10 June 2008
Equality Raises Female Math Performance to That of Males
Study links gender gap in math to environmental factors
Washington -- A new study refutes the conventional wisdom in education that, on average, boys do better in math and girls do better in reading for biological reasons. A new international study suggests that the gender gap in math varies according to national culture, with the gap disappearing entirely in countries that have approached rough equality between males and females.
The study also found two other significant correlations: with increasing equality between the sexes, the number of girls performing at the very highest levels increases, and the gender gap in reading grows even larger in favor of girls.
The study appeared May 30 in the Education Forum of the journal Science and is the work of Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. The authors, who say they contributed equally to the research, represent several institutions: the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (Guiso); the Economics Department at the University of Chicago in Illinois (Monte); the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (Sapienza); and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (Zingales).
To measure performance differences in mathematics and reading, the study uses data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Students from 40 countries took identical tests designed to be free of cultural biases.
The PISA test revealed that in many countries, girls perform worse on average than boys in math, while in all countries girls perform better than boys in reading. In other words, if one looked no further, the conventional wisdom would appear to be true: boys are better at math, girls at reading.
But the researchers then used several measures of gender equality to classify countries, including the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, the World Values Surveys, a measure of female economic activity and the political empowerment index developed by the World Economic Forum. To detect cultural attitudes toward women, for example, they looked at responses to such statements as “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.”
When the researchers compared results country by country, they found that the gender gap in math narrows or disappears in societies that display more gender equality according to the measures used. The top five are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand.
No country has achieved full gender equality by the measures used. The United States ranks 31st in gender equality on the researchers’ scale.
To make sure the correlation they found between equality and the math gender gap was not just a reflection of the low rates of poverty and relative income equality in the top-tier countries, the researchers used only the scores of the top 50 percent of students in terms of socio-economic status, Sapienza said in an e-mail interview with America.gov.
“We were worried about differential dropout rates between boys and girls in some countries,” she said. “For example, in some societies it is possible that in poorer families either boys or girls are not attending schools because they work at home or outside the home. Dropout rates could affect the comparisons. It turned out that they don’t. The results are the same if we drop the low socio-economic status students and if we do not drop them. But, the analysis presented on the paper is based on the reduced sample.”
“The so-called gender gap in math seems to be linked to environmental factors, which means it could be eliminated by education or social programs,” Sapienza said. “The gap doesn’t exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities.”
The authors note that their “findings shed some light on recent trends in girls’ educational achievements in the United States, where the math gender gap has been closing over time.”
In 2001, women in the United States earned 48 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The new study constitutes good news for educators, although it also poses a challenge. If the gender gap or poor performance in mathematics in general was rooted in biology or poverty, there would not be the same urgency about addressing the problem that there will be if curricula changes can have an effect. Many educators have said, for example, that boys and girls seem to learn mathematics differently, especially geometry.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been funding research on gender in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields since 1993. With an annual budget varying from $7 million to $10 million, NSF has funded more than 350 grants for research on how to maintain girls’ interest in science past middle school, how to bring more girls into elective high school math and advanced-placement science courses and how to increase young women’s enrollment in STEM undergraduate studies, particularly in engineering and computer sciences.
For example, traditional math instruction in the classroom often assumes that learners will work alone and are best motivated by competition. But researchers funded by NSF at the University of Southern California have found that girls learn math best through collaborative activities and dialogue.
Boston College researchers are investigating fourth-graders’ measurement ability, which is the ability that shows the strongest and most consistent gender and socio-economic difference and plays a key role in success in STEM fields.
On August 9, 2007, President Bush signed into law the America COMPETES Act, which authorizes $33.6 billion over fiscal years 2008-2010 for STEM education programs, including help for current and future teachers in the areas of science and math education.
In mathematics, U.S. students ranked 26th out of 40 countries on the PISA test, with a below-average number of top performers and a significant gender gap.
The United States has played a leadership role in the pursuit of equal rights for women both in the 19th century and in the feminist movement that began in the 1960s. But progress in some areas has been more difficult to achieve than others. (See Diversity At Work.)
“Some northern European countries have a lot of poor immigrants and they are educating them quite well even at the low end of the social distribution,” Sapienza said. The weaker performance by U.S. girls on the PISA math test, she speculates, is rooted in curricula differences. “My suspicion is that especially the math curricula [in northern Europe] are stronger than the one typically adopted in the United States, especially in areas where there are disadvantaged children.”
Indeed, improved curricula in both math and reading are likely to be increasingly critical for boys as well. “Our research indicates that in more gender-equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys,” Sapienza said.
