the difference between generalization and prejudice

[chhotii]

A generalization would be, for example, to observe that on average, females show poorer performance in doing math than males. It makes me cringe to admit this, but I've heard that statistics such as average SAT scores, numbers of women vs. men enrolling in engineering programs, etc., support the hypotheses that females, as a group, have worse math skills.

Prejudice is to say "oh, she's a girl, she can't do math." I will take my perfect 800 on the math section of the GRE and beat anyone who says this into a pulp.

The problem with generalizations is that they lead to prejudice. Generalizations are useful because they allow for snap judgments. Like, if someone runs in exclaiming "Quick! Somebody prove that cos(A+B) = cosAcosB - sinAsinB before the house burns down!" then you will probably find the person who looks most like a "math geek" to direct this problem to, and that stereotype is male (and scrawny, wearing glasses and a pocket protector). OK, so that example is absurd and far-fetched. But more useful generalizations might suggest who you should pull out of line to search at airport security: the young man from Saudi Arabia or the old lady from Minnesota. (But, then again, this makes it kind of suck to be a perfectly innocent young man from Saudi Arabia.)

Why do generalizations lead to prejudice? When one has to make a snap judgment, is prejudice any more effective than generalization? I think not; prejudice is too inflexible to allow one to recognize and adapt when one has encountered a math-geek chick, or a little old lady terrorist from Minnesota, or a deficit-spending Republican.

Discuss.

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

I've heard that statistics such as average SAT scores, numbers of women vs. men enrolling in engineering programs, etc., support the hypotheses that females, as a group, have worse math skills.


just fyi, a few points about this specifically:

1. it's cultural. american and israeli girls have lower sat scores than american and israeli boys. thai and kuwaiti girls outscore thai and kuwaiti boys.

2. relative to boys, girls get better grades in math class than their sat scores would predict. so it's difficult to interpret what this means in terms of their actual math skills -- is the test harder on girls in some way that has nothing to do with their math, or do they get better grades for some reason besides their actual skills?

i guess my point is that even generalizations need to be made with a lot more care than we typically offer them. prejudices, of course, the more so.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to me that this is largely cultural. I think the relavant points about math are that a) it is difficult and b) it takes perserverance to get very far in it. So cultural expectations and self-esteem have a big impact. The preface to Thomas Garrity's book, All the Mathematics You Missed [But Need to Know for Graduate School], is worth quoting at length on this point:

Math is hard. Unfortunately, people are just not that good at mathematics... I know of no serious mathematician who finds math easy. In fact, most, after a few beers, will confess as to how stupid and slow they are... This is one of the hurdles... namely how to deal with the profundity of mathematics in stark comparison to our own shallow understandings of mathematics.

My own experience is that math is wicked hard. Alone with a math textbook, without any external feedback, I quickly come to the conclusion that I am the stupidest bit of goo in the universe. But then I get all this assurance from standardized tests and from my college professors that, really, I am really amazingly good at math... So then I grant that maybe, perhaps, it might be worthwhile to keep tackling the subject.

On the other hand, someone who has internalized both "I am female" and "girls are bad at math", when faced with the difficulty of math, is going to just give up too quickly. In a culture in which math skills are considered un-feminine, boys would be more likely than girls to keep plugging away, which is what is really needed because nearly nobody finds math to be falling-off-a-log easy. But... but I guess in a culture that doesn't contain the "girls suck at math" meme, girls would expect themselves to understand the math they're taught in school as well as they understand other subjects. So the prejudice regarding girls and math is really insideous and self-perpetuating. Has anyone studied attitudes on this subject in Thailand and Kuwait, whether math is considered less un-feminine in those countries?

My own reactions to the 2 statements that got most chicks to give up on math long ago:

I am female: I am a gender-neutral soul that happens to be inhabiting a female body, which seems so irrelevant when I'm trying to focus on math not sex.

Girls are bad at math: They should stop being wimps and try harder.

I have no insight on the discrepancy between test scores and class grades, though.