Researchers have more evidence that takes aim at the old stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. Psychologist Janet Hyde had previously studied scores on standardized math tests in the United States, and found no difference in performance between girls and boys. Her new study expands the scope of the work by analyzing international data. She and her colleague analyzed studies from around the world on math performance along with gender inequality as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index. This index measures the gap between men and women in economic opportunity, educational attainment and other socioeconomic factors [LiveScience].
They found that countries with poor gender equality, like India, had a larger gender gap in math, while in countries with excellent gender equality, like the Netherlands, girls performed as well as boys. If males really did have an innate advantage in math, the researchers note, that advantage should be obvious throughout all these cultures. Instead, the study suggests that cultural issues are the basis of the math gender gap.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also tackled a more subtle stereotype: Even if girls and boys perform equally well in math on average, is it true that more math geniuses are male? That was the idea expressed by then-Harvard president Larry Summers in 2005 when he raised an uproar by talking about males’ “intrinsic aptitude” for math. The researchers looked for evidence of such an imbalance, but found that in countries with the greatest gender equality, as many girls as boys scored above the 99th percentile–and in a few countries, there were more girls in that elite rank than boys. The “scarcity of top-scoring females in many, but not all countries .. . must be largely due to changeable sociocultural factors,” the scientists write, “not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes.” If the differences were innate, they should show up in every culture [Newsweek].
To erase the last remnants of the math gender gap, the researchers say that adults should tell all girls that they can excel at math, and should nurture girls who are especially gifted in the subject. Says Hyde: “There’s a gender stereotype that boys are better at math than girls are, and stereotypes die very hard…. Teachers and parents still believe that boys are better at math than girls are” [LiveScience].
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Image: iStockphoto
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 am
I had no idea that this was even something that had to be researched or that was still ‘mysterious’ in any way. Perhaps this showcases my naivety! Is the target audience intended to be these other countries that still need help with gender equality?
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 am
Try sounding a little more professional in your writing by not using vulgar language in your articles. Is it really necessary in getting your point across?
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:22 am
I still remember an elementary school teacher informing the class that it was a scientific fact that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.” It wasn’t until I got an A in a college trig class in the 11th grade (we were allowed to take one class at the local state university in high school) that I realized that I was actually good at math. Too bad it took nearly ten years to figure that out!
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:45 am
Love the playful headline. It’s fun to see personality on the site.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:27 pm
@ronmac: Vulgar language? Seriously? Methinks you are responding to your own perceived notion that you should be offended, rather than actually being offended. Sheesh.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I like the title too…
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:58 pm
I’d like to note that math, as we are away of it anyway, evolved rather recently.
Re: Rhonda
“other countries?” You did notice that the good ol’ US of A was not held up as the shining example of gender equality… and a president of Harvard was held up as an example of top-level bigoted thinking.
Smart people often think they’re too smart to believe in stereotypes or be bigoted.
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:37 am
being in the 99th percentile does not make you a math genius; it MIGHT get you into MIT in any one school year. being a genius at math of the order that summers was discussing requires being in the top 1/100th of 1%, at minimum. as with most studies, this one is something, but not everything. you people are as quick to believe in so-called “gender equality” as the people you were attacking. follow the data, period. there has been maybe one female math genius in the history of the world (kovalevskaya).
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:03 am
chris,
add: yvonne choquet bruhat–solver of the einstein cauchy problem
emmy noether, who was the creator of modern abstract algebra
mary cartwright, discover of chaos in electronics and coauthor of G.H. Hardy
modern times—plenty more, such as karen uhlenbeck, dusa macduff, alice chang, penny smith…
considering the ubiquitous bias–often hidden at the hiring or tenure committee level–in favor of men,
it is clear that females are More talented.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:22 am
as a girl, my physics teacher told me that there were no successful female theoretical physicists and to drop out of the course. I brought him copies of articles on lisa meitner
, who explained nuclear fission –with a very junior male coauhor; and maria mayer, who
won a Nobel for her invention of the nuclear shell model.
that shut the sexist creep up. I got the highest grade in the course–easy to do.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:37 am
yeah cause a lot of physics teachers commonly tell their students to drop their own courses.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:26 am
brc,
he WAS UNEASY with female students. There were plenty of boys in his class—in 1969.
more common than you think.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:05 am
Kick-ass is “vulgar”? Lol .. loser.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Sue,
While I fully agree with you that there are plenty of talented women in math and science, I feel that your opinion on the matter is extremely biased as well. By saying that females are more talented than men, you are in fact propagating the idea of gender inequality. I am of the opinion that a person’s intelligence is based more on natural ability as well as their educational background, NOT their race or gender. If you are truly for equality then the last thing you should do is stoop to their level of ignorance.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 pm
jason,
clearly, you missed the irony, and the parody of previous sexist logic.
June 4th, 2009 at 6:40 am
IT WAS A SCIENTIFIC FACT WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL THAT BOYS WERE BETTER AT CERTAIN SUBJECTS THAN GIRLS, SUCH AS MATHS. NOW IT IS ALL DEBUNKED, HOW MANY OTHER SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN FACTS WILL BE DEBUNKED?
I WAS AT AN ALL GIRLS GRAMMAR AND WE HAD A VERY HIGH OPINION OF OURSELVES AND DID NOT LET THIS BOTHER US WHEN WE FELT WE WERE TALENTED AT THE BOYS’ SUBJECTS.
The questions that need to be asked are , if the boys are doing rather worse than girls at the moment and the skills they used to excel at are no longer being excelled at, what has really changed? Too many female teachers, compared to male teachers, mixed classes, different teaching styles or an oppressed male species? At one time, girls did better in all girl classes, now boys do better in all boys classes. We do need to look at the reasons why boys are losing their edge. Have males have lost their self esteem? Perhaps our culture tolerates girls chattering more than boys hum0ur!!
June 4th, 2009 at 10:54 am
amy and brc,
amy’s story is completely believable to me. I am female and I went to a school that was majority male in the early 80s and such attitudes were not uncommon, even then. One of my mechanical engineering profs gave different grades to the female students for the same work and the same answers. When I confronted him on my grade, he said it was because I had clearly copied the male students’ answers. If that were true, he should have failed me, not given a B+, but I didn’t have the strong personality to confront him and merely went away fuming.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Lubos Motl and Steve Hsu will be very upset when they read this. They may even cry.
June 4th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
USHIVON: “IT WAS A SCIENTIFIC FACT WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL THAT BOYS WERE BETTER AT CERTAIN SUBJECTS THAN GIRLS, SUCH AS MATHS. NOW IT IS ALL DEBUNKED, HOW MANY OTHER SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN FACTS WILL BE DEBUNKED?”
As many as fail to be supported by data.
I’m glad that you felt no reason to be bothered by the supposed superiority of boys, but what does that have to do with the confirmation, in hard numbers, of the scientific fact that there is nothing to be bothered about in the first place?
June 4th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
hackenkauss,
why? they already know the string theorist lisa randall–recently, the most cited theoretical physicist in the world.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
I saw this headline on an article about 4th grade school tests in the Oregonian about 1994 “Girls Better at Reading, Boys Better at Math”. Closer inspection of the averages revealed that girls’ reading scores were higher than girls’ math scores, which were in turn (considerably) higher than boys’ math scores, with boys’ reading scores the lowest.
I wonder how often the usual stereotype actually means something like this?
June 4th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
sue,
They are both big fans of the theory that males are more represented on the extreme tails of the distribution, which is contradicted by the results of this study. The existence of females like Lisa Randall who are obviously way smarter than them, is something they must deal with in various ways. In the case of Motl, he dealt with it by running away and hiding out in the Czech republic.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
hakenkaus,
Thanks. pseudoscience is so-often hypnotically seductive in its simplistic pseudogenerality. Thus, even brilliant people became ardent nazis. The extreme tail theory was a theory that was a deliberate fraud, as early iq testing showed that females were superior at all tasks–especially spacial skills. They had to search long and hard for spacial tests that malrs did better on.
Those tests were weighted to tasks in which experience with certain toys matter a great deal–and it has recently been rediscovered that some practice makes a huge difference in the performance of females here.
Are girls smarter than boys? No, I think–but early 20th century girls were more practiced at sitting quietly. Spacisl IQ tests are extremely sensitive to anxiety. With the introduction –in the USA–of medis coverage that girls are spacially inferior, girls did perform more poorly–and this has been shown to be due to anxiety.
I wonder if the pooer performance of males on verbal tests is similar? After all, Shakespeare was a male!
June 4th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
one should also note that it was well-known in the early 20th century that central european jews were inferior in iq snd math skills to WASPS. Much of this “research” came from the same WASP men (Harvard was a huge player) that claimed the same inferiority for females. They argued that
both groups were genetically inferior.
Now, we have “The Bell Curve”, also from Harvard.
Plus ca changr….
June 5th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Do research to beef up your personal bias and you’d get the desired results all the time. Who were the researchers? No Bias?
There is every chance that you could be knocking each other over faulty biased data. Get real. Vulgar language to enforce personal bias? It happens all the time.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:10 am
How do you define a math prodigy? I thought that people like Tian Boedihardjo and others that have the ability to do university level math at a young age are math prodigies, and that more of those are male. Scoring in the 99th percentile of a standardized math test doesn’t sound like the same thing…
June 5th, 2009 at 7:26 am
lara,
more male children are given the help or encouragement to do this. But, many girls –with that help or encouragement can. In my childhood, I was reading at the high school level when I was six–but nobody gave me an algebra
book etc. It was assumed that I would learn math
at a normal time in school. Result, I didn’t learn calculus until I was 12, when I met a cute boy who had learned it.
Boys get attention. I started uni at 15, and made sure that No media attention was allowed–it would have been a social disaster. The boy was in the newspapers and dropped out from the MIT
phd program at 19. I had emotional issues and got my phd at 22–solving a famous problem.
Some people thrive on media attention, like Terry Tao–others, such as one female math prodigy out of oxford, and one male prodigy out of caltech are destroyed.
my conjecture is that most girls are too socially intelligent to want the prodigy label–and most parents of girls are not interested in labeling their child this way.
In any case, many great mathematicians were not prodigies.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:08 am
I was just voting into the European Parliament. When I left the school, all the 39 tickets except one that I submitted were spread across the road by the wind.
Fortunately, a class of small girls was nearby and they helped me to clean the mess. Together with their (female) teacher, we also gave special thanks to the winner of the contest who collected the highest number of sheets of paper. ;-)
The girl on the picture is cute and obviously relatively intelligent.
However, Janet Hyde’s science is just nonsense. Some added statements are clearly fabricated. But the old problems with her work are discussed e.g. here:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/janet-hyde-boys-girls-in-math-not.html
The higher variance of the boys’ distribution is clear, especially for kids above 15 years when the difference expands in the full force. Almost all winners of mathematical olympiads are boys, no woman has won a physics or chemistry Nobel prize for 45+ years, and so on, and so on. This difference of variances, which plays a key role in the vastly pro-male ratio in the very high percentiles, has well understood physiological, evolutionary, and psychological reasons, and has been demonstrated in thousands contexts.
I am sure that everyone who observes the world around her must be aware of these facts.
June 11th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Lubos, except that while in the U.S. the math olympiads are won by boys, in Europe that is not the case. For example in Hungary many of the top mathematicians were/are female. Maybe Eastern European women have different physiology or psychology from American women?
July 11th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The international mathematical olympiads consist of a very difficult math problem-solving competition bringing together the most brilliant teenager mathematical talents in the world. It takes place every year.
Even in the countries which most favor female participation at the mathematical olympiads (like Russia or Bulgaria) there are only 12% to 24% females, which means that males still make up 76% to 84% of exceptionally talented young mathematicians, much less in other countries. On a combined international basis, nearly all golden medals at mathematical olympiads go to boys. Girls just cannot compete against boys at this level.
The reason why there is such an overwhelming male representation in fields like top level mathematics, theoretical physics or astrophysics is actually very simple. It can be explained by the the fact that you need a IQ of at least 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean of 100 (in other words a IQ of at least 150 or 160) to master the most advanced topics in these disciplines. Now there are numerous studies showing that the standard deviation of males IQ is significantly larger than the standard deviation of females IQ. If you add the fact that the IQ distribution is approximately normal (or gaussian) then you have a very simple explanation of the huge male over-representation in those areas.
Note that exactly the same factors probably explain why there is a huge male over-representation at top levels in games of pure abstract intelligence like chess or checkers. For example, according to the FIDE database of April, 2009 (available free online) there is only 1 female in the best 100 chess players worldwide (1%) and 21 in the first 1000 (2.1%) whereas females represent 7.6% of the overall FIDE chess rated population of about 100,000 players. All the big chess tournaments (like world championships for example) are open to both genders but as the result of the huge gender gap female-only chess tournaments had to be set up in addition to all the other ones open to both genders.
incidentally this male imbalance is not restricted to humans. For example male rats perform more accurately than female rats on tasks that require spatially organized representations. No social factors can explain better male rats performance, certainly not male rats chauvinistic behavior.
July 11th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Sorry, typo in previous blog. Read “…. much more in other countries…. ”
The international mathematical olympiads consist of a very difficult math problem-solving competition bringing together the most brilliant teenager mathematical talents in the world. It takes place every year.
Even in the countries which most favor female participation at the mathematical olympiads (like Russia or Bulgaria) there are only 12% to 24% females, which means that males still make up 76% to 84% of exceptionally talented young mathematicians, much more in other countries. On a combined international basis, nearly all golden medals at mathematical olympiads go to boys. Girls just cannot compete against boys at this level.
The reason why there is such an overwhelming male representation in fields like top level mathematics, theoretical physics or astrophysics is actually very simple. It can be explained by the the fact that you need a IQ of at least 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean of 100 (in other words a IQ of at least 150 or 160) to master the most advanced topics in these disciplines. Now there are numerous studies showing that the standard deviation of males IQ is significantly larger than the standard deviation of females IQ. If you add the fact that the IQ distribution is approximately normal (or gaussian) then you have a very simple explanation of the huge male over-representation in those areas.
Note that exactly the same factors probably explain why there is a huge male over-representation at top levels in games of pure abstract intelligence like chess or checkers. For example, according to the FIDE database of April, 2009 (available free online) there is only 1 female in the best 100 chess players worldwide (1%) and 21 in the first 1000 (2.1%) whereas females represent 7.6% of the overall FIDE chess rated population of about 100,000 players. All the big chess tournaments (like world championships for example) are open to both genders but as the result of the huge gender gap female-only chess tournaments had to be set up in addition to all the other ones open to both genders.
incidentally this male imbalance is not restricted to humans. For example male rats perform more accurately than female rats on tasks that require spatially organized representations. No social factors can explain better male rats performance, certainly not male rats chauvinistic behavior.