by Rose O’Malley, Program Assistant
National Women’s Law Center
According to a recent study, there is no difference between the scores of girls and boys on standardized math tests. The study, the largest of its kind, examined the scores of 7 million students from 10 states from grade 2 to 11 and found “no gender difference.”
Seriously, how awesome is this? And can I say, “Finally!” Although the myth that boys are inherently better at math and science has stubbornly persisted (Hi Larry Summers! And John Tierney! And, sadly, so many others), study after study in recent years has shown the gap in math achievement for boys and girls to be trivial and shrinking. Now, at last, the hard facts show that even any remaining tiny differences have disappeared. Girls and boys are not inherently better or worse at certain subjects. The “science of sex difference” emperor has no clothes!
The challenge now, of course, is getting people to believe that and to act to remove the barriers that still limit young women’s access to these nontraditional fields. Janet Hyde, the researcher who led the recent study, thinks that the most important thing is to get the message out to parents and teachers, who may be subtly leading their daughters and female students away from advanced math classes in the mistaken belief that they will straggle behind their male peers. That’s certainly critical. Children pick up on those cues early; young girls who are told that they shouldn’t be interested in math, or that they won’t be good at calculus will rarely grow up to want to be engineers. But there is also a need for colleges and universities – and middle and high schools before them – to do more to encourage, recruit and retain young women in math-based fields like engineering and physics. Once mathematically-inclined girls see these fields as possible careers in which they will be welcome as equals, the gender gap that still exists in so many of the hard sciences will shrink and disappear.
From what I read of the Associated Press article, certain high-profile education professors remain, somehow, unbelievably skeptical. Yes, Stephen Camarata, I am looking in your direction. When you say, “We need to know…if our measures aren't capturing some aspect of math that's important. Then we can decide whether there's an actual male or female advantage,” do you really mean, “Well maybe girls can do the easy math on these tests, but if we were testing more advanced math, then the boys would certainly do better?” Sigh. One day female students and male students will perform equally on tests of, I don’t know, rocket science, and then these sex difference proponents will have even less of a leg to stand on than they do now. What will they do then? I can only hope that they will quietly admit that they were wrong, and even more quietly, disappear from magazines and newspapers forever.
Comments