The gender difference in orienting liquid surfaces and plumb-lines: its robustness, its correlates, and the associated knowledge of simple physics.
In comparison between male and female psychology students, a greater proportion of female students fail to represent liquid surfaces and plumb-line objects as invariably horizontal and vertical, respectively. However, the occurrence of this perplexing gender difference has not been ascertained among young adults enrolled in science programs, who should ostensibly be more fully equipped in terms of academic competence, irrespective of their gender. The present large sample of undergraduates (N = 1412), majoring in natural and applied sciences, and social sciences or humanities and arts, completed water-level and plumb-line items, along with other simple physics problems, indicating how and in reference to which principle they had solved these tasks. They also answered questions pertaining to possible personal proficiency correlates of a biological, experiential, perceptual, and sociocognitive nature. The data revealed not only that women's achievement was consistently poorer than men's across discipline categories, but surprisingly that this was so even within specific fields requiring and providing the most visuo-spatial skills as well as physical knowledge and training. Especially for women, mastery was predicted by success in simple physics problems, and to a lesser degree by perceptual, sociocognitive, and experiential variables. Biological variables did not contribute to proficiency for either gender, though the data fitted a recessive gene model. Responses based on relevant physics principles were more accurate, but men and women generally adopted the same procedural strategies. The present compelling demonstration of a gender gap in achievement that is not compensated by formal science education, extending thus even to future physical scientists, invites further investigation into its perceptual and cognitive determinants, as well as into those more distally connected with early aptitudes, interests, and experiences.
Robert
M
M
Départment de psychologie, Université de Montreal, Québec. robertmi@ere.umontreal.ca
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011340:Problem Solving; D011601:Psychophysics; D012737:Sex Factors