Entry 17: Boys Are Better at Math than Girls
This entry is inspired by a recent article I read in Science: L Guiso, F Monte, P Sapienza, and L Zingales, Science, 320, 1164-5. I somehow scored a free membership to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) earlier this summer, and have been getting weekly copies of Science ever since. I’m not sure exactly how that went down, but I certainly jumped on the email when they asked for my contact info to accept my membership.
I’ve been trying to read at least the non-technical articles in my spare time, just to be versed in the sort of research that gets into premier academic journals these days. If you check the date that this article was released (May 30th), you’ll see I’m falling predictably far behind. This plan for doing things I feel I “ought to do” is going about as well as my plan for reading classic books. So far, I’ve managed to read Brave New World and listen to audiobooks of Heart of Darkness, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. (That’s since moving to Wisconsin three years ago, mind you.) Bow before my literary prowess, knaves!
If this was one of those fancy blogs, I’d have some kind of special decal marking this article as Blogging On Peer-Reviewed Research or The Scientific Method In Action. Actually, come to think of it, I suppose I’m not going to be critiquing or commenting on the actual article. I’ll be using the article’s results to attack the above pseudoscientific statement, but I won’t be partaking in the post-publication peer-review process, per se. Hmmm. Perhaps this is why I don’t have one of those cool blogs.
Eyewitness Testimony: Girls Bad At Math, Have Cooties
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard this week’s statement, having taken advanced math classes throughout my K-12 education and then majoring in engineering in college. The male/female ratio in these courses was almost always nowhere near 50-50; as two examples, I graduated college with around four women (depending on how you count people who graduated in 4-5 years), and there are only two women in my graduate school class. There must be some reason that I’ve been surrounded by dudes for all these years, right?
Well, I’m sure there is. I’m also sure that many engineers feel that they know what the reason is, and that it’s listed in bold a few inches above this sentence. Engineers tend to be a tactless bunch of people, so non-PC sentiments like girls suck at math don’t often encounter a mental filter before they spill out of engineers’ mouths. And, just in case you’re not buying my anecdotes (good for you!), I offer you the verifiable story of Teen Talk Barbie. One of her spoken phrases: “Math class is hard!” I rest my case.
Whatever the reason, the results in Guiso et al imply that American girls are indeed worse than American boys in math. US girls average score on a purportedly-cultural-bias-free math test was about 10.5 points (or 2%) lower than the US boys’ average score, and correspondingly fewer girls than boys hit the 95th and 99th percentiles. In fact, the article lists a whopping nine countries where boys outperformed girls in math: Turkey, Korea (South, I presume), Italy, the US, Portugal, France, Poland, Norway, and Sweden. Other countries were studied, but I didn’t pull the supplementary information to check for the entire list.
Ah crap. Did I just prove all those oafish engineers’ point for them? Across the globe, boys are kicking the crap out of girls on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s special bias-free math test. I guess that second X chromosome must inhibit their ability to solve for just one x on algebra tests, or something.
Freedom Isn’t Free (It Costs a Buck o’Five)
Indeed not, because what this study really shows is that equal opportunity and freedom for women costs men their false superiority in mathematics. The list of countries I provided above is in the order of decreasing gender gap in mathematics test scores; i.e., girls score miserably in Turkey and nearly match boys in Sweden. (There is a tenth country listed, Iceland, where girls actually outperform boys in math.) There’s a second bar chart underneath the test scores chart showing each country’s Gender Gap Index (GGI), the World Economic Forum’s yardstick for “economic and political opportunities, education, and well-being for women.” The graphs follow the same positive trend, and the authors provided the calculations demonstrating that the correlation is statistically significant.
Thus, in countries where women are treated equally, the gender gap in mathematics completely disappears. Girls aren’t bad at math, they just aren’t socially liberated enough in this country (and most others) to reach their full potential in mathematics.
Lest you think I’ve assumed causation from correlation, the authors covered that concern, as well. (It is a Science paper, after all.) Perhaps poverty independently decreases both women’s freedom and girls’ test scores, or perhaps there are hidden genetic factors that ultimately cause the test score differences. The authors checked these alternate explanations for the data, finding (1) no effects from the evolutionary history of populations and (2) that economic factors alone could not explain the decreasing test score gap.
The authors seem convinced that gender equality eliminates the mathematics gap between boys and girls. I, however, remain skeptical. These materialistic scientists didn’t account for the flowing human energy fields that envelop our Mother Earth, and more importantly they completely ignored the fact that the different countries spend varying amounts of time under each astrological sign. Everyone knows that Gemini is good luck for little girls, and Iceland is almost always under Gemini. COINCIDENCE?!!?!!11!
But Seriously …
The results of this paper are interesting for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it really demolishes this week’s statement. Women aren’t any better or worse at math than men, and anyone saying girls suck at math is misinformed at best and sexist at worst. There’s no doubt that something is keeping women out of the hard sciences in America, but it’s certainly not a lack of raw talent. Based on our less-than-stellar GGI score, which was considerably (and appallingly) lower than various Northern European countries’ scores, it might just be good old fashioned sexism keeping the ladies away from math classes.
The last interesting bit of this paper was the reading scores. Girls walloped the boys in reading across the globe, and the shellacking worsened as their freedom index scores increased. Here’s a real gender gap, folks: boys suck at reading. Maybe we ought to be concerned about that gender gap, since it seems to me it’s not merely a sociological phenomenon like the mathematics score disparity.
Note that the merely in that last sentence is not at all meant to trivialize the struggles of women in the hard sciences; just the opposite, in fact. It’s absurd that, in the year 2008, freaking sexism is what’s discouraging half the population from entering the field of endeavor most important for our future. It’s a shame, and I’m frankly embarrassed for my profession as a whole. I have some more thoughts on this, but they’re not exactly of a skeptical nature so I’ll hold off for now. Perhaps an Entry 17a is in order? We’ll see.
Posted at 10:34 pm by cheglabratjoe
