Gender math gap erasable, studies suggest

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, 01 June 2008 09:53.

Two arguments about the maths gap, spotted by John Ray - the first from World Science:-

It’s been a long, sometimes vicious controversy: are boys better at math than girls? Some say they are, because boys tend to outscore girls in math. Opponents blame that on sexist upbringing.

New studies may be shedding light on the issue. In a nutshell, some of the latest research points to three conclusions that offer something to satisfy both sides but overall paint a bright picture for those eager to see more women enter mathematics and sciences. The key findings: Girls are as good at math as boys given the proper environment.

Males may have an edge in spatial thinking abilities, which are useful in math, evolutionarily speaking, and this advantage may be very ancient.

Deep-rooted though this difference may be, females can surmount it with just a little work. “The so-called gender gap in math skills seems to be at least partially correlated to environmental factors,” said Paola Sapienza of The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois. “The gap doesn’t exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities,” added Sapienza, summarizing the results of a new study published in the May 30 issue of the research journal Science.

In it, Sapienza and colleagues analyzed data from more than 276,000 children in 40 countries who took an internationally standardized test of math, reading, science and problem-solving. The data came from the 2003 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment.

The researchers found that globally, boys outperformed girls in math by 10.5 points on average on this test. But this advantage vanished in some of the most progressive and gender-equal countries such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway.

Now that the apparent good news is out, does this mean anyone who dared suggest the existence of natural gender differences in math was being sexist?

Not necessarily, if one believes other studies suggesting sexism isn’t the only reason for the math gap. Some research has attributed that gap to a deeper discrepancy in spatial reasoning abilities. One new study even suggests an evolutionary reason: better spatial reasoning in males might be related to larger range size in their ancestral environment.

This discrepancy may extend all the way down the evolutionary tree to invertebrates, according to the research, which focused on cuttlefish and appears in the May 27 online issue of the research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“Evidence of sex differences in spatial cognition have been reported in a wide range of vertebrate species,” but never the simpler invetebrates, the authors wrote. The investigators found that male cuttlefish both range over a larger area, and have better orienting abilities than female cuttlefish. “The data conform to the predictions of the range size hypothesis,” they wrote.

Nevertheless, differences in spatial cognition are easily surmountable, if one believes yet a third study, which might help explain why ultimately girls and boys can perform equally in math. Published in last October’s issue of the journal Psychological Science, this study found that malefemale differences in some tasks requiring spatial skills are largely eliminated after both groups play a video game for 10 hours.

“On average, women are not quite as good at rapidly switching attention among different objects and this may be one reason why women do not do as well on spatial tasks,” said the lead author, University of Toronto psychology doctoral student Jing Feng. But “both men and women can improve their spatial skills by playing a video game,” he added, and “the women catch up to the men. Moreover, the improved performance of both sexes was maintained when we assessed them again after five months.” The game used was a first-person shootemup game, “Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault.”

The game “may cause the expression of previously inactive genes which control the development of neural [brain] connections that are necessary for spatial attention,” said Ian Spence, director of the university’s engineering psychology laboratory. “Clearly, something dramatic is happening in the brain” thanks to the playing.

“One important application of this research could be in helping to attract more women to the mathematical sciences and engineering,” he added. “Since spatial skills play an important role in these professions, bringing the spatial skills of young women up to the level of their male counterparts could help to change the gender balance in these fields that are so important to our economic health.”

And now for the demolition:-

Economist says girls actually better than boys at maths. Shows no sign of it herself however…

An economist in America has published research stating that girls have at least as much innate mathematical ability as boys. Paola Sapienza contends that the fact of girls almost always doing worse in maths exams results mainly from sexual discrimination. “The math gender gap can be eliminated, and it is indeed eliminated in some countries,” says Sapienza. “Our research indicates that in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys.”

Sapienza and her co-authors reached their conclusion by looking at boy-vs-girl maths performance in different countries, and checking this against various measures which indicate how sexually equal each country is believed to be. The maths test figures used were from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), set up by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The PISA data included standardised test results from some 276,000 children in forty countries.

As for equality, various figures were used, most notably the Gender Gap Index from the World Economic Forum. This is worked out according to various measures, such as the support given to working mums, proportion of women who work, females in politcs etc. A value of zero GGI indicates “inequality” (males totally dominating; women do no work, earn no money, don’t appear at all in politics etc). A GGI of 1 equals “equality” (women just the same as men in these areas).

Presumably there could exist a condition where the GGI approached infinity, in which the zero state was reversed and men were totally crushed. However, no country has even achieved a rating of 1 yet; in every nation on Earth, according to the GGI, women are disadvantaged to some degree.

Sapienza and her colleagues noted that in Iceland, girls actually beat boys by a small margin on the PISA maths tests. Iceland scores high on womens’ lib, at GGI 0.78. By contrast, Turkey - where the men keep their women firmly under the thumb (GGI 0.59) - showed girls lagging. The top four countries for gender equality are all in northern Europe: Sweden, Norway and Finland are the only ones which beat Iceland. (You can see the latest rankings here (PDF)

“As a European, I’m not surprised that the top countries are the northern European,” said Sapienza - who comes from Italy herself. QED, then. In the northern-Euro countries, where the human race is most nearly approaching gender equality - though not by any means there yet - girls are already outstripping boys at maths, as they often do in non-mathematical subjects. In the gender-equal society of the future, girls really could be expected to trounce the chaps on all suits. Men just aren’t as intelligent as women.

Steady on, though. You can download the PISA 2006 figures here (xls spreadsheet, table 6.2c). As far as we can make out, Turkish girls aren’t doing nearly as badly as Sapienza says (6 points down on the boys, not 23). Perhaps there’s a typo somewhere. But there are other problems: the Icelander girls’ 4-point lead is there, as noted, but it’s a statistically insignificant result. That means it’s within the variation you could expect from the sample with no bias present.

There is, however, one country where the girls thumped the boys at maths in a statistically significant fashion. But it’s not in progressive northern Europe - it’s Qatar, lying 109th in the gender-equality rankings with a GGI of 0.6 - almost as male-chauvinist as Turkey.

And what of so-progressive Finland, actually ahead of Iceland in gender equality? Boys ahead in maths by a statistically-significant 12 points. Ouch. Boys are significantly ahead in Norway, too, the second-most-gender-equal country in the world. In Germany - seventh best worldwide at gender equality - the girls are simply nowhere, a shocking 20 points down on the chaps. Indeed, very few girls anywhere lag as far behind their male contemporaries as those of progressive Germany. (Those of Austria and Colombia do, though. Both countries score higher than the USA on gender equality.)

Meanwhile, girls appear to be somewhere near equal maths performance with boys - that is, the difference between the sexes falls within expected variation - in various other places. Jordan and Kyrgyzstan rather leap to the eye, actually. Girls do fine at maths in both nations, yet these places are way down (104th and 70th) in the equality rankings.

“What are these northern European countries doing so that there is no gap?” asks Sapienza. But Norway, Germany, Denmark and Finland do show a statistically significant gap in her own chosen data set, for goodness’ sake. Unlike Qatar, Jordan and Kyrgyzstan. Even for an economist, this shows a poor grasp of mathematics.

In the end boys may or may not be innately better than girls at maths, but one thing’s for sure: associate professor Sapienza hasn’t added anything to the debate, perhaps because she herself doesn’t seem to understand maths at all.

Her twaddle can be read in the new issue of Science, or there are summaries here and with more detail here.

Update

We’ve already had a fair bit of angry mail on this one. Sample quote: “To you, one word only: Moron” [many more words then followed, and indeed another email from the same person]. However, two further points: the research apparently draws on the PISA 2003 survey rather than the 2006 one, presumably explaining the discrepancy in the Turkish maths scores. Also, another reader flags up the fact that Sapienza’s co-authors are all male, which makes this article “an excellent example of discrimination against women”. (Sapienza is the lead author, though, and none of the others have their picture at the top of the press releases.)

Tags: IQ and Heredity

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:11 | #

“One important application of this research could be in helping to attract more women to the mathematical sciences and engineering,” he added. (—from the log entry)

Women self-select out of those fields. They don’t like them.

Notice a non-Jewish woman promoting a viewpoint on which Jewish academics have the market cornered (have it cornered because Jews are angry and have a screw loose — angry in part because they resent having to be Jews, and have a screw loose because they just do). But would we be getting regaled from all directions with this sort of stupidity so much, were it not for how the Jews have arranged things in academia, encouraging people with this viewpoint to come out of the woodwork, lauding them, shining a spotlight on them?

In other words, to paraphrase the BASF commercial, “Jews don’t make a lot of the PC bullshit you hear. Jews make a lot of the PC bullshit you hear bolder.”

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:01 | #

La Griffe du Lion talks about this.

(Oops! I forgot, better not read those links because logic and mathematical reasoning — thinking, in other words — are a phallic creation of the oppressive Patriarchy intended solely to enslave women, people of color, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, people in wheelchairs, and ... oh yeah, people who love Michael Bolton, Barry Manilow, and Garth Brooks (to say nothing of Chris Gaines, Garth’s alter-ego — remember that?), but there was one I still can’t remember ... wasn’t it LGBTF or something? What did that F stand for? Fags? No that word’s not PC, it can’t be fags. Wait, I’ll look it up ... OK, here, it was queers. Yeah that word used to be unPC but somehow it got PC again, in fact, it’s so PC that if you don’t say it now, you’re not PC. It’s like nigger, it used to be unPC then the Negro rap artists brought it back to where it’s super-PC to say nowadays, but only in certain contexts (consult the web-site “Stuff White People Like” for details of when it’s OK). Hey maybe “Negro” will come back into vogue — then everyone who looks at me with a raised eyebrow every time I use it will be praising me for being so ahead of the coolness curve, the exact same people.

All right, so let’s change that to:

logic and mathematical reasoning are a phallic creation of the oppressive Patriarchy intended solely to enslave women, people of color, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, people in wheelchairs, people who love Michael Bolton, Barry Manilow, and Garth Brooks (and Chris Gaines of course), queers, fags, and Negroes.

(Boy, that sentence all by itself would get me declared an absolute genius at Harvard University’s Wimmyn’s and Gender Studies Department.)

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:36 | #

You might need some hard evidence to back that Jewish bon mot up, Fred.

What I find interesting about the leftist revulsion at the maths gap is its illustration of the absolutist nature of radical individualism. There can be no above-the-neck performance differentials which are attributable to Nature, none whatsoever or the whole teleological rocket ship Limitless Potential comes a-tumbling down.

So every possible effort must be made to deny the obvious and attempt to defy gravity - including, naturally, doing “scientific” research based upon a skewed and selective reading of the evidence. Happens all the time.

As everyone above three years old should be told at least twice every day, radical individualism is rooted in the Lockean tabula rasa and nowhere else - certainly not in any intelligent model of Man. And no philosopher of the genomic age would ever dream it up. But it’s “out there” now, in the woodwork, and it seems we have to suffer for it.

So it is not a Jewish thing, particularly, and not even that leftist. JJR flirts with aspects of it in his libertarianism. When one strips away the vestiges of conservatism which adorn the right of the spectrum, what remains is radical individualism enacted through boundless (but tawdry) economic progress. The left is more interesting. Radical individualism appears as state-mandated identity politics, but is augmented by the social democratic tradition in what is not quite a comfortable marriage. Social democratism is disinterested in abstractions, and wants to right wrong now, today. And that’s about all it wants. It certainly has nothing to say about the maths gap.

But then social democratism is an “what is” issue. It isn’t teleology. It is combines with Volkish nationalism to produce a large part of what is national socialism (ie the part without the teleological pathologies that caused war and haughty, even murderous disdain for the “Other”.

The enemy, wherever we find him, is always a dreamer of new dreams, and too absolutist to brook opposition in the pursuit of them.

Posted by Standtall on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:58 | #

I do like research like this. It exposes us to new opportunities and thinking. This will help in line of my work in Women’s empowerment via technology in Nigeria

Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:08 | #

What Miss Sapienza needs is a good man to set her straight. Any volunteers?

Posted by loki on the run on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:15 | #

Hmmm, it is interesting that the discrepant results come from the Scandinavian countries ... there has been equal access to math in the US for a long time.

Also, didn’t that research that women have to be twice as good as men to get their research funded come from Scandinavia, and then the women who wrote the paper promptly lost the data so that no one else could re-analyze the data to check the results.

Posted by Andrew on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:59 | #

My take:
The logic of the article is
1) The gender gap in spatial cognition tests is fairly constant across countries
2) Inequality between men and women (measured as ‘CGI’) varies widely across countries.
3) Therefore if inequality between men and women predicts differences in mathematics scores (from here on Y), the gap between men and women in mathematical achievement is cultural.

First off, this is not a fair test - for example maybe small differences in the gap in spatial cognition tests cause big differences in Y. It would be more fair to run a regression with both variables and see which one predicts more variation.

Second, it is possible that differences in CGI and Y are both caused by a common genetic factor that varies from country to country. The article says:

To verify that these results are not driven by biological differences across countries, we analyzed whether they persist in populations that have a similar or identical evolutionary history. To assess history, we used a genetic distance measure (14-17) based on the frequency of each allele across DNA polymorphisms.

According to this measure, there are 13 European countries with genetic distance equal to zero and 26 European countries with genetic distance less than 100 (table S5). When we restrict the regression of the table (above) to either one of these two groups, our findings are substantially unchanged (table S6).

If CGI and some genetic variable Z are highly correlated enough, and Z causes differences in Y, then restricting the regression of Y on CGI to a sample with a small range in Z, would still show that CGI predicts Y.

Again, a more fair test would be to regress Y on CGI and some variable Z derived from genetic data (such as the 1st and 2nd principal components of genetic variation).

I guess the main question is, If this is a test of two rival hypotheses, what data would cause the biological hypothesis to win?

Posted by Fr. John on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 05:54 | #

Well, here we go again. But, why is it when we want to destroy God-given genetic ability differences, we use the most Caucasoid countries as models? Isn’t that being inherently ‘racist’ and as well, ‘intelligist,’ in that NORDICS tend to have higher IQ’s than say, Italy, or Spain, or Greece? Or the multicultural behemoth, the USA?

Let’s compare Nordic Christian men with Negroid women from oh, say, Muslim Somalia, and THEN what would the differences be?

Yeah, thought so….

Besides, only God can make a tree, and only a woman can bear the race’s next generation. Some things are worth more in the long run, than getting a scholarship to Harvard…. like having White children, and avoiding genocide by design….

Posted by History Major on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:10 | #

there has been equal access to math in the US for a long time.

Loki, you sound like a Scandinavian to me, so I’ll forgive you for not knowing that it has only been in the last 3 or 4 years that females in the US have been allowed to even use mathematics for tasks not related to cooking or homemaking.
Of course that isn’t true. But as someone mentioned, for the most part, women just aren’t interested in hard sciences, engineering, mathematics and the like. In the US people are allowed full freedom to do as they wish. Of course, they must must make the right choices! This article reminds me of all those studies saying that there aren’t “enough” negroes, hispanics, etc…involved in math and science. Same shit, different study.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:10 | #

“Same shit, different study.” (—History Major)

Sums it up very nicely.

Posted by 357 on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:58 | #

“It’s been a long, sometimes vicious controversy: are boys better at math than girls? Some say they are, because boys tend to outscore girls in math. Opponents blame that on sexist upbringing.”

Yes…“well, well, here we go again.” All it takes is the radical-leftist-egalitarians to make the charge of sexism, racism, or whatever “ism” of the day is evoked, then the Hegelian-dialectic process begins…for the millionth time! When will we stop falling for it?!?! When are the linguine spined men in the establishment going to stand-up and put a halt to the demands of the left? I’m afraid the answer to my question is never….or not until its too late. Not until the system collapses due to its own ignorance…willful ignorance brought on by cowardice. In the mean time, the unPC China is moving ahead by leaps and bounds.

The Jews aside, it was/is white-women who’ve led white-men down this insane PC path, and I’m afraid only white-women can lead us out ... ?

Posted by GT on Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:55 | #

...it has only been in the last 3 or 4 years that females in the US have been allowed to even use mathematics for tasks not related to cooking or homemaking.

My mother was a math major. She math modeled flight systems for sexist engineers at Northrop Aircraft Inc. in Hawthorne, CA, for a number of years and taught high school math in sexist south Missouri for more than a decade.

Posted by a Finn on Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:56 | #

Comment on Iceland. That discrepancy has been explained long time ago. Icelandic boys have so many good profitable job opportunities that require no math skills that they tend to not make effort in school or simply quit it. One example is fishing, where jobs are almost exclusively manned by, well, men. Women have no such opportunities, so they have to gain profitable jobs by good education, and they do their utmost in school.

Just a last nail to the coffin where Sapienza’s theories and lack of intellect will be buried.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:20 | #

La Griffe du Lion (means “the Lion’s Claw” in French) speculates on:

Probable Origins of Sex Differences in Mathematical Ability

In early hominid societies women gathered and men hunted. The division of labor exerted distinctly different adaptive pressures on men and women, leaving them with different cognitive strengths. The legacy of the hunter is visuospatial proficiency including the ability to mentally rotate and invert objects in 3-space. This ability, useful for navigating across wide stretches in search of prey, is also valuable in mathematics. Women’s better ability to identify objects and recall their location is the legacy of the forager.

Related cognitive sex differences may be found in other species, often with similar origins. In polygynous vole species, for example, males cover wider territories than their monogamous cousins. As a result, they have evolved sex-differentiated navigational skills very much like humans. Polygynous males navigate mazes faster than females of the same species, whereas monogamous vole species exhibit no such sex difference.[5] [...]

Here, below, la Griffe conducts an imaginary Q & A with Prof. Lawrence Summers, whom the dykes in the Harvard wimmyn’s studies department (or the equivalent thereof in biology or literature or something) notoriously hounded out of the presidency not long ago for speaking the truth, in addition to extorting 50 million dollars from the Harvard endowment to go toward funding lots of cushy projects, lavish and pointless “studies,” and generous salaries and stipends for their lez girlfriends and colleagues and testosterone-challenged servile dominatrix-craving male sycophants:

Q & A

Q: Girls frequently get better math grades than boys, even though boys score higher on tests of mathematical aptitude. How do you explain this? And isn’t classroom performance linked more strongly to future job performance than test scores?

LS: When you say “better grades” I think you mean “better average grades.” In a high school math class we expect to find a narrow male majority of 52% in the top half of ability (obtained by setting N /NS = 2 in [3]). Thus with almost equal numbers of boys and girls on each side of the ability median, a bit of extra industry on the part of the ladies, or more likely a bit of slacking off by the boys, could easily tilt the average grade toward the girls. None of this, however, is relevant to job performance in fields like engineering, math or physical science. There, considerably more than average ability is required. The technological workforce will emerge from the more selective fractions of the class, where boys predominate to an extent that is not compensable by extra diligence. The 95th percentile of mathematical ability, for example, will be about 64% male, the 99th percentile, 71% male.

Q: If, as you claim, 71% of the 99th percentile is male, that still leaves 29% who are female. What have you done to bring senior female faculty up to this level in Mathematics, Engineering and Physical Sciences?

LS: Full professors in Mathematics at Harvard represent ability in the top 0.0001% of the population, not the top 1%. We could therefore reasonably expect to find no more than one or two women at that rank, with two being extremely unlikely. I haven’t done an analysis of Engineering and Physical Sciences, but I suspect prospects for women there are similar but less stark.

Q: OK, so we can’t expect gender equity in Mathematics, Engineering and Physical Sciences at Harvard, but can we at least expect 29% of the workforce in these fields to be women?

LS: Not likely. Men and women exhibit other behavioral differences which are apparent almost from birth. To some extent they mirror sex-differentiated behavior in animals. Boys are more aggressive, girls more nurturing. Female babies react more to facial expressions, males to moving objects. By adolescence these behaviors have morphed into girls’ interest in social relationships, and boys’ interest in machines and devices. Obviously, such divergence of interests influences career choices. Girls lean more toward fields like psychology, while similarly talented men incline toward engineering or physical science. A study[6] by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at almost three times the rate of boys. For all these reasons, we should regard 29% as an upper bound to the percentage of women in the technological work force. In practice, their numbers will be significantly less.

Q: If all this is so, why are we meeting here today?

A: Good question. We are meeting here today because feminists, in order to support their androgynous fantasies, encourage able young women to enter technological fields even when their interests lie elsewhere.

Q: I see several people have left and one has thrown up. [Scroob note: Here La Griffe takes an indirect dig at that professor who said listening to Summers during that fateful speech he gave “almost made her throw up,” to the point where she had to get up and leave the auditorium.] Do you think there will be repercussions campuswide?

A. Nah. We are, after all, first and foremost scholars, researchers and above all colleagues.

Thank you all again.

For non-technical people, by the way, La Griffe’s papers can be read with benefit even if you can’t understand all the math, because his non-math verbal explanations are always very clear (and there’s always a certain amount of simpler math you will understand). Everyone should read the papers at his site.

Posted by 357 on Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:05 | #

After reading the Q&A between L.S. and the radical feminist, I can extrapolate from it that if we ever let these extremist lunatics to get in full domination over society, it’s over. I can envision a scenario where these radicals will, in order to achieve gender equality in athletics, mandate men (only white men, of course) go on a starvation diet and be banned from physical exercise in order to erase any innate differences.

I hope I didn’t give them any ideas.

Posted by Takahata Joe on Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:48 | #

have it cornered because Jews are angry and have a screw loose — angry in part because they resent having to be Jews, and have a screw loose because they just do

I doubt Jews (at least Ashkenazi jews) resent having to be the highest-IQ ethnic group in the world.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:04 | #

“I doubt Jews (at least Ashkenazi jews) resent having to be the highest-IQ ethnic group in the world.” (—Joe)

No, I imagine they’re pretty happy about that. It’s other stuff they resent about having to be Jewish.

I meant to add in my last reply to him in a different thread, this will be my last reply to Joe who, as I said elsewhere, is not sufficiently smart or honest to be worth the time it takes to deal with.

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