Quinnchr, I can't reply to you, so I'll reply here instead.
This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.
The article you linked had a different take—that women are more adversely affected by pressure than are men.
The article had a different take, because I don't think your hypothesis is true: And I went through the American public school system very recently. There wasn't a single year in which it wasn't drilled into our heads by predominantly female teachers how much better girls are than boys at everything. Boys were the victim of daily jabs. There wasn't a single year in which we weren't told that the only reason girls have been traditionally worse at math is because mean boys make girls think they're worse.
...mentions something that I witnessed personally. Teachers tend to despise boys who act like traditional boys. Those boys are treated more harshly. Their answers are never given the benefit of the doubt. They're mad to feel like failures.
So I think the meme of "girls are taught they suck; boys are taught they're great" doesn't apply to the United States, and opposite has likely been true since the 70s or 80s.
Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable
I think they spend a lot of time and money giving special treatment to girls and women, trying to close innate performance gaps. If they wanted to be truly equitable, they'd do the same for boys (and maybe they're starting to, and we'll soon see results).
But even if Sweden were to do that, what then? They've spent a lot of time pursuing equal results, as though it's a goal in and of itself. Why should it be?
If you have two people, one of whom innately excels at math and the other innately excels at editing prose, why not encourage and foster those skills instead of fighting against them? Specialization isn't a bad thing; it's necessary for real progress to be made.
If it was a result of pressure why would the disparity only show when they were told it was a math test? Are you suggesting women have an innate anxiety to doing math?
I'm going to shy away from the anecdotal as that will get us nowhere, I will say though my experience was very different than yours.
As for teachers discriminating against men. This is absolutely a legitimate men's issue, but it's largely an intersectional issue. Middle class white men in general aren't the ones being discriminated against, it's largely an issue of race and to a lesser extent class.
Sweden has a ton of social programs specifically for men as well. In what ways are Swedish women receiving special treatment? Do you consider anything other than the status quo special treatment?
I'm not sure why equality isn't a legitimate goal in itself. Would you say the same thing in the 1960s about the nascent civil rights movement? I'm generally of the opinion that no class or group of people should be treated as inferior. If you still need a reason, economically speaking there is a strong positive correlation between gender equality and GDP per capita.
What purpose does proving that women/men are innately better at certain things hold? At best it's a generalization, there will always be women and men who preform better in non-standard ways. What purpose does a generalization like that serve? Of course women and men can have innate differences, but why must it depend on the biological sex? There are huge variances in hormonal levels and physiology across a single sex, do you really think there are innate characteristics common to all women?
Why do you make the implicit assumption that innate performance gaps (in things like math and editing prose especially) fall along gender lines? A better null hypothesis is that there is no connection between gender and these skills.
By the way, I'm sorry you felt mistreated by teachers because of your gender. That's wrong.
This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.
The article you linked had a different take—that women are more adversely affected by pressure than are men.
The article had a different take, because I don't think your hypothesis is true: And I went through the American public school system very recently. There wasn't a single year in which it wasn't drilled into our heads by predominantly female teachers how much better girls are than boys at everything. Boys were the victim of daily jabs. There wasn't a single year in which we weren't told that the only reason girls have been traditionally worse at math is because mean boys make girls think they're worse.
This article...
http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discrimi...
...mentions something that I witnessed personally. Teachers tend to despise boys who act like traditional boys. Those boys are treated more harshly. Their answers are never given the benefit of the doubt. They're mad to feel like failures.
So I think the meme of "girls are taught they suck; boys are taught they're great" doesn't apply to the United States, and opposite has likely been true since the 70s or 80s.
Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable
I think they spend a lot of time and money giving special treatment to girls and women, trying to close innate performance gaps. If they wanted to be truly equitable, they'd do the same for boys (and maybe they're starting to, and we'll soon see results).
But even if Sweden were to do that, what then? They've spent a lot of time pursuing equal results, as though it's a goal in and of itself. Why should it be?
If you have two people, one of whom innately excels at math and the other innately excels at editing prose, why not encourage and foster those skills instead of fighting against them? Specialization isn't a bad thing; it's necessary for real progress to be made.