Math gender gap bridged

Girls and boys are now doing equally well on math tests

Vancouver Sun – page A6 – July 25, 2008

by Tom Spears

Girls and boys are now performing equally on standardized high school math tests across North America, ending a “gender gap” that lasted for decades, new research says.

An American math expert says the results should put to rest all the theories that girls’ brains can’t do math. The gap, she says, has closed for good.

The main study focuses on more than seven million U.S. high school students, who periodically write math tests that are standardized across the country. It also looked at SAT tests given to university applicants.

Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reports the scores between boys and girls have finally become so close that the difference isn’t statistically significant.

“The gender gap has been narrowing over time,” she said. “I did another study in 1990 that showed pretty small differences, but nothing like this.”

Her analysis is published today in Science, a major international research journal.

“There are all these people out writing books about the male brain and the female brain being different, [saying] that girls’ brains can’t do math,” she said in an interview. “Which is just ridiculous because the data show that they can.”

The gap probably arose in times when boys more often expected to do jobs requiring math, such as science and engineering work, she says. It’s known that for many years, boys took more math courses in high school while girls dropped math.

That has changed.

“Girls in the U.S. now take calculus in high school at the same rate as boys do, and they take chemistry at the same rate as boys.”

They still take fewer physics courses.

“What you need in order to do well on these [standardized] tests is a lot of courses. People aren’t born knowing how to do calculus. So the narrowing of the course gap has really been quite striking over the last decade … Now it’s more likely that both [sexes] have done four years of math” by the end of high school.

Canada has seen the same changes, she said.

International tests done by an organization called Program for International Student Assessment found the math gender gap in Canada had become “so small that it’s not important,” based on 2003 tests of 26,000 high school students.

At the college level, 48 per cent of Americans graduating with bachelor’s degrees in math are now women. “It could be that we will see some narrowing of gaps as this generation of girls and women passes through the system.” However, she cautions that women still face discrimination, especially in engineering.

Yet at the same time, a Canadian education professor wonders: Does the gender gap matter anyway?

“It’s not really news” that girls and boys are now performing in math at the same level, said Rebecca Coulter, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario’s faculty of education.

A greater problem, she said, is the difference in performance between children in richer and poorer communities, she said.

Teachers have known for a long time that girls can do math, but there remains a problem of children in underprivileged settings who are falling behind in their education, she said.