intrinsic aptitude my ass

I'm working on the references for the final project in a class on "College Teaching and Academic Careers." The project is a research proposal about classroom research; I'm writing mine about gender differences in participation styles. Having noticed that women often don't raise their hands and are more passive when doing group work, I want to come up with and test what I've named "low-stakes participation."

The whole thing seems to be a problem of confidence - active participation in class and small groups both builds and requires confidence. So maybe lowering the confidence requirement for participation will help train students (and women in particular) to be more confident in their ability.

Anyway, the article I am reading right now (Felder et al., "A longitudinal study of engineering student performance and retention: III. Gender differences in student performance and attitudes") keeps dropping bombs like this:

The converse question was also posed, i.e., what the most likely reason would be if the students performed above their expectations in the course (Table 10). Hard work was cited by the highest percentages of both men and women, but men were consistently more likely to report their own ability as the most likely factor while in four of five courses women were more likely to cite help or support from someone else. These attribution patterns match those observed by Fennema and Leder [25], who found that female mathematics students tend to attribute failure to themselves and success to help from others while male students tend to do the opposite.

Later on:

In the second semester of their senior year, the men remaining in the experimental course sequence were twice as likely as women to feel that they did more than their fair share in their groups and the women were significantly more likely to feel that their contributions were undervalued or ignored by other group members. This feeling is similar to one expressed by female Radcliffe College students, who reported that too often their contributions in small mixed study groups were not valued and so they preferred to study by themselves.

Yikes. And this, from a different article:

[Jacquelynne Eccles] found that even though girls got better math grades than boys, parents of daughters reported that math was more difficult for their child than parents of sons. For the math success of boys, parents rated talent and effort as equally important. For the math success of girls, parents said hard work was much more important than math talent. Ultimately, these young women have a lower opinion of their abilities in math and science and in their general intellectual abilities, even though they average higher college GPAs than young men.

And!

While boys quickly jump into a role and compete with one another to get their colleagues' attention and admiration, girls want to be in a group with people they like, and tend to wait to be invited or encouraged to assume roles.

Multiple sources and situations point to symptoms of the same disease. Lack of confidence and passivity are more common in women than in men, and they contribute negatively to learning.

Everyone agrees that group work is good, but how can instructors make sure confident students don't steamroll timid ones? In discussions with the whole class, the instructor can be there to guide the discussion and ask for contributions from students that need to be invited to participate. Small groups don't have the benefit of a facilitator like that.