Lynne Kiesling
I’m not one to see everything through the lens of gender, but this is pretty cool: for the first time in its nine-year history, girls have won all of the grand prizes at the Siemens math and science competition:
Siemens Foundation President James Whaley says the percentage of girls entering the competition has increased each year; this year, 48% of the contestants were female. Eighty percent of this year’s competitors were from public schools, and one team of finalists consisted of home-schooled girls. Many of the schools whose students were represented also have close ties to nearby universities or research labs. “There are very few [high] schools that have the resources or labs to support this high level of research,” Whaley notes.
Note the importance of the local university ties. Increasingly I meet new undergrads who have taken extensive advantage of local universities for exactly this sort of thing. Here’s a hypothesis: at the margin such ties are more likely to benefit girls than boys. Why? I could offer a host of reasons, largely based on my own personal experience.
In any case, this is pretty cool. HT to Instapundit for the link.
I don’t know that this is necessarily a good thing. Women academically outperforming men is a recent phenomenon, and could be spun negatively as well as positively.
In any case, it bodes well in one respect. If women are overcoming their deficiencies in math, that opens up the pool of potential engineers by 50%.
If you care about such things, of course.
Anyone know why the media outlets are now so quiet about this? No one has been on TV or radio yet. Isn’t this kind of strange compared with other years? Also what happened in 2004?
There seems to have been a major mistake made in the 2004 competition. Why wasn’t it ever reported on or corrected?
There seems to have been a major mistake made in the 2004 competition. Why wasn’t it ever reported on or corrected?