In this recent study, women outperform men in reading/writing whether the tests were given blindly or not (i.e., the examiner knew the sex of the examinee or not).
However, in mathematics, men outperformed women when the exams were blind, but women to men when they did not go blindly.
Sexual bias
The study's findings suggest that examiners (secondary school teachers) may be biased in favor of women in their mathematics evaluations.
On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in mathematics are more likely to select a science major in high school. Without teachers' bias in favor of girls, the gender gap when choosing a science career would be 12.5% greater in favor of boys.
Similarly, in 2017, social researchers William von Hippel and David Buss sent a survey by email to a sample of psychologists, asking their beliefs about a variety of evolutionary statements and findings. These psychologists were more likely to endorse a sex difference in favor of women than in favor of men. Specifically, they were more likely to agree that women could have evolved to be more verbally talented than men than that men could have evolved to be more mathematically talented than women.
It is not the only observed example of bias towards the female sex. For example, another newly published study in it British Journal of Psychology directed by Steve Stewart-Williams found that people respond to research on sex differences in ways that favor women.
In the study, participants were asked to read a popular science article that was experimentally manipulated to suggest that men or women have a more desirable quality (for example, men/women are better at drawing or men/women lie less often). Participants evaluated pro-women's research more favorably than pro-men's research. Specifically, participants found pro-women's research to be more important, more plausible, and more well-conducted, and they found pro-men's research to be more offensive, more harmful, more disturbing, and inherently sexist.
This pro-female bias was observed between male and female participants.
It has also been discovered that people have a greater desire to censor science that disfavors women.
Ironically, these pro-feminine preferences may explain why dominant narratives focus so assiduously on the possibility of anti-female prejudice: Society cares more about the well-being of women than men and is therefore less tolerant of disparities that disadvantage them. A series of studies directed by Katharina Block found that people care more about female underrepresentation in careers than they care about male underrepresentation.
Perhaps this bias has something to do with the fact that men tend to be incarcerated more often than women and also receive higher sentences, or that they are shot by police is also higher, or that they are victims of violent crimes, or that are homeless, or who commit suicide or die at work.
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The news
Women outperform men on math tests (only if the teacher knows he is evaluating a woman)
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
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