Math is easy for girls in progressive countries...

2009-06-04T01:08:00.000-07:00

The recent study published in the Journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, summarized at:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,524338,00.html?test=latestnews

has a rather obvious conclusion. ?Where there is greater gender inequality,
girls perform worse in math. ?Where there is less, girls perform better, and
even have similar variation in math skills.

The short of it: The math gap can't be explained away purely by
inherent biological ability.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 13:20 PDT
Breaking: Girls are good at math!

Maybe the infamous Barbie doll who announced that "math is hard" was
on to something -- that is, if she had continued on to say "when you
live in a sexist society." A new study shows that differences between
boys' and girls' math performance has more to do with gender
inequality than hard-wired ability. (Here's a freebie for all the
young'uns in the audience: "But, ma, it's society's fault that I
failed my math test!") Not only that, but it pokes a hole in Lawrence
Summers hypothesis that men innately show more variability in
mathematical ability.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared global
studies of math ability with countries' rankings in the World Economic
Forum's Gender Gap Index, which is calculated based on differences in
education, financial clout, health and political power. Well, color me
unsurprised: Countries with greater gender inequality showed a larger
gap in mathematical performance, and vice versa. Iran, for example,
had a poor gender equality ranking and a low percentage of
high-scoring girls in the International Mathematical Olympiad. The
opposite was true for the United States, where girls on average
perform just as well as boys and sexual parity ranks relatively high.

I gave lead researcher Janet Hyde a ring to chat about why this was
true -- could the cause be narrowed down to access to math education,
for example -- and she suggested that there "are lots of sociocultural
factors at work." Hyde, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology
professor, said: "It may have to do with the percentage of women in
the labor force, inside technology and computers, teaching math and
science at the college level" -- the list goes on and on.

The short of it: The math gap can't be explained away purely by
inherent biological ability.

So, what about Summers' controversial suggestion -- are there more
hard-wired male math geniuses? The study shows that in some countries
and ethnic groups girls' and boys' math ability is equally variable.
That's not to mention that the gender gap in the higher percentiles
has been shrinking dramatically in the U.S. As the study puts it: "It
is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not
immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes."

This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a kick-ass
doctoral candidate at Stanford who's working on a cutting-edge HIV
treatment. I had the embarrassing misfortune of sitting next to her on
a panel of fellow alumnae who were deemed to be "doing interesting
things." (Now that's a tough act to follow: Oh, you're trying to save
several million people's lives? Well, I ... blog.) She felt lucky that
her confidence in math and science was never crushed -- by teachers or
a nasty classroom environment -- and said something along the lines
of:

**** Once girls lose that confidence, it's over for them.

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Women at work

Math is easy for girls in progressive countries...