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Source: ONE News
Girls can do just as well at math as boys - even at the genius
level - if they are given the same opportunities and encouragement,
researchers reported.
Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, contradicts studies showing girls can do as well as
boys on average in math - but cannot excel in the way males
can.
They also said it is a clear rebuttal to Larry Summers, who as
president of Harvard University said in 2005 that biological
differences could explain why fewer women became professors of
mathematics.
Summers is now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for
President Barack Obama.
"We conclude that gender inequality, not lack of innate ability or
'intrinsic aptitude', is the primary reason fewer females than
males are identified as excelling in mathematics performance in
most countries, including the United States," Janet Hyde and Janet
Mertz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison wrote in their
report.
They did a statistical analysis comparing various math scores and
contests with the World Economic Forum's 2007 Gender Gap Index.
This annual report ranks countries according to employment and
economic opportunities, education and political opportunities and
medical status.
The United States ranks 31 out of 128 nations on the World Economic
Forum index.
"We asked questions about how well females relative to males are
doing at the average level, at the high-end level - 95th percentile
or above - and the profoundly gifted level, the one-in-a-million
type level," Mertz said in a telephone interview.
"Countries with greater gender equity are also the ones where the
ratio of girls to boys doing well in math is close to equal," she
said.
Gifted and average
She said no one disputes that at the average level, girls perform
as well as boys mathematically.
But at the top levels, disparities persist and some experts have
said this is do to the greater male variability theory - the idea
that males in general are more likely to score both extremely high
and extremely poorly on tests than girls are.
Mertz said the analysis shows this is not true. "It's not that
everywhere in the world there are fewer girls than boys in the top
one percent," she said.
If there were a biological reason for the differences, this would
have to hold everywhere, she said.
But it does not.
"Analysis of data from 15-year-old students participating in the
2003 Program for International Student Assessment likewise
indicated that as many, if not more girls than boys scored above
the 99th percentile in Iceland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom,"
Mertz and Hyde wrote.
Several different international tests show the same pattern,
including the International Math Olympics, Mertz said.
"If girls don't have equal educational opportunities or if they
know if they learn the material there won't be jobs available to
them, why bother, they seek something else," she said.
This is changing, slowly, in the United States, they pointed
out.
"For example, only 14% of the US doctoral degrees in the biological
sciences went to women in 1970, whereas this figure had risen to
49% by 2006," they wrote.
"The percentages in mathematics and statistics were eight percent
in 1970 and 32% in 2006."
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