Interesting op ed in the paper yesterday, given that gender + classroom participation question we just had: mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/opinion/…

That is one really impressive 10 year old

@ff524 Interestingly, this contrasts with my own experience (in Germany). In my school classes, those going for quantity instead of quality of oral contributions were mostly girls. Much to the annoyance of people like me who disliked this pointless waffling, this was encouraged by teachers through grades (without a gender bias though).

This completely changed for me on the academic level where the vast majority of wafflers went on to study medicine, law, and stuff, and in physics and mathematics there is little participation of any kind, even if you explicitly ask questions.

So, there may be a clear difference in culture and priming here. Also note that the German school system has been shown to prefer girls for quite some time, IIRC.

In my high-school-yearbook-equivalent, in the section What do you think about our class/year?, there was a comment along the lines of: “Many will never learn the difference regarding quality and quantity when it comes to oral contributions.” – I was about to add: “Unfortunately, this also applies to the teachers.”

@ff524 Whenever these discussions come up, I remain a bit puzzled. Though in my classes there are just a few women (it's true now as it was 30 years ago when I was a student), I don't see any significant difference in participation, which seems quite balanced (note that in my country a normal rate of questions during a lecture is 3-4 questions for a 3 h lecture; most of the questions come up instead during the breaks, directly at the desk and not in front of the class).

In the next days, I'll ask to some of my PhD students (I have 4 now, all female), if they felt an issue about this.

I don't have personal experience with this either, I went to all-girls schools growing up. And in college, as you know, the sample size of women in electrical engineering classes is very small...

But I am impressed at this 10-year-old for being observant about her environment, noticing a problem, seeking a solution, and following through. Wow!