Actually, I guess one test there would be to see how the top 10 lists compare to the gender split in submissions overall.

This is a really good/tough question, and probably one that doesn’t have an easy answer. Having thought about the relationship between power and gender somewhat, I’ll give a stab at some possible answers, and maybe one of these is right, or none of them are.

1. You should check your blog readership gender ratio. Since you are the primary advertiser of 101questions, it may be that gender bias comes from a disproportional number of male readers for your blog. I’ve often noticed that even in social media, many people tend to favour their own gender (this may not be anything YOU have done at all, I’m speaking primarily of your readers) when making choices about whom to read, and whom to share.

2. The same effect which reduces the number of women who apply for educational leadership roles may be at fault here. Women make up about 80% of the teaching profession, but less than 20% of the superintendents across the nation. This is due to a few complicated reasons (tall people tend to be favoured toward leadership positions, and women tend to be culturally conditioned not to toot their own horn as much as men). The tooting one’s own horn may be the issue here, as the competitive nature of the rankings in 101questions may produce a bias against female participation. Obviously there are lots of women who are perfectly comfortable with competition, and showing off to other people, but by and large, men are more comfortable doing this (I’ve read research on this at one point) than are women. That’s a cultural issue, not a biological one.

3. The collaborative efforts of 101questions are hard to see. We are essentially collaborating to produce a set of excellent resources by competing with each other for limited attention. This is a stereotypically male thing to want to do, and comes up over and over again in classroom dynamics even.

4. It may be a combination of factors, some of which you have control over, and some of which you do not.

I can only speak to what I know and everything else is speculation.

Having used 101qs.com with my students, the biggest fan of the site is a female 8th grader. She loved the site so much she created an account and uploaded a video. Her and I constantly talk about it. We’re in DC right now and she mentioned to me today how much she enjoys the site. She has expressed interest in film and wants to study it, with her goal being Stanford (she did get excited to hear that Dan was currently doing some school work there) and USC a close second.
She told me she’s hooked on 101qs.com. She mentions ideas for me to upload. It’s a connection with a student I would have never imagined, but now thoroughly enjoy all because of Dan’s site.

I don’t know if this answers any of your questions or shares insight. Yes, I have boys who enjoy 101qs, but it’s not the same. I wish there were more females participating on 101qs. My favorite math teacher was female. The site is still primitive. I think it’s making connections with teachers (even if the majority are male) and even connections with students. It’s creating discussion. This post itself is creating discussion about how to better balance the scales of math and gender-based interest; a product based on subjective enthusiasm.

Personally, I would love to see more females contributing. I especially would love females to share ideas that they can relate with so I can better connect with my female students. It’s more challenging for me to know the interests of my female students. It’s easier for me to think like a middle school boy (sadly). I need that female perspective. More female teachers would help bridge that gap for me. Karim from Mathalicious reminded me tonight that a lot of video gamers are female. That’s a great starting point, but I need more. We need more.

I think the best advertisement for female teachers are the current female teachers using 101qs.com. Get them to talk, email, tweet, and post about 101qs.com to their female colleagues and friends. Guys, we can do the same!

I’m not trying to speak for all women, but this woman finds the explanation in comment #4 to resonate with me. I tend to read the 101q site rather than post on it, in part because I’m not into the competitive side of it. I am entertained by what is there and curious about other potential questions, though.

WRT Josh g (#1): I work in (math) teacher prep. Locally, there are more women going into (and who are employed in) math teaching than men at all levels.

To follow-up on #4… There’s some data to support the claim that males do group, although it could also be an artifact of the data-collection techniques.

Why not post a nice short quiz as an intro-screen for 2 days?

1) How often do you check 101qs?
2) How often do you post a first act?
3) How often do you respond to a first act?
4) What’s your gender?
5) What’s your approximate age?

*My guess would be that there’s also an age-bias that’s not reflective of the broader collection of (secondary) math teachers.

It does matter!! There is such a struggle to encourage girls and minorities to join STEM fields and the 2010 AAUW report “Why So Few?” addressed some alarming statistics. http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/whysofew.cfm

While not comprehensive, I wondered if more men are blogging/reading blogs, but that does not appear to show in modest reserach findings… http://mashable.com/2012/04/28/women-vs-men-social/

Are you readers predominantly male?

Comments 4, 8, and 9 match how I feel about it (especially the “males competing for limited attention” bit), and I’m a female physics and math teacher. I like visiting the site and viewing the pics/vids, but I rapidly get bored (and occasionally even annoyed) reading the questions/comments posted by others (and that in turn makes me less likely to visit the site). And I have ZERO interest in adding my own question/comment to the list; once I think about it, I’m done, and odds are someone has already posted something that matches my thoughts anyway. I’m much more interested in hearing what my STUDENTS will ask about the pics/vids, and also more interested in looking for my own examples that will be relevant to my own classes and students. For me, the site represents a great idea that was initially an eye-opener, but its usefulness is now past, except for the very occasional check-in to see if anybody has posted something I can use (to save myself some work, instead of coming up with something myself) (but coming up with something myself is much more fun).

What ever happened with the data you collected on gender and problem solving at the end of last year? With the four different problems?

You could set up a SurveyMonkey survey, or something similar, to find the ratio of male to female users for 101qs. That would let you know the probability of the top spots being all male.

Is there something about Dan, Dan’s work, Dan’s presentation style, writing style, thinking, etc., that is essentially “male”? Essentially off-putting to women? Essentially sexist? If so, I’ve yet to notice (but then I am, sad to say, burdened with being a man and hence hopelessly insensitive).

Somewhere in the list of questions and observations raised by Elizabeth is the germ of one that might be worth researching, on my view: is there an indication that, controlling for basic differences in self-assessed interest and ‘success’ in mathematics, female STUDENTS are less inclined to find 101qs useful, inviting, accessible, and so forth?

And Taylor, yes, it is a part of sexism to think it doesn’t matter.

There are fewer women than men in math and that does matter, greatly. So any shiny new idea to promote math is problematic if it attracts men way more than women.

You probably have multiple populations on 101qs. I’m sure not everyone participating is a teacher (or a student). On top of that, you probably have different demographics for posters/active participants vs. lurkers.

To riff on other comments, you could have gender bias due to an additional demographic of non-teacher techies. And these people (who aren’t teaching day in/out) could find more time to post on 101qs. That could be a total horseshit hypothesis, but maybe worth keeping in mind if you survey.

I don’t think there is a fundamental flaw in the design of the website, though I found comments #4 and #11 especially thought-provoking.

A few weeks ago I went through your “faculty lounge” section and subscribed to the rss feed from nearly everyone. When I did, I noticed that almost everyone was male. I wondered why that is and how you found each other. Are guys actually 89% of the educators blogging (or at least the interesting ones) and how can I find more female teachers who are doing interesting things? I’ve always liked ‘hanging out with the guys’ and have no problem learning from them, but there could be a whole part of the spectrum that I am missing out on.

I don’t fault you, think that you’re knowingly or unknowingly sexist or anything. I’m thrilled that you’ve done the grunt work of finding some awesome blogs. But my guess is that your faculty lounge have spent the longest time looking at and for these types of interesting problems, that they already have the tech savvy and experience to post to 101qs, and are probably the most active promoters of your site. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of your contributions do come from males, I wonder what other characteristics they have in common- are the most prolific or perplexing contributors single/young married? How long have they been teaching? My guess is that in many ways they fit the profile of the typical contributor on wikipedia, which has gender-balance issues as well.

As for the competition- I’m a bit bummed at my perplexity score, though I find the questions that people do leave on my (only 2) contributions so far interesting. Not everyone is coming up with the same question, and most people are skipping them. But the questions that I do get are opening up avenues that I didn’t know I could explore. It reminds me of one of your recent posts, talking about expecting students to come up with the question, vs. thinking as soon as you propose it, “Oh, yeah, of course you could ask that question. I wonder what the answer is” and ideally also be somewhere close forming an opinion/guess about what the answer might be. That’s my feeling when I read these questions.

I’m not interested in repeating the same questions and situations that have already been done so well, unless I find something that I really think does it better/is just fascinating. I don’t want to upload a shorter version of my dive video, for instance, because I feel like that would be too redundant.

I find it really interesting that few responders mentioned the million other things that have to be done near the end of the school year. I think there might be something to how people look at these other things needing to be done…
I was pleased to find not one but two female first-year math and physics teachers among the commenters! One of them mentioned the greater importance of other things… Pleased, because I am old enough to have been told, when I was looking for a job, that women could not teach physics. There has been a lot of physics in my math classes over the years…
I love the photos and the questions and the whole idea of another way to think about math teaching. I am also a very visual person — graphs come first when studying almost any mathematical relationship. So why am I not posting? Because every time I start looking and thinking about possibilities, that little voice reminds me that there are other things whose deadlines are closer. Is that gender oriented?

@Nathan Did the students’ perplexity scoring of the items correlate with their site score? I think that may be a next step in inquiry with 101qs- are perplexity and the obviousness of a question two different things? I’m not sure if I interact with the site in the same way. Sometimes I’ve got my student hat on, sometimes I’m just a nerd, sometimes I’m thinking like a teacher, sometimes I’m just looking for something new and awesome, sometimes I’m proud that I can figure out what the question was supposed to be, sometimes I want to skip it because it was too obvious.

@Sue anecdotal evidence here- but I’m female and incredibly engaged by visual stimuli. And I think that the point of 3-act problems is that behind these pictures lies a story, an event, humans acting (covering a file cabinet with post-its, running in circles in the house, building domino spirals, flying over the US). I do want to know why women seem to be participating less or their contributions aren’t having the same impact. I don’t know if it comes from the audience or the contributors, or both.

I’m starting to wish for a place (maybe a link to another site?) where we can start conversations about these pieces. I wonder if that would lead to another score, maybe called “teacher perplexity” or “engagement” score (how many comments teachers make on a topic perhaps correlating with how likely they are to actually use it in a classroom/how much it inspires them with extensions, how much effort they’re willing to put into making it work, how thought-provoking it is…). But I guess I’m pretty pragmatic, and if I see something I can use, I’d email the person who submitted it to ask if they had a 3rd act.

A few ideas from my game design life come to mind. Arcade games are made and are known to be very male-centric. 101 questions is very much designed like an arcade game. As soon as you enter you are in the game. There are minimal buttons with little explanation of what they do. Moreover, the pictures are generally confusing ( or perplexing to keep with your language).

Most of the time in an arcade if you see a parent give a daughter and son some money for the arcade, the boy will rush to the very first flashy game he sees put in a quarter and die in less than a minute. The girl will walk around, look at several of the games, and then go outside and talk on her phone.

I don’t know why this is. But I do know that this is known(or at least strongly believed) and marketed for arcade games. It doesn’t take much to verify it either. Console games are male-centric but nothing like arcade games are. After all, arcades make their money by have more and more quarters pumped in. There is even a talk (I believe from Stanford) on iTunesU on this very situation that is stated much clearer than I will be able to do. Although, I unfortunately am having a VERY difficult time finding it.

Translate this to 101qs. I already mentioned a few arcade design parallels. And I will mention, I was confused and hesitant to hit some of the buttons. Sometimes, I just want to look at the pictures. If I skip a question does that mean I found the picture perplexing? I didn’t, but I don’t want to see stuff in a random order. At that point I quit. Or on a few occasions, I just pressed the skip it, I’m bored button several times to cycle through and play with the site. And when I did that I got a feeling remarkably similar to jumping over an anthropomorphic flame in donkey kong. That little boy inside me just wanted to press buttons. I would expect that the most perplexed users are males pressing buttons to see the next flashy picture.

I’m sure all of this is wrong. But the exact same thoughts were floating through my mind when using the site a few weeks back. Initially, I would add a “free view” button or gallery (I know you want data but this might help the bias). And maybe a quick blurb on what the site is. If I found the site randomly and and did not follow from this blog. I would be lost, click the back button, and wonder why that site came up on my google search. The few button design, no instructions, and placed right in the middle of the game is the exact design companies use to make arcade games they know will only market themselves to boys.

I am still not convinced it matters. Gender would matter if we were looking at the responders and the responders were not teachers and adults, but in fact students, and there was a noticeable disparity where male students were far more interested in the medium than female students were. Obviously we would not want to adopt a teaching strategy that heavily favored male learners over female ones. But if its simply a matter of who is making interesting submissions, I don’t think it matters.

If for some strange reason, this teaching strategy appeals more to male teachers than female teachers, but both male and female students responded to it equally, then why in the world would it matter? Our focus in this context is on the students, not the teachers. Suppose no female teacher had ever used the strategy, but male teachers used it with great success. Would we tell those male teachers to abandon effective pedagogy in the name of anti-sexism and fairness?

Because of the way 101qs is set up with random questions and no names attached to 1st Acts, I am inclined to say that it has pretty good protection from both intentional and unintentional sexism on the part of the responders. I would guess the disparity in the top ten is due to the ratio of male submitted 1st Acts to female submitted ones. I have no idea what those numbers are, but it sounds like there are a lot more males submitting.

Count me as one of the women who doesn’t participate because of time and technical horsing-around. I have the knowledge, but tech stuff always seems to run into snags and take forever.

However, I eagerly await the addition of second and third acts. That will get me using the site more, because I LOVE math applications, and don’t come up with enough on my own.

Would having the Top 10 list, but without the scores and listed in a random order, help remove the competitive nature? I mean, I guess they could still see the scores once they click through, but it won’t be so easy to say “Oh, I’m on top!”

@Taylor (#3 and 35): Imagine an alternate universe, identical in every way to ours, except that whatever factors cause the 75/25 uploading split and 90/10 top ten split in our universe, do not exist. In that universe, there is a 50/50 uploading split because everyone is still participating that is participating in our world, but also 200% more women. In that universe, there are 50% more submissions for us to look at. In our universe, those submissions, for some reason, are stuck in lady teachers’ brains or cameras or hard drives. We are missing out!

Ahh, Jachary’s comment helps me see the big picture here more clearly. Thanks!

@Bree and Johanna: I’m working on a list now. I’m supposed to be working on my book right now, but gender issues are something I had trouble writing about, so I’ll count this discussion as a gift.

The list is up, at Math Mama Writes. 22 good math blogs by women, on high school or college level math. 15 other good education-realted blogs by women (with 2 email lists thrown in).

I’m intrigued by these comments and this conversation, and thought I’d add another female voice to the mix, and try to contribute a perspective I don’t think I’ve seen yet. I haven’t even gone to the trouble of subscribing to 101qs, even though I probably visit the site 3-4 times a week and click through 5-10 acts just to see what’s there. If I had to explain why, I’d probably say there’s a selfish desire to satisfy my curiosity without really putting anything back into the community. We’re not even talking about uploading here– just subscribing so my participation and questions are on the record.

I do like pressing buttons and exploring, so it’s not the lack of instructions that bothers me. But I strongly dislike competitions and ranking systems. That could be disinterest in other people’s opinions, or just plain insecurity. It’s not just about being seen though– I loved being observed when I was still in the classroom– so I think what’s at play is that if I’m going to put myself out there on something I’m not yet sure I’m good at (or good enough at), I’d like some real feedback about how to get better. While Dan’s comment in #37 says 101qs is set up to be a form of formative feedback, I think the type of formative feedback I’d want is something that leaves me feeling less “nope, didn’t get the reaction I wanted” and more “hmm, I think I have hints about how to improve this.”

If I submit something, I probably won’t be confident that it’ll be great. But at the same time, if I knew how to make it better, I would have. And since I didn’t, I probably don’t know. So the formative feedback I would find useful isn’t just you agreeing that my work is or isn’t good, but rather suggestions on how to improve. Maybe that’s where the comments section will come in :)

I’m having a little trouble with the comment
“I’m struggling with this one. I mean, our students evaluate our work all the time, often negatively. They often disapprove of our efforts. They’re often bored. I would so much rather get some sense of that feedback from the safety of my barcalounger with my iPad in hand than after I introduced a task my students found uninteresting or unclear.

It doesn’t seem like the job allows us to be uncomfortable with evaluation. Everybody is evaluating us. Those evaluations are mostly summative. I like 101questions because it gives me some rare formative feedback.”

There is a huge difference between evaluations by students, with whom you’ve established a long-term relationship and who have relatively little power, and evaluation by peers and supervisors, whose opinions are more likely to have long-term impacts on your career and self-esteem. I can easily understand being willing to try something in class but not put it out for other teachers to mock. (I know that 101qs is not set up in a way that encourages or invites mockery, but try telling that to people’s inner censors.)

It is a very small subset of math teachers that are interested in participating in something like 101Q. If this same small sliver is representative of those playing more active leadership roles, etc. in their department, then I think we have an issue. Otherwise, who cares what the gender distribution is for this or any other tiny subculture in the math teaching profession.

The M/F split is nearly even for high performing students – those taking AP Calculus or those scoring 600+ on the SAT. I would be concerned if the split was not fairly even.

The M/F split for the small sliver of students scoring at the highest level on math tests is heavily skewed male: 2 to 1 for 800’s on the SAT, and as much as 10 to 1 or more for the AMC top performers (writing is skewed female). This difference, by itself, just doesn’t seem like much cause for concern.

I’m a woman who’s spent A LOT of time in masculine-dominated activities and environments, and I have to agree with Mr. Bombastic that this doesn’t seem like a major issue to me. As far as gender differences/difficulties, I’ve had so much bigger problems than a simple imbalance of interest, that this is trivial by comparison.

As somebody said above, engaging all the students is the important thing — but if you think of us as Dan’s students, does it matter if we engage in different ways? Some write, some make videos, some mostly lurk but then use the ideas in their work. If we learn how to improve our students’ learning, that’s the bottom line, right?

Sorry, let me clarify — I used interest and engagement in two different places, with different scope.

Everybody who’s participating in any way is engaged. (in the subject) But our interests vary by topic. We’re all interested in different aspects of the subject, and we accomplish the goal of improving our students’ learning in a variety of ways. For example, although I’m not participating in 101qs, I’m reading and commenting on the blog.

I hope that makes more sense.

Okay I get what you’re saying, but math interest *generally* wasn’t my point. It was interest in different ways of interacting with math.

To apply my analogy of Dan’s blog as a classroom, him as teacher, and all of us as students: Suppose you have a math classroom, and suppose you, like Shawn Cornally, allow students to demonstrate their understanding in whatever way they choose. Suppose the boys tend to like making videos, while the girls tend to prefer writing about math concepts on their blogs. As long as they’re all engaged, does it matter how they show what they’ve learned?

The things that frustrate me in masculine-dominated environments are completely non-existent on 101qs. Even the competition aspect of the top 10 is minimal intensity. My guess is that the gender imbalance has a lot to do with comment #11.

“Math is a subject of which women are underrepresented.”

Is this still true? It certainly was true 40 years ago when I was a college undergrad, but the only recent figures I’ve seen (which were for only one college) showed that math had gender parity up to the bachelor’s degree (unlike the engineering fields, where gender parity peaked about 15-20 years ago and the imbalance is now back to levels not seen seen the 1960s). I did a quick Google search for a larger sample of data, but did not find one in the 3 minutes I was willing to devote to the search.

Women are certainly underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering, which may be due to math instruction in secondary school, but I’d like to see some hard data for math still being a field in which women are underrepresented–can any one point me to the data?