February 12, 2022

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Standing Up to Pee Gives Boys an Unfair Advantage in Physics 🧐

In the article entitled “Taking the pee out of physics: how boys are getting a leg-up“, Anna Wilson, Kate Wilson, and David Low argue with a straight face that peeing standing up provides an advantage for boys over girls. Explaining what prompted their conclusion about the advantages peeing standing up gives boys, the professors write,

“The gender gap in physics, and other related subjects including engineering, has long been a cause for concern.”

After casually going through a list of possible explanations for why young women might not perform as well in physics as do young men — things like lack of female physics teachers, cultural pressure and expectations, and gender bias in the teaching materials — they conclude: “there may be another reason, too.”

After noting that girls lag in areas of physics that deal with projectile motion, the article reveals:

“Like many parents of small (and not-so-small) boys, two of us (KW and DL) have observed the great delight young males take in urination, a process by which they produce and direct a visible projectile arc.”

Laying further groundwork for the assertion that standing up to pee aids in learning physics, the three detail the ways in which peeing standing up is a central yet fun part of the male life:

“The fact that boys (and men) play with their ability to projectile pee is hardly contentious. 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.

All this is experienced up to five times a day, so by 14, boys have had the opportunity to play with projectile motion around 10,000 times. And 14 is when many children meet formalized physics in the form of projectile motion and Newton’s equations of motion for the first time.”