A group of Australian academics are claiming that the gender gap in physics (males performing better at the subject that females) can partially be traced to the phenomenon of “pee games” that boys often engage in at urinals during their youth.
According to Anna Wilson, Kate Wilson, and David Low, all of whom are physics professors at universities in Australia, the playful urination practices that young boys often engage in are actually making a difference when it comes to the advantage males have over females in regards to early exposure to physics.
Pee games, for those who are unfamiliar, range from simply seeing how high one can pee, to games such as “Peeball,” where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal.
“The fact that boys (and men) play with their ability to projectile pee is hardly contentious,” write the researchers. “Boys are trained to pee into toilet bowls with floating targets, a huge variety of which can be bought on Amazon; Amsterdam Airport Schiphol famously cleaned up its urinals by encouraging men to hit flies etched next to the drain; and Peeball is now a worldwide phenomenon.”
Based on their calculations, young boys will have played these “pee games” more than 10,000 times by the time they hit the age of 14 years, which is approximately the same age when students begin learning about projectile motion and Newton’s Laws of Physics.
“This self-directed, hands-on, intrinsically (and sometimes extrinsically, and socially) rewarding activity must have a huge potential contribution to learning, resulting in a deep, embodied, material knowledge of projectile motion that’s simply not accessible to girls,” say the authors.
While they directly blame the ability of boys to engage in pee games, the authors also cite masculinity in physics as a dominating force that keeps women away from the subject.
According to the authors, a majority of physicists are male, which reinforces masculine culture in the subject of physics. Additionally, the authors claim that because most physics teachers are male, this produces a lack of female role models for female students interested in physics.
