{"id":19584,"date":"2013-03-07T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T17:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=19584"},"modified":"2013-03-03T19:35:07","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T00:35:07","slug":"the-truth-about-gender-and-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/03\/07\/the-truth-about-gender-and-math\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About Gender and Math"},"content":{"rendered":"

New data about the science aptitude of boys and girls around the world<\/a> inspires me to re-post this discussion from 2010.<\/em>\"\"<\/a>
\nMath ability, in some societies, is gendered.\u00a0 That is, many people believe that boys and men are\u00a0better\u00a0at math than girls\u00a0and women and, further, that this difference is\u00a0biological (hormonal, neurological,\u00a0or somehow encoded on the Y chromosome).<\/p>\n

But actual data about gender differences in math ability tell a very different story.\u00a0 Natalie Angier and Kenneth Chang reviewed these differences<\/a> in the New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0 They report the following (based on the US unless otherwise noted):<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 There is no difference in math aptitude before age 7.\u00a0\u00a0Starting in adolescence, some differences appear\u00a0(boys score approximately 30-35 points higher than girls on the math portion of the SAT).\u00a0 But, scores on different subcategories of math vary tremendously (often with girls outperforming boys consistently).<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 When boys do better, they are usually also doing worse.\u00a0\u00a0 Boys are also more likely than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.\u00a0 So they overpopulate both tails of the bell curve; boys are both better, and worse, than girls at math.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 That means that how we test for math ability is a political choice.\u00a0 If you report who is best at math, the answer is boys.\u00a0 If you report average math ability, it’s about the same.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 How you decide to test math ability is also political.\u00a0 Even though boys outperform girls on the SAT,\u00a0it turns out those\u00a0scores do not predict math performance in classes.\u00a0 Girls frequently outperform boys in the classroom.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 And, since girls often outperform boys in a practical setting, math aptitude (even measured at the levels of outstanding instead of average performance) doesn’t explain sex disparities in science careers (most of which, incidentally, only require you to be pretty good at math, as opposed to wildly genius at it).\u00a0\u00a0 In any case, scoring high in math is only loosely related to who opts for a scientific career, especially for girls. Many high scoring girls don\u2019t go into science, and many poor scoring boys do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, let’s look at some international comparisons:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 Boys do better in only about \u00bd of the OECD nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences. In Iceland, girls outshine boys significantly.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0In Japan,\u00a0though girls perform less well than the boys, they generally\u00a0outperform U.S. boys considerably.\u00a0 So finding that boys outperform girls within a country does not mean that boys outperform girls across all countries.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0Still, even in Iceland,\u00a0girls overwhelmingly\u00a0express more negative attitudes towards math.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what’s the real story here?\u00a0 Well, one study<\/a> found that the\u00a0gender gap in math ability and the level of gender inequality in a society were highly correlated. That is, “\u2026the gender gap in math, although it historically favors boys, disappears in more gender-equal societies.”<\/p>\n

Part of the problem, then, is simply that\u00a0\u00a0girls and boys internalize the idea that they will be bad and good at math respectively because of crap like the “Math class is tough!” Barbie (sold and then retracted in 1992):<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

However, girls’ insecurity regarding their own math ability isn’t just because they<\/em> internalize cultural norm, their elementary school teachers, who are over 90%\u00a0female,\u00a0sometimes do to and they teach math anxiety by example.\u00a0 A recent study<\/a> has shown that, when they do,\u00a0girl students do worse at math.\u00a0 From the abstract (this is pretty amazing):<\/p>\n

There was no relation between a teacher’s [level of] math anxiety and her students’ math achievement at the beginning of the school year.\u00a0 By the school year’s end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that “boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading” and the lower these girls’ math achievement.\u00a0 Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, with only the possible exception of genius-level math talent, men and women likely\u00a0have equal potential to be good (or bad) at math.\u00a0 But, in societies in which women are told that they shouldn’t or can’t do math, they don’t.\u00a0 And, as Fatistician<\/a> said, “math is a skill<\/a>.”\u00a0 People who\u00a0think practicing it is pointless won’t\u00a0practice it.\u00a0 And\u00a0those who don’t practice, won’t be any good at it… Y chromosome or no.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New data about the science aptitude of boys and girls around the world inspires me to re-post this discussion from 2010. Math ability, in some societies, is gendered.\u00a0 That is, many people believe that boys and men are\u00a0better\u00a0at math than girls\u00a0and women and, further, that this difference is\u00a0biological (hormonal, neurological,\u00a0or somehow encoded on the Y […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,34,55,2099,2101,260,1711,290,37],"class_list":["post-19584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-education","tag-gender","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-gender-education","tag-international-comparisons","tag-toysgames","tag-sciencetechnology","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19584"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54167,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19584\/revisions\/54167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}