We've come a long way since Immanuel Kant stated that "women might
as well have beards rather than trouble their pretty little heads about
mathematics." A new study found that girls actually score higher than
boys in mathematics until age 13. Only then do boys, whose skills
accelerate more rapidly, gain a slight edge.
Erin Leahey, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that at the end of high school,
boys' math scores surpass those of girls by no more than 1.5 percent. The
scores of more than 12,000 students, ages 4 to 18, revealed few
differences in mathematical aptitude.
These data challenge evidence of the male mathematical advantage,
demonstrated most prominently by the Study of Mathematically Precocious
Youth (SMPY) launched in 1972. Researchers including Julian Stanley,
Ph.D., used SAT scores to establish male superiority among gifted
seventh-graders and college-bound high school seniors. Male high school
seniors scored higher than females on the math section of the SAT every
year from 1966 to 1997.
But Stanley deems elementary school results irrelevant to the SMPY.
"The higher you get on the ability scale, the greater the differences. At
grade level you are not going to find big math differences," he declares.
Stanley has published five subsequent studies related to the SMPY and
deems Leahey "way behind."
"By using a large sample we broadened our understanding of gender
differences among regular adolescents," counters Leahey, who published
the findings in Social Forces. "There is a perception that even at
younger ages boys are more mathematically inclined. If that is the
perception, then girls have been shortchanged."
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