For all of recorded history roles have been defined for both males and females, and scarcely ever have those roles overlapped in any way. The citizens of classical Athens categorized their women similar to slaves, denying them the vote, the right to self-determination and the right to own property. The ancient Chinese viewed women as property, inflicting on them what are now viewed as horrible practices such as binding their feet to keep them small. The ancient Hebrew culture had strictly-defined roles for both men and women, based upon traditions steeped in age. Women were the homemakers, who helped to tend their husbands' farms while also being responsible for preparation of meals and raising of the children. The Greek philosopher and physician Galen put forth the notion that women were men who had not been sufficiently baked in the womb.
The nobility in the Middle Ages used women as currency, marrying their daughters and sisters off to lords from other countries in an attempt to buy alliances or avoid wars with those neighboring nations, or paying off the victors of the wars. Women were expected to remain silent, producing heirs and embroidery. On the occasional times that a women rose to power, such as Matilda of Anglo-Saxon England or Eleanor of Aquitane, they were not viewed as powerful or taken seriously by their male contemporaries.
By the time of the Enlightenment, not much had changed. Indeed, in Tudor England, Henry VIII's schism from the Roman Catholic Church was largely fueled by his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Why did he demand such a divorce? This was for the simple reason that Catherine could not provide him with a male heir. Henry is known for having had six wives in total - his fifth wife was the first to provide him with a male heir, though he had two daughters already by the time of young Edward's birth.
Through the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, and even into the Industrial era, there are few records of scientific achievements in any field by women - the first such that comes to mind are those of Marie Curie in the early twentieth century. Women were largely denied the opportunity to explore science and technology (or much of anything else - literature for example), socially and culturally, and as a result they were largely unable to make any widely-recognized contributions.
What has changed in the twentieth century? There have been significant changes in the status of women, especially in the Western World, but there are still examples today, even within developed nations, of misogyny. The Roman Catholic Church, after fifteen hundred years, still does not admit women to the clergy. Statistics Canada reports a disparity of ten thousand dollars between the average annual pay of women and men. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported in February 2000 that only one major corporation in North America has a female CEO. The United States of America has never had a female President and Canada's only female prime minister served for less than six months. The area of mathematics was no different from the rest. One of the greatest philosophers of the Renaissance, Immanuel Kant, writing in the eighteenth century, wrote that women might as well grow beards as worry their pretty heads about geometry. What does this say about the supposed "enlightened" attitude of the Renaissance? Did Kant believe that women were incapable of understanding and contributing to mathematics? It certainly seems that this is what he was trying to say.
Recent scholarship on gender and learning is prolific in its magnitude. There are more journal articles on gender in the classroom than can be read in a reasonable amount of time, and that does not speak to the number of books that have been published as well. The topic is a rich one for discussion, as is any topic in education, if only because the qualitative nature of the discipline withholds any possibility of a rock-solid conclusion on any issue.
Despite this, academics continue to research, and one of the areas that they have been researching with respect to gender is the area of cognitive differences between males and females. The results have been reproduced several times by different researchers in different areas of the United States, and so it seems fairly sure that there is a definite difference in the way that boys and girls think in the math classroom. This cognitive difference has definite repercussions to those students' achievement as they progress through the system.
Do women really lack the ability to do math? Certainly not. However, gender differences in mathematical achievement in the classroom are a very real phenomenon. This is due to several factors, once of which is the difference in cognitive style between males and females at a young age. These cognitive differences are reflected in the different achievement that males and females reach using standard, traditional assessment methods. In essence, boys and girls think and solve problems in different ways, and standard assessment techniques do not address the effects of these cognitive differences. However, assessment techniques can be easily modified to do so.
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