The Trouble with Bright Girls [link]

I will spend about 15-60 minutes looking something up rather than ask someone for an answer (which will take about 1 minute)

Which will take one minute, but has a high chance of knocking them out of the "zone", and regaining focus can easily take 15-20 minutes...

Sounds like a learned behavioral model - just about everyone acts differently around their parents than their peers. That's only to be expected, since your peers will expect you to behave differently towards them than to your parents. So we learn to behave differently around them, which may also involve deeper effects like different ways of thinking around them.

Did your parents (implicitly or explicitly) discourage communicative and attentive behavior when you were growing up?

I don't think it's a bias. It's not about reasoning. But it's an interesting performance-inhibiting factor.

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I find attention very helpful in cases where the limiting factor is not my ability, but my akrasia. I need to feel like my audience would jump on me if I didn't update a chapter of my fiction when I said I would; in school, I needed to expect my teachers to notice and care if I didn't show up to class (this meant I got very little academic value out of my semester abroad, since they didn't, so I didn't); etc. But when I don't know quite what I'm doing in some minor-but-essential way, having help handy ensures that I will not learn to do it.

I've noticed this as well, although it doesn't seem to apply in all cases. Here's a guess about the distinction between cases:

1. When the puzzle seems like an obstacle to achieving the goal, I'm more likely to attempt to look up the solution. This is the case for many adventure/RPG games, where I'm mainly interested in advancing within the game, and also for the average homework assignment, where I mainly want the good grade.
2. When solving the puzzle is an end in itself, I'm more likely to try to keep going by myself. This is the case for games like Portal, where the puzzle is the point and is fairly fun, and also for homework or research in a topic I enjoy.

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I am currently a college student in a gifted program, and was in them all through elementary, middle, and high school. My experience has been that it wasn't rewarding easy challenges, quite the contrary. The teachers I've had have been thrilled at having students that actually can handle a complex problem. They've mostly liked the challenge we provided. Although, for a few of my years, I've had teachers that genuinely were not as intelligent as the average student in the classroom. They had more factual knowledge, but not the actual thinking skills. Those years were rough.

My only major complaint about those classes was that the problems, in many cases, weren't challenging enough. The teachers would pick complex topics for us to untangle, but the problem solving process typically took around 30 seconds. We very seldom did anything that required thinking for minutes. Nothing "impossible". And we totally could have done those.

Not just the atmosphere-- the skill with which the gifted program is designed.

And some gifted programs are worse than what you imagined-- they just pile busywork on the students.

Developing good gifted programs is a hard (or if you prefer, complex) problem. I'd start by surveyed students and graduates from gifted programs about the their take on the value of various parts of the programs.

Yes, this should definitely be taken into account. In fact, given the present state of many fields, I'm sure that for many people in academia the "impostor syndrome" is just a true realization that their work is worthless.

I rather suspect my mother (or anyone else that wasn't paying me a lot of money) would soon find that behaviour of that kind would rapidly lead to my disinclination to provide assistance. They can either show some respect and courtesy or follow the flowchart themselves.

Mind you I am willing to adjust my teaching to suit individual learning styles. Some people just really do suck at understanding how steps work. Meanwhile I am extremely poor at following instructions without understanding how they work - scarily so at times.

Not the complete story, of course, but here's an interesting recent Slate article suggesting that female professors seems to have a positive effect at the university level:

They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester's end rose to 46.

. . .

Finally, when Stout and Dasgupta evaluated how much the students identified with mathematics, they found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men on actual tests of math performance.

. . .

These experiments suggest that subtle and unconscious factors skew the "free choices" we make. The career choices of men and women are affected far more by discrimination than by any innate differences between men and women. But it is not the kind of discrimination we usually talk about. We ought to assume that male math professors at the University of Massachusetts were just as committed to teaching young women as they were to teaching young men. And those professors were just as talented as their female counterparts. (The professors and students were not told the purpose of the experiment beforehand, so the female professors and female students couldn't have entered into some kind of pact to boost test scores.)

A bit later than intended, but here are some useful sources related to my post. I'd recommend the stereotype threat wikipedia article and the Handbook of Socialization as the best overviews for those less familiar to the topic.

Stereotype threat:

• good synopsis at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
• most relevant source article (unfortunately subscription-protected, but I think a lot of people here have some sort of institutional access): Murphy MC et al, "Signaling threat: how situational cues affect women in math, science, and engineering settings." Psychol Sci. 2007 Oct;18(10):879-85.

Basic overview of childhood gendered socialization: http://gozips.uakron.edu/~susan8/parinf.htm

Other stuff:

Handbook of Socialization: Theory and Research, edited by Joan E. Grusec and Paul D. Hastings (2007).
Excerpt here: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/CBD/downloads/week9_LeaperCh22.pdf
(Particularly relevant is the section on peer-sensitivity and the tendency to downplay achievements or ability in an area considered to "belong" to the other gender.)

Claire Etaugh, Marsha B. Liss, Home, school, and playroom: Training grounds for adult gender roles, Sex Roles, Volume 26, Issue 3 – 4, Feb 1992, Pages 129 – 147

I'll go through my link archives tonight, then. Still getting a feel for what's considered common knowledge here and what isn't.

IIRC, programmers are about 50-50 in a number of post-Soviet states. Not sure if this is due to commie educational policies, regional culture, or something else.

Among European countries the greatest proportion of female physicists, by a significant amount, are in France and Poland, so the mere existence of national heroes seems to make a difference as well.

However, these were the days before compilers. Programming back then was a very different affair from nowadays, involving a lot of office work, as well as other kinds of semi-skilled work that were back then (and would likely still be to some extent) perceived as typical women's work. I'd be wary of any generalizations to today's situation in computing without studying the issue in much more detail.

That is a plausible interpretation.

My priors were that, for similar levels of maturity girls collectively do better on classwork and boys collectively do better on tests, that girls mature faster at young ages, and that the bulk of grades come from classwork in younger grades. So I would expect girls collectively to be routinely outperforming boys collectively at the 5th grade level. The statement that there are no differences between girls and boys thus struck me out of left field- the only explanation I could come up with was sex sensitivity (if girls are doing worse, there are differences, if boys are doing worse, there are no differences).

Thinking about it again, I came up with another interpretation: the "these" in front of "boys and girls" is referring to the bright ones. So bright girls routinely outperform average boys, just like bright boys outperform average boys. But that seems like a sloppy way to compare distribution tails.

I stumbled across that interpretation here. It seems reasonable but sloppy.