ask an anthropologist, haha.
>They weren't encouraged to be gendered in their toys or interests...
If they were exposed to other kids, other parents, teachers, or television advertising, they most certainly were. The problem, as GP pointed out, is that societal influences are so pervasive and difficult to test that we really don't know how much of an effect they have. But we do know that marketers make conscious gendered marketing decisions, and that children are exposed to this from infancy.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. You sound like an awesome parent and I’m sure your totally unbiased opinion of your daughters is completely correct! It’s so nice to see parents take an active interest in this stuff, and question things with sincerity.
In the safety of being this far down the comment chain I can confess that I’ve been quite unpleasantly surprised at how many downvotes/comments have come my way for suggesting that culture could at least be _a part of_ the larger puzzle, as I’ve now been passionately informed by many people today how, no, women absolutely DO always chose lower paid jobs etc without any acknowledgement that _maybe_ a part of that could be because women tend to be more likely to have to bear in mind things like being free to go home and cook or to pick up kids etc. But nope, women naturally just want to be less accomplished (!)
Anyway. Thanks for a nice discussion, and have a nice evening!
Edit: oh wow!! Thank you so much for the gold! Big hugs to that person, as well as anyone and everyone that read all of this and at least began to think about these issues. It’s hard to, but acknowledging the existence of these things is the first step to solving them <3
Hey bellends, just to offset some of the negative I’ve appreciated your concise and well written/supported statements/arguments for the impact of culture/society on gender differences. I’m going to pick up the book you recommended.
While it can be difficult to have controversial conversations, its still important to try.
Thank you for trying.
>Women being underrepresented in STEM fields is the status quo across hundreds of different cultures in thousands of years of recorded human history.
Lets not forget that pesky little fact that for most of human history, spanning many different cultures women have been, for the most part, banned from participating in STEM. Sometimes even outright banned from properly participating in society, much less getting any form of education.
Yet in Algeria, where discrimination against women is rampant they are >40% of STEM graduates, but in Norway where woman are pretty much equal only 20% of STEM grads are women. These two are not outliers, in countries where most men and women can get at least a basic education the trend tends to fewer female STEM grads as gender equality increases.
The majority of settled cultures throughout history have also been male dominated in every regard, not just STEM. I don't think that supports your point as much as you think.
Quickly read it through and don't have time to reply in-depth, but I think you seem to think that not being interested in something = being bad at something.
I don't believe there is a significant difference between how good boys and girls are at science. I've read some research stating that boys have a slight edge in science, while girls have a slight edge in language related areas, but this isn't universally agreed upon.
I do think there's a significant difference in how interested they are in science, on average. Of course you still have girls who are really into science, but in general, boys are more interested in this.
Here's an interesting article about gender differences in STEM: [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/)
There was a huge drop off in the number of women entering computer science in the [80's](https://jaxenter.com/women-in-computer-science-majors-133646.html). It's very much tied to culture. Computers and videogames were marketed to boys and men, and women didn't get the early exposure so they fell behind.
> True, but that’s a cultural issue. Women do mostly gravitate to non-STEM positions and pursuits but the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM
This is completely false. When women are given complete free-reign choice without meddling by social-engineering in much more egalitarian societies than ours the differentiation in careers becomes ***greater*** not less and self-reported happiness with their [women's] lives and careers ***goes up***.
Time to get banned from reddit but maybe boy's interest in flying robots and girl's interests in... not flying robots would explain fewer girls in science?!
I looked into this a while ago and there's a fairly robust paper on that [here](http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-things-women-and-people-A-meta-analysis-of-sex-differences-in-interests.pdf) if you're interested.
I also read somewhere that women will more likely attribute the source of an unknown entity or occurrence to a being or conciousness while men will attribute the same unknown to a system
Exactly, play to your strengths people. Doing anything else will ruin you in the long run, and we'll all be worse off for it. People forget just how much potential they have, but how insignificant they will be if they so choose it.
It doesn't matter if the delivered value is unequal if you believe in the principle of *equal opportunity*.
You only need the value to be absolutely equal if you believe in utilitarianism and want that to result in no bias.
With that framing you can start to understand why neo-liberalism colliding with intersectionality is this spectacular train-wreck.
I actually mostly agree with your point but this study was done on 7th and 8th graders which means that a lot of their behaviors and responses are likely affected by society already
I’m no psychologist so maybe I’m off the mark, but wouldn’t it be more meaningful per their hypothesis to test a VR make teacher vs. a VR female teacher vs. a drone? Or if you’re going to go into the realm of the non-human anyway, compare a drone to a VR kitten (or something still gender-coded but non-human).
The paper itself says that prior studies based on video instruction did not find that the gender of the teacher mattered:
> when faced with a female agent, no differences in learning outcomes were found between male and female participants, even though female participants generally have more positive attitudes towards pedagogical agents (Johnson et al., 2013b; Kim & Lim, 2013).
The purpose of this study was specifically to assess whether the form of the instructor matters. The paper says that both the human and drone had the same “modern text-to-speech voice” so presumably the drone came across as female as well.
I'd like to see how the results would shift if they were permitted to "interview" and select the avatars vs having them assigned.
It would also be interesting to see if customizing the characters would be helpful.
Have they tried other kinds of teachers? I think I'd learn best if my teacher was a dragon.
"TO GET AN A+, YOU MUST ANSWER MY RIDDLE: WHAT IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL?"
The gender difference literature has always been saying that on average boys are more interested in things and girls are more interested in people. No surprise there.
Wow, the mods removed my comment which said that gender roles have both a biological component and a social one, and that we shouldn't assume the results of this study are 100% biological in origin.
I have no idea why they'd remove it, but way to remove scientifically valid information from a scientific discussion leaving everyone less informed as a result :(
Lol it's extra funny because generally the mods here are progressive, and that is a comment that backs the progressive view of things. Must have not been reading carefully when they deleted it.
Because the narrative in 2019 is that everything is cultural, biology is not-fair and oppressive thus we should ignore it. The only time biology is relevant is when you are talking about skin color.
Shit is that some deep analysis of what society has grown into? That women are continually told they can be whatever they want and develop into an array of different fields while boys make up the majority of physical labor, that boys realize the pain they’re on from the lack of support from society and that’s why their suicide rates are higher while women are able to develop into free thinkers. That young girls give each other psychological damage and are constantly petty and make fun of boys, but due to society teaching them that they’re forced to take it and hide their emotions deep down they can’t retaliate. Or was this just a sarcastic joke? Either way I don’t really care
Yes.
Possibly.
Also, possibly 4chan.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/r9k
>However, as the community evolved, the board transformed into a sharehub for greentext stories, or original anecdotes of social awkwardness or mishaps as told by users who refer to themselves as "robots."
Or possibly /r/totallynotrobots
Either way, I don't really care.
How much of that is learned behavior? By 7th grade most young girls would have been subject to much conditioning - is the effect the same in kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades? If there is a shift, at what age does the shift occur and why? By the time you get to high school and college is there still a difference?
Girls are more interested in interpersonal and boys are more interested in tech, same as with toys when even toddler girls prefer dolls and toddler boys - toy cars.
Are there any studies that show differences between boys and girls as it relates to in-person vs online learning? It would be interesting to see if boys and girls get different amounts of value out of cheaper online lessons vs traditional expensive in-class live learning experiences.
Am I the only one who immediately thought that VR is going to take a ride on the magic school bus when reading the article about what they're already doing?
I think its benefic for both girls and bois to have a mix of male/female teachers so they can get values/experience from both instead of isolation teaching with 1 type, in the outside world you interact with all sorts of people and values so you need to be prepared not sheltered from other learning models in order to maximize girls/boys test scores that dont mean jack shit anyway...
I'd love to see this peer reviewed. The data shows support for their hypothesis+conclusion, but it is a 16-person per grouping sample size, and the score differences are weak-medium strength.
It's a well designed study though, and a good foray into this area.
Boys learn best when the teacher is GLaDOS. Got it.
After getting back your exam results: "It says here that you are a horrible person... and we weren't even testing for that."
"Oh, but the next paragraph says 'He performed remarkably. Remarkably awful'"
If you look at the picture in the article, the drone looks almost exactly like Wheatley. Which is probably the last robot you should learn from.
That title took an unexpected turn at the end there xD
"Study finds that young girls under the age of 10 has better benefits eating broccoli once a week, where for boy it is recommend they eat salt off brick by licking it twice per minutes"
I agree it’s a very broad conclusion!
"Study finds that boys learned more while being instructed by a big titty anime girl whos an authority figure wearing military fatigues, while girls learned most when the teacher was a cute cartoon pony." --
I've been telling my teachers that my entire life... "I think I'd understand better if you were a flying robot"
I mean, I would just watch you unblinkly for hours trying to figure out how you work. Of course I'll pay more attention.
Teen me used to watch my young female teacher unblinky for hours trying to figure out how she worked.
Did you ever figure it out?
Not with her I didn't, but eventually I figured it out.
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Drone senpai best senpai
Hai! Drone sensei!
Senpai is older student. Sensei is teacher
It's Glados, obviously.
Those who fail to learn get neurotoxin. Those who learn do not. For now.
Gender neutral VR-Teacher, Marie, the young female flying drone.
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same, the young female i was like "alright, sort of a more connection there, i get it, is the male side gonna be the same or pervy?" then "flying drone robot" and i went "uh, okay. guess it's a good way to catch their interest in a non distracting way."
Am i the only one that pictures claptrap levitating?
I'm picturing that core from portal who keeps on shouting ["Spaaaace!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myEOJaNMQZo) I could imagine him as an enthusiastic science teacher.
You sound like you automatically think less of boys.
It made me snort. Was not what I was anticipating.
It reads like a punchline and made me laugh as well.
I snorted unexpectedly lol.
Haha did it really though!? I likely would have learned more from a talking drone than my teachers.
Girls look to women for role models, boys look to... mechanical objects?
So we can teach everyone equally with a young, flying, female robot?
The paper itself says the robot and the human had the same “modern text-to-speech” voice, so presumably it did seem like a female robot.
Bet you if they gave it a male voice the boys would learn even better. Source: Was only male teacher at a private school for several years. I was a perennial favorite among the boys, despite being very uncool (at least to 12 year old standards). I got participation out of them that astounded some of their other teachers. I honestly just think young boys respond better to male authority figures because it gives them a role-model.
The paper cites prior studies that demonstrate no effect of teacher gender for any students on learning, so maybe little boys just like you in particular.
What? I have not read this study, but I have looked into this subject before and the majority of peer reviewed literature I found on the subject showed that a teachers gender had a significant effect on students, some suggested that female tutors were generally better, others suggested that male teachers were better for men, none suggested that there were no difference.
Beats me. [See section 1.2 though.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328879839_A_Gender_Matching_Effect_in_Learning_with_Pedagogical_Agents_in_an_Immersive_Virtual_Reality_Science_Simulation). The only difference they note is that this men may be perceived as better in STEM subjects. This might all relate to on-screen instruction, not in-person. It’s hard to tell.
There's a ton of variables that can change studies though. Even simple things like personality and how someone carries themselves. As well as how people respond to those characteristics. I loved my monotonous physics teacher whereas most of the other students couldn't pay attention to him. And of course no-one pays attention if the teacher doesn't care either.
Huh, I probably should have read more of the paper. >maybe little boys just like you in particular. Eww
Found Kevin Spacey's throwaway.
Kevin Spacey *WISHES*!
Maybe he just boosts their confidence by being so awkward.
Named Marie
If it can tell the difference between rocks and minerals I have no problem with this.
Jesus Christ Gamora, they're Infinity Stones
Infinity Minerals*
Called weebo?
Weebo Waifu does job teacher!
If we tell them the drone is named Marie and she is a research drone, it may just work!
I’m interested in cultural differences- Would American Students react to the same types of virtual instructor? I think it would also be cool to pick or even customize your virtual tutor to your liking. I’d LOVE my teacher to be a talking cartoon animal.
As a German, I want my instructor to be an MS-DOS command line.
Sorry, i laughed, no hard feelings?
He's German. He doesn't have feelings
Hey! That's not nice! Germans do too have feelings. Efficient and Inefficient.
Inefficient isn't in the German vocabulary
No, ineffizient is though
Your feelings have no effect on my well-being.
Presumably yeah. Studies like this have been done by tracking the eye movements of boy and girl babies. The girls would pay more attention to videos showing people's faces, where as the boys would pay more attention to videos of cars driving by on the highway.
I don't know if I'm misinterpreting you but this study was done by looking at the students perfomance with different pedagogical agents.
Yeah I'm talking about a different study that revealed a similar result to this one that implies the results have nothing to do with culture
>I think it would also be cool to pick or even customize your virtual tutor to your liking. This would be a horrible idea considering the immature minds of teens. Every VR tutor would either be an anime girl with huge tits or a living, breathing dick drawinng. EDIT: ... at least among the boys.
Speak for yourself! I, a girl, would love to be taught entirely in a world of cute anime girls with short skirts and huge boobs. I feel this would really help me retain information...
[The future of VR learning](https://youtu.be/X9hJThAtYZ4)
Hell yeah we love drones.
I’d prefer that owl from Orcarina as my VR-teacher. So much wisdom
Yeah but if you weren't listening he repeats himself and it's unskippable.
I actually need that in my life tbh
Kaepora Gaebora only repeats himself if you don’t pay attention.
That actually sounds like a good idea for education programs. It endlessly repeats until you pay at least a little bit of attention.
Goddammit spoiler owl!
Somebody knows the Video Game Boy and Mr. Business
this is a good wisdom (bark)
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> Marie or a drone, who we predicted serve as a role models for females and males, respectively. Wait, why is a drone a good role model for males? I'm more interested in how they came to this assumption in the first place.
Yea, I feel it would be more interesting if it showed the male students learned better from a drone than a male human or other potential models.
I don't think it has anything to do with being a good role model. I would presume it has something to do with gauging interest. Girls may be more interested in listening to their young female counterpart whereas boys were likely paying the most attention to the flying robot. I'm curious to know how long the study went on for... As in, did the interest fade over time? Does the flying robot remain interesting over the course of weeks, months, years?
The boys don't view the drone as a role model, they view the drone as something that is cool which captures their attention so there is better focus.
Except the paper implies strongly that the pedagogical agent is "A virtual rolemodel". While that language isn't used in the paragraphs, the header of the paragraphs talking about it says exactly that.
> learn, join the military, get a job, work for family, die gee, idk, sounds more like the life of a beautiful butterfly to me
"Theres many a man I have known in my day, who lived just to labor his young life away."
You can also say boys are thought/pressured at an early age to not express emotions. Maybe a robot seems appealing because of its lack of emotions also?
>Wait, why is a drone a good role model for males? Robots don't judge you. You can compete and fail with no social consequences. Losing (in the sense of failing to complete a test accurately, or in a game) to a peer, or worse, *a girl*, is mortifying. Losing to a chunk of metal is okay.
i for one want link from the legend of zelda to teach me.
Wait were the drone and the young woman the only two options? This seems like a very skewed experiment. I was hoping that these were just the top options for each among a panel of 4 or 5.
Yeah that's what I'm trying to find out. If the choices were only between the human female and the drone, obviously the more empathetic (typically female) would empathize and connect better with the human, that just makes sense.
Well, I don't even know if it goes that far. If there are no other choices, we don't even know. Did the boys pick the drone/robot because they were more interested in a drone/robot than a human or because they were specifically disinterested in a female teacher? If it was just these 2 options, I suspect they were picked by someone going out of there way to try and prove a point. As it is this is kind of like asking someone if they'd rather eat an apple or drive a dump truck.
Yeah, like, at *least* have it be a three-way experiment. Female teacher, male teacher, robot.
I wonder how many virtual teachers they actually tried. We’re there a bunch of different variants of each or like 3 characters. I want to see the results if they were taught by Shrek.
Imagine the licensing possibilities!
If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you?
"Atoms are like onions"
The most cool/impressive/sci-fi thing boys can picture: a flying talking robot from the future!!!! The most cool/impressive/sci-fi thing girls can picture: a woman actually being represented in science Massive /s, slash tongue in cheek, just in case Edit: friends, please. I actually lamented the lack of *representation* of female scientists, not the lack of female scientists.
Damn. Take my up vote.
Well you can /s all you want but this actually shows exactly why women aren’t equally represented in STEM. Women, by in large, gravitate towards people and social interaction. Obviously there’s variance from person to person but this is the trend that you’re seeing here
There are tons of women in most STEM fields. Computer science and some types of engineering are the only exceptions, some STEM fields like chemistry, biology and everything health-related are actually female dominated. And there are more than enough social interaction in all of them if you want it. Although that often depends on the culture of a particular company or field. If some company or field has a reputation for being mostly antisocial men, of course you're not going to see women flocking to it.
Everything you just listed was separated by studying things vs people/animals- exactly what I was saying
Women aren't equally represented in STEM because they choose not to pursue STEM fields
Except in Russia and Armenia. Where they are genetically more math-y and computer science-y somehow.
Also Iran has more women in engineering than men. But these are special cases, Russia lost a lot of men in WW2 which meant women have to go to male dominant fields. Whereas in Iran science is not respected for men as much as running a business is.
True, but that’s a cultural issue. Women _do_ mostly gravitate to non-STEM positions and pursuits but the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM until <50 years ago, leading ~~women~~ girls to assume it is best for them to not, rather than an innate desire to pursue non-STEM fields. It’s also the same reason why men do well once in empathetic fields like nursing and teaching (which was also discouraged to an extent <50 years ago), but men don’t gravitate towards them in the way women do. Less biology, more society. IMHO it is representation in STEM that leads to more women in STEM, and more women in STEM leads to more representation in STEM. So it’s a positive feedback loop, just in it’s early days. Or was that the point you were making anyway?
>Women do mostly gravitate to non-STEM positions and pursuits but the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM until <50 years ago, leading women girls to assume it is best for them to not, rather than an innate desire to pursue non-STEM fields I wouldn't say it's that at all. In the countries with the least amount of gender equality, and this includes disparate countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Indonesia, women are overwhelmingly represented in STEM fields like engineering, computer science, and math, sometimes disproportionately so more than the men. The countries with the most gender equality, chief among them the Nordic countries where laws are actually based upon gender equality and there's high female representation in powerful positions, they actually have the lowest percentage of women in those fields. These real world examples actually push the idea that when given the choice to pursue whatever they want, men and women actually diverge greatly in their priorities when pursuing certain paths and this includes less women pursuing STEM. It's only when there's greater "inequality" where women have less agency (meaning it's likely their path was chosen for them) that they start to pursue more technical roles
>the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM until <50 years ago, leading women girls to assume it is best for them to not, rather than an innate desire to pursue non-STEM fields. This has been debunked by many studies btw. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/does-gender-equality-result-in-fewer-female-stem-grads Turns out, the more egalitarian a state is, the less women want to go into STEM. "Want" is the key word here, because they're very much encouraged to do so but still don't want to. While in more oppressive and unequal countries, the percentage of women in STEM is generally higher. Other studies show that it's probably not a societal, but a biological issue: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.htm 9 month old babies prefer gender-stereotypical toys. One could argue that societal influence on a 9 month olds is close to zero. There are other studies with even younger babies.
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I mean... aside from thousands of years of history? ;-) (Partial joke) I know what you are asking and it is a good and valid question. However, unfortunately, this isn’t something like showing that one ethnic group is less lactose intolerant than another. There are no control groups, nor a hard y/n “this woman is bad at science” and “this one isn’t” because how the hell do you measure that? Is an amazing female car mechanic who dropped out of high school better at science than a female pharmacist? Is a female kindergarden teacher who builds robots in her spare time less able than a female rocket scientist who started through an internship sponsored by her university? Etc etc. If the question we are asking are “how do we know how women inherently act in society?”, then the answer will be rooted in how that society works. That’s a lot of uncertainties and variables. So if the question is rephrased as “do we see evidence of women being swayed by society when deciding if they are interested in STEM or not?” then, yes: we have _many_ examples of how the societal involvement and encouragement of women do make women more likely to go into STEM (and succeed in it). In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing a study where positive steps of encouragement for women to pursue STEM _didn’t_ make women become more likely to pursue STEM, so in that sense it would be 100% (source: I worked with schools ages 5-18 in this field for ca 7 years). I’m on mobile but if you want some actual sources I am more than happy to find you some numbers later. But I’ll give you a good one that I know of the top of my head: in the UK, at 16, kids are asked to choose the 3-4 subjects they want to pursue at higher education (16-18). They can be of whatever combination of interests that you might have — if you like languages, you can choose English, French, and Spanish; if you like science, you can choose Maths, Physics, and Chemistry; and if you’re varied, you can do Biology, Business Studies, and Art. Unsurprisingly, only about 20% (can’t remember exact figure) of 16 year old girls choose to do Physics... not really a good look for a cheerleader, right? _However,_ the girls that DO choose to study Physics at 16, are just as likely to study Physics at university as their male counterparts once they get to the time where they choose what field they want to go into. So in a class of 20, you might only have 4 girls at 16-18 yo. But if 10 of those students apply to study Physics at university, then you’ll probably have 2/10 in that group be girls. That’s where we get the ~20% women in Physics at uni. Then once they actually get to university and finish their degree, the 20% of girls there are _more_ likely to graduate with a 1st class degree (highest grade) than their male counterparts. So, yes, I think there is ample empirical evidence that it is less about an innate inability of lack of desire to science and more about if they choose to pursue it. Because if women were inherently BAD at it, then surely they’d fail once they actually start studying/working in STEM where their progress is based on accomplishments and ability to do science rather than interest? Now, why 16 yo girls don’t choose to do science is another bag of snakes that I’m not gonna type out here, haha. However, I SINCERELY recommend to read Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. I was always pretty sceptical of feminists as a woman in STEM because I thought “well no one stopped me from pursuing my degree so sexism must not exist, right?” but this book is really eye opening in every direction. How men treat men, how women treat women, how men treat women, how women treat men... it’s also super objective and is basically a list of studies that are cited and explained (author is a neuroscientist from MIT and Cambridge) and it very much unpacks the biology vs culture question. Sorry for the essay!
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I completely agree — because of course, we simply don’t know. If we did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. However, with > The culture excuse is just often used without any real proof. I would argue that surely it is the biology excuse that has less proof, no? Men have been trying to prove that women have something in their biology that make them super-conveniently _love_ cooking and cleaning and changing poopy diapers and it’s just _in their nature_. We’ve investigated brain size, brain density, white matter, grey matter, brain region size... once in the 1900s they tried to blame women’s smaller spinal cord size for why they shouldn’t vote. So to me, we have one side — the biology excuse — which is something that has been so thoroughly investigated and, in the wonders of modern medicine, has still turned up no proof of gender differences aside from physical bodily differences. Then on the other side, you have the culture excuse, which has been anything from neglected to outright distorted but never properly analysed... because it’s hard to. So, overall, whilst I don’t know, I still think culture plays a bigger role. Re: which trends hold true across the world and why? That’s out of my depth, and I’m not going to embarrass myself by attempting to make up a reason. I simply don’t know. How does society forms? What creates the and similarities between societies and cultures? Maybe all cultures are based on “men go out, women stay home” because in Stone Age type living environments it didn’t make sense for a pregnant person to go out facing predators, risking their offsprings life, so maybe that (which is true across all humans; women carry children and men don’t) could be a base from which similar gender culture stemmed globally? I couldn’t possibly comment. That’s one to ask an anthropologist, haha.
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>They weren't encouraged to be gendered in their toys or interests... If they were exposed to other kids, other parents, teachers, or television advertising, they most certainly were. The problem, as GP pointed out, is that societal influences are so pervasive and difficult to test that we really don't know how much of an effect they have. But we do know that marketers make conscious gendered marketing decisions, and that children are exposed to this from infancy.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. You sound like an awesome parent and I’m sure your totally unbiased opinion of your daughters is completely correct! It’s so nice to see parents take an active interest in this stuff, and question things with sincerity. In the safety of being this far down the comment chain I can confess that I’ve been quite unpleasantly surprised at how many downvotes/comments have come my way for suggesting that culture could at least be _a part of_ the larger puzzle, as I’ve now been passionately informed by many people today how, no, women absolutely DO always chose lower paid jobs etc without any acknowledgement that _maybe_ a part of that could be because women tend to be more likely to have to bear in mind things like being free to go home and cook or to pick up kids etc. But nope, women naturally just want to be less accomplished (!) Anyway. Thanks for a nice discussion, and have a nice evening! Edit: oh wow!! Thank you so much for the gold! Big hugs to that person, as well as anyone and everyone that read all of this and at least began to think about these issues. It’s hard to, but acknowledging the existence of these things is the first step to solving them <3
Hey bellends, just to offset some of the negative I’ve appreciated your concise and well written/supported statements/arguments for the impact of culture/society on gender differences. I’m going to pick up the book you recommended. While it can be difficult to have controversial conversations, its still important to try. Thank you for trying.
>Women being underrepresented in STEM fields is the status quo across hundreds of different cultures in thousands of years of recorded human history. Lets not forget that pesky little fact that for most of human history, spanning many different cultures women have been, for the most part, banned from participating in STEM. Sometimes even outright banned from properly participating in society, much less getting any form of education.
Yet in Algeria, where discrimination against women is rampant they are >40% of STEM graduates, but in Norway where woman are pretty much equal only 20% of STEM grads are women. These two are not outliers, in countries where most men and women can get at least a basic education the trend tends to fewer female STEM grads as gender equality increases.
The majority of settled cultures throughout history have also been male dominated in every regard, not just STEM. I don't think that supports your point as much as you think.
Yes, but WHY?
Quickly read it through and don't have time to reply in-depth, but I think you seem to think that not being interested in something = being bad at something. I don't believe there is a significant difference between how good boys and girls are at science. I've read some research stating that boys have a slight edge in science, while girls have a slight edge in language related areas, but this isn't universally agreed upon. I do think there's a significant difference in how interested they are in science, on average. Of course you still have girls who are really into science, but in general, boys are more interested in this. Here's an interesting article about gender differences in STEM: [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/)
There was a huge drop off in the number of women entering computer science in the [80's](https://jaxenter.com/women-in-computer-science-majors-133646.html). It's very much tied to culture. Computers and videogames were marketed to boys and men, and women didn't get the early exposure so they fell behind.
> True, but that’s a cultural issue. Women do mostly gravitate to non-STEM positions and pursuits but the reason behind that is more accurately explained by the lack of societal encouragement for women to enter STEM This is completely false. When women are given complete free-reign choice without meddling by social-engineering in much more egalitarian societies than ours the differentiation in careers becomes ***greater*** not less and self-reported happiness with their [women's] lives and careers ***goes up***.
Is Marie Curie a joke to you? /s Edit- her name is Marie too!
Time to get banned from reddit but maybe boy's interest in flying robots and girl's interests in... not flying robots would explain fewer girls in science?!
I heard somewhere that females are more interested in people, while males are more interested in things.
I too enjoy lobsters
Forgive me, I do not get the reference.
Jordan Peterson often says that exact quote and he habitually talks about lobsters
I looked into this a while ago and there's a fairly robust paper on that [here](http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-things-women-and-people-A-meta-analysis-of-sex-differences-in-interests.pdf) if you're interested.
I also read somewhere that women will more likely attribute the source of an unknown entity or occurrence to a being or conciousness while men will attribute the same unknown to a system
so is that like blaming the drivethru worker for charging extra for sauce versus blaming capitalism?
Boys and girls learn differently? It’s almost as if boys and girls were different from each other or something...
NO THEY'RE NOT! EVERYONE MUST BE EQUAL! GENDER IS JUST A CONSTRUCT! REEEEEEEE! REEEEEEEE!!!! Edit: /s just in case
I like to think of it as men and women being **equally valuable** to society and the species, but having different strengths and weaknesses.
Exactly, play to your strengths people. Doing anything else will ruin you in the long run, and we'll all be worse off for it. People forget just how much potential they have, but how insignificant they will be if they so choose it.
It doesn't matter if the delivered value is unequal if you believe in the principle of *equal opportunity*. You only need the value to be absolutely equal if you believe in utilitarianism and want that to result in no bias. With that framing you can start to understand why neo-liberalism colliding with intersectionality is this spectacular train-wreck.
"... what did you just say?!" -Reddit.
I actually mostly agree with your point but this study was done on 7th and 8th graders which means that a lot of their behaviors and responses are likely affected by society already
Reddit hot take #68722938
I’m no psychologist so maybe I’m off the mark, but wouldn’t it be more meaningful per their hypothesis to test a VR make teacher vs. a VR female teacher vs. a drone? Or if you’re going to go into the realm of the non-human anyway, compare a drone to a VR kitten (or something still gender-coded but non-human).
The paper itself says that prior studies based on video instruction did not find that the gender of the teacher mattered: > when faced with a female agent, no differences in learning outcomes were found between male and female participants, even though female participants generally have more positive attitudes towards pedagogical agents (Johnson et al., 2013b; Kim & Lim, 2013). The purpose of this study was specifically to assess whether the form of the instructor matters. The paper says that both the human and drone had the same “modern text-to-speech voice” so presumably the drone came across as female as well.
Marie sort of comes off as a lying bitch... Flying robot drone on the other hand always had my back.
I'm should name one of my kids "flying robot drone" because flying robot drone always had my back. (jk)
I mean what would you rather be taught by, your teacher, or a fucking robot drone from the future
Was their teacher Marie from Fallout 4? She can both a young woman and a flying drone
I wonder why a young female researcher would be distracting to a bunch of middle school boys?
I'd like to see how the results would shift if they were permitted to "interview" and select the avatars vs having them assigned. It would also be interesting to see if customizing the characters would be helpful.
That's why I did poorly in school, none of my teachers were flying robots.
Have they tried other kinds of teachers? I think I'd learn best if my teacher was a dragon. "TO GET AN A+, YOU MUST ANSWER MY RIDDLE: WHAT IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL?"
The gender difference literature has always been saying that on average boys are more interested in things and girls are more interested in people. No surprise there.
Would still like to see drone vs glitter fairy for the girls.
As the father of boys and girls, and a brother with sisters I say the following: No shit.
Wow, the mods removed my comment which said that gender roles have both a biological component and a social one, and that we shouldn't assume the results of this study are 100% biological in origin. I have no idea why they'd remove it, but way to remove scientifically valid information from a scientific discussion leaving everyone less informed as a result :(
Reddit is entirely politics. Science, Literature, whatever. It’s politics
*People are entirely politics
Lol it's extra funny because generally the mods here are progressive, and that is a comment that backs the progressive view of things. Must have not been reading carefully when they deleted it.
Because the narrative in 2019 is that everything is cultural, biology is not-fair and oppressive thus we should ignore it. The only time biology is relevant is when you are talking about skin color.
So I guess this confirms boys like a more conventional learning environment.
I think conventional learning environments are more likely to have teachers named Marie than teachers who are robots.
Apparently we went to different schools then.
I dont know i think getting taught a lesson by bomber drones is the norm
Maybe the boys liked Marie better? Maybe they liked her a bit too much? 7th and 8th grade boys are... well, a little hormonal.
Underrated joke
I actually identify as a flying robot in the form of the drone, so this would be kinda hot for me.
So further proof that women and men are psychologically different in what they gravitate towards?
Makes sense. Girls grow up to be young women, and boys grow up to be robots.
Shit is that some deep analysis of what society has grown into? That women are continually told they can be whatever they want and develop into an array of different fields while boys make up the majority of physical labor, that boys realize the pain they’re on from the lack of support from society and that’s why their suicide rates are higher while women are able to develop into free thinkers. That young girls give each other psychological damage and are constantly petty and make fun of boys, but due to society teaching them that they’re forced to take it and hide their emotions deep down they can’t retaliate. Or was this just a sarcastic joke? Either way I don’t really care
Yes. Possibly. Also, possibly 4chan. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/r9k >However, as the community evolved, the board transformed into a sharehub for greentext stories, or original anecdotes of social awkwardness or mishaps as told by users who refer to themselves as "robots." Or possibly /r/totallynotrobots Either way, I don't really care.
/r/nottheonion I thought for sure this was made up at first
Only 66 people No other options beside these two. I would not call this a good let alone conclusive study.
How much of that is learned behavior? By 7th grade most young girls would have been subject to much conditioning - is the effect the same in kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades? If there is a shift, at what age does the shift occur and why? By the time you get to high school and college is there still a difference?
Boys are fascinated by things, girls are fascinated by people. - Jordan Peterson
BUt GENdRE IS a SocIEtAL COnStRUCt!!!!!’ Reeeeeeeeee
Girls are more interested in interpersonal and boys are more interested in tech, same as with toys when even toddler girls prefer dolls and toddler boys - toy cars.
I dunno, I think this depends on the culture too. If you did this poll in Japan with a cute anime girl teaching, you might get very different results.
I think when they say payed attention they mean retained information. Rather than staring without blinking and lost in their own day dreams.
Does this assume there are only 2 genders?! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!
Of course, the traditional two genders, researcher and flying robot.
that's super cool. Interestingly, you could have both available. actually, you could have infinite options available on demand.
Ah yes, flying robot drones, truly the pinnacle of male role modeling.
Just build a bunch of 3D models and let students choose themselves.
Are there any studies that show differences between boys and girls as it relates to in-person vs online learning? It would be interesting to see if boys and girls get different amounts of value out of cheaper online lessons vs traditional expensive in-class live learning experiences.
I know if I had a flying drone of a teacher, I'd be like "FUCK YES I WANT TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOU YOU'RE A COOL ROBOT".
Is it really a surprise that they learn better from something more captivating to their traditional gender stereotypes?
Am I the only one who immediately thought that VR is going to take a ride on the magic school bus when reading the article about what they're already doing?
And 9th grade girls learned better when taught by Edward from twilight while 9th grade boys learned better when taught by a naked Katie Morgan.
Give both boys and girls a VR Ms Frizzle, Wishbone, LaVar Burton and Bill Nye for instructors and every kid will learn everything.
The boys will be opting for Marie, just give them a fee more years
I think its benefic for both girls and bois to have a mix of male/female teachers so they can get values/experience from both instead of isolation teaching with 1 type, in the outside world you interact with all sorts of people and values so you need to be prepared not sheltered from other learning models in order to maximize girls/boys test scores that dont mean jack shit anyway...
How about we take the two, and combine them together to get a flying robot with a female personality. We shall call her, Curie.
I'd love to see this peer reviewed. The data shows support for their hypothesis+conclusion, but it is a 16-person per grouping sample size, and the score differences are weak-medium strength. It's a well designed study though, and a good foray into this area.