No Gap Found In Math Abilities of Girls, Boys

sciencehabit writes "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference. 'Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.' But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."

What!

Next they'd have you believe that girls fart and use the internet too... I'm not buying it!

Nonsense

I'm a boy, and I've met girls who I'm better at math than.

Therefore boys are better at math than girls.

Heh, stupid girls probably can't even follow simple basic logic like that ;-)

Re:Nonsense

I can follow the logic, just not the logic that led you to the structure of your first sentence.

Re:Nonsense

http://xkcd.com/385/ [xkcd.com]

Conflicting results?

Wait so:

result 1: While previously it had been believed that boys solved harder mathematics questions more adeptly, that trend has been reversed.

result 2: Our standardized test material contained no hard mathematics questions.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this? Their results may be true, but that doesn't mean the study was valid.

Re:Conflicting results?

result 2: Our standardized test material contained no hard mathematics questions.

In a room with a low ceiling, a high percentage will jump the same height.

Explanation

The math in this study was done by girls.

Almost in MN

I was just commenting about this with a coworker this morning, and how the Minneapolis Star Tribune indicates Minnesota high school girls are still lagging behind boys. I said we just need to bump down the high school boys' performance a couple notches and we'll be good: no child left behind!

easy deduction:

white boys should breed with asian girls, creating an uberrace of math chomping supergenius kids

i for one welcome our eurasian einsteinchan overlords

A root cause you'll never hear about

Other girls.

Seriously. Anyone who has dated a geek girl knows that misogyny is a drop in the bucket compared to the problem that girls geared toward science and math face from other girls who will be absolutely VICIOUS in putting them down.

The reason this never gets debated is simple. It would blow apart the entire "sisterhood" myth of feminism. To admit that there are a number of women who use "girliness" as a cudgel to beat the tar out of intelligent women, while there are a number of men who actually want an intelligent, educated mate, would be to force them to admit that women, not "the patriarchy," are really what's keeping the culture stagnant.

No surprise

Girls have more fear of math. They are not worse at it. The typical observation is that girls do not dare try it, while boys perform badly and do not mind. This is a cultural problem, not a capability issue. Same is, incidentially, true ofr technology: Girls are afraid to touch it, while boys break it.

Re:No surprise

Trust me, I know lots of girls who aren't afraid to touch IT

So the real headline should be

Girls just as good as boys at today's easier math?

Frankly, I've never bought that old CW about girls being worse at math than boys... especially since I met and married my math-major wife in college, who has always been much better at math than I am. It may be true that boys are more _interested_ in math than girls, and thus pursue it and are successful at it more often, but that's a completely different thing from saying that girls are somehow innately "worse" at math.

SEX DIFFERENCES IN MATHEMATICAL APTITUDE

There are more male winners of the field's medal. This article makes a pretty convincing case that the reason is because males have a wider sigma and that there will be more male super geniuses than women. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm [f2s.com]

Re:What?

Right, but what they're trying to emphasize is that gender is not the discriminating factor. Rather, culture is. So your statement is kind of misleading in that it emphasizes gender as the discriminating factor, and subjugates "western world" into a circumstantial factor.

Re:What?

The article is much more misleading than my statement though, it claims girls are equal to boys at maths, then says boys are better (at least white boys and the average SAT taking boy).

The title shouldn't be "Girls = Boys at Math", it should be "Boys better than Girls at maths, but for cultural reasons, not gender related reasons."
I imagine that this title would never be chosen because it's either not politically correct enough, or not attention grabbing, regardless of it's accuracy

Re:What?

My sister (we're twins) consistently kicked my ass at math and just about everything else, right up until we got to 10th grade or thereabouts. Then she turned into a vacuous fashion fiend with god-awful grades who liked hanging out with other vacuous fashion fiends.

I think peer pressure has a lot to do with how kids perform at things like math. Math is not cool, therefore if you want to be cool then you have to suck at math, or generally just suck at school.

I always got good grades, but I was also good at sports and generally avoided the "jock" scene and the do-nothing i'm-so-cool rich kid crowds. I'm kind of proud at having been able to achieve that balance.

Thankfully she grew out of it eventually, but not in time to do rather badly in high school. It's just as well she didn't need a scholarship to pay her way through college (where she did pretty good).

Re:What?

Americans are better at counting than Brits, as Brits seem to think there is more than one math.

Re:What?

According to TFA more girls than boys do the SAT, doesn't give whether more boys than girls did other tests, but the article implies girls outnumber boys.

It also says boys do 7% better in the maths portion of the SATs, but writes it off as a statistical illusion due to more girls doing the test (they don't know how averages work?).
I bet it wouldn't be a statistical illusion if the girls where the ones getting 7% better.

Re:What does it mean for boys to be better?

The way many studies show this is that the average scores for boys and girls are roughly equal, with boys slightly outperforming girls, however girls tend to have a much lower deviation, most girls score about average, whereas boys are much more likely to score either very high or very low.

My problem with this article is that it writes off a 7% difference as an illusion. And doesn't actually give any of the figures, just results (which I can't really trust without figures, especially after how the one figure they do include contradicts the article headline)

Re:The Important Question....

Because obviously if it was conducted by a male, it will be biased toward boys and if it was conducted by a female, it will be biased toward girls, right?

Thus, I hereby suggest hiring a transsexual robot to lead the next survey.

Re:I don't understand this gender difference swing

Well, the idea is to see if there are any differences. Sexism is only sexism if it's baseless. If you have something like this to demonstrate that there are differences between the genders, then making decisions based on those differences is qualified. However, like they said, there is no difference. The smartest person in my school in every subject that I took in my last year of high school was female (except Music, but there were only 3 people). Of course, anecdotal evidence, take it with a grain of salt. The point is that finding out that there are no differences makes any attempts to make decisions based on gender alone an offensive and ignorant thing.

Re:Can it be time?

Men do tend to be more interested in technical things. In fact, the cog. sci. department has a related hypothesis that they're currently testing. The hypothesis is that Asperger's syndrome and the autistic spectrum is just the extreme case of the male brain (literally: testosterone poisoning).

Re:Real Story is

How does correcting an unfair imbalance equal hamstringing? More attention was paid to boys, and they did better. Now that teachers are giving more time to girls and teaching in a more gender neutral fashion, the scores are becoming more equal.

As mentioned on 60 minutes [cbsnews.com], "Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school".

Does that sound very equal to you?

It goes somewhat against the grain of this report, but what this study seems to indicate is that, relative to their performance in other subject areas, girls aren't doing well in math.

Re:Real Story is

When I was in public school in the 80s and 90s none of my math teachers were men. Typically, a quarter to a half of our grade would be 'homework checks' or art posters where you draw a picture of issac newton and an apple. I was never in a class that you could even pass by just being able to understand and perform math.

So in my day girls had huge advantages in math classrooms, with sypathetic teachers and rote learning and grades based on following the rules -- and guys still did better in math. I can only image how hostile the classrooms are now. Judging by your id, back in your day maybe there was a bias for men but that has long since been overcorrected for.