Girls and Math: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Females have caught up to males in math achievement.
Alberta Einstein, where are you?
Girls now score as well as boys on average on state math tests, a new Wisconsin-Berkeley study published in Science has found.
Back in 1992, when Teen Talk Barbie was criticized for pointing out that “Math class is tough,” girls took easier high school math classes and earned lower math scores than boys. No more. Now girls are taking the same tough math classes as their male classmates. It shows.
While males continue to outscore females on the math SAT, that’s skewed by the fact that a larger percentage of female students take the test, the researchers said. In Colorado and Illinois, where all students are required to take the ACT, the gender gap vanished.
Girls are outperforming boys in the classroom: Female students read better, earn higher grades, and are more likely to complete high school, go on to college, and earn a degree. (See Richard Whitmire’s Why Boys Fail for more on the gender gap.) Young women have reached parity or superiority in law, medicine, accounting, business, and undergraduate math degrees. (Many math majors go on to teach math, so the fact that women make up 48 percent of enrollment isn’t all that surprising.)
Males hold the lead in only a few disciplines: engineering, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
Larry Summers was forced to resign in 2006 as president of Harvard after speculating that differences in high-level math ability might account for women earning fewer doctorates in math, engineering, physics, and chemistry.
Pushed by Congress, several federal agencies are investigating whether universities that receive science grants are discriminating against women in the labs. (See John Tierney in the New York Times on “title nining” science.)
As a former member of the mainstream media, I can tell you that most reporters — male, female, and confused — found math classes to be tough. But nearly all hailed the study as proof of the downfall of another stereotype: Girls are just as good at math!
Nearly all took occasion to sneer at Summers and suggest that nothing but discrimination is keeping women out of physics and engineering labs.
Nearly all — except for the Wall Street Journal and Heather Mac Donald at City Journal — seem to have read the press release but not the full report.
To start with, researchers had trouble measuring advanced math ability because so many state tests asked few questions requiring complex problem-solving skills; 10 states had no complex questions.
Using other assessments, the researchers determined that boys are more likely to score at the very high and the very low end of the scale, while girls’ scores cluster in the middle.
White boys are twice as likely as white girls to score above the 99th percentile, they found Asian girls are more likely to excel than Asian boys. (Very few black and Hispanic students scored above the 95th percentile.) Since most students are white, most high scorers with the ability to excel in math-heavy disciplines are male.
Looking at math ability alone, about one third of engineering Ph.D. candidates should be female, the researchers wrote. The fact that it’s only 15 percent suggests that old stereotypes have held women back, they believe.
That spin, reflected in the press release, became the story.
On the blog Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok did the reading. He observes that Larry Summers, in his ill-fated speech, was talking about the very, very talented. Summers said, “If one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. … But it’s talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.”
Tabarrok also did the math, estimating that a top-25 math or physics department would be only 25 percent female, if math ability is the only issue.
Of course it’s not. Women might reject academic careers due to discrimination or the lingering effects of old stereotypes. But there’s also evidence that women who are good at math are less likely to choose engineering, physics, etc. Math-smart women are more likely than math-smart men to have good verbal and social skills. They have more choices. Which is good.
When I think of math girls, I see my niece solving toothpick math puzzles set by our waitress on our Alaska cruise. After acing BC Calculus in high school, Lee was allowed to take upper-division math classes in her first year in college. She plans to major in “cognitive science,” which I think is math, computer science, and psychology. Will she be a professor? Design interfaces for some high-tech company? I don’t even know what her choices will be, but I know she’ll have choices because she can do math. It’s a brave new world.
Joanne Jacobs is the author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds. She blogs on education at JoanneJacobs.com.
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28 Comments
1. Girls and Math: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby:[...] Pajamas Media Copyright © business loan sc_project=3641399; sc_invisible=1; [...]
Aug 7, 2008 - 8:57 am 2. A Stoner:I guess the recent study that shows that women and math are on a steep bell curve while men and math are on a shallow bell curve must have been missed by you. Women still are not on PAR with men when it comes to the very highest levels of math. While 1 in a million women might make it to the very top, and 1 in a million women might not have any ability at all in math. 10 in a million men might make it to that spot.
Of course, when you are bad at math, you necessarily start to truncate decimal points. So, now that women can compete on a scale of 1 to 100 and reach the 99% rating as often as men can, it eludes you that when that 99 turn into 99.999% that there are 10 times as many men and when it reaches 99.999 there are 100 times as many men as women in these catagories.
It also could be argued, and has been, that this is not s zero sum game. Women have basically made this progress at the expense of the men, because education has shifted so far into the whats best for women, that male students are left behind.
I am glad that women are doing better. I am upset though that in order to get women to be equals to men, that men have to be brought down instead of women brought up to.
Aug 7, 2008 - 9:17 am 3. A Stoner:I’m a retard, I see that you did have the bell curve information in your post.
Sorry for missing that part.
The part about how education has shifted far too much into favor of women is still my argument.
Aug 7, 2008 - 10:27 am 4. MarkD:I am far more concerned that the average ability of all HS educated Americans to actually understand math has declined, in both absolute terms and relative to other countries.
If you don’t understand elementry algebra and basic statistics, you are a victim, not a citizen. You get taken on loans and credit cards. You fall for political promises that make no sense. You accept mindless pronouncements about complex subjects like global warming as if they were facts.
Aug 7, 2008 - 10:32 am 5. Science is hard at Joanne Jacobs:[...] By the way, I have a column up on Pajamas Media on girls and math. [...]
Aug 7, 2008 - 11:11 am 6. John Samford:I doesn’t matter. You cannot erase half a million years of evolution with a generation or two of Title 9. In the 23rd century , you will still hear the expression “You throw like a girl!”
Aug 7, 2008 - 11:35 am 7. Zinaida:And there will still be no Females in the worlds top 50 Chess Masters.
You can’t fool mother nature and it requires a special brand of stooooooooooopid to even try.
WTF? Why do you oppose Islam again?
LOL–you sound like the Mullahs on You Tube who say Allah made women inferior and they are only worth half of what men are worth!!!
Has it occurred to you that maybe women have Always been good at math but that gender sexist constructs such as ones I’m reading here have put up barriers?
But alas, ugh ugh, lets just keep perpetuating the cave man mentality and the clubbing the woman and throwing her back into the cave,
I can hear the knuckles scraping the ground from here!
LOL keep writing–its So amusing, seriously, I can’t figure who is American and who is Islamist, and of course,
if you can’t understand elementary algebra and statistics [which can be manipulated btw] you might fall for fallacy–but of course,
those of you who Can understand, but can’t think with that ‘other side of your brain’ seem to fail to realize those fuzzy math equations via statistics and economics,
prop up the very systems you’re fighting.
But hey–thats not logical thinking, what do women know????
Other than measuring cups and spoons and dress size LOL.
[she scampers back off in her cave before her male master finds her ugh ugh]
Aug 7, 2008 - 1:10 pm 8. HeatherRadish:“And there will still be no Females in the worlds top 50 Chess Masters.”
I see John Samford doesn’t understand math, science, or statistics, either. Just because there are *fewer* women with very high abilities doesn’t mean there are–and forever will be–*zero* women with very high abilities. It is possible there could be a woman with the ability and the desire to become a chess master–why is it so important to you that she be told that she shouldn’t, just because most women can’t or don’t want to??
Aug 7, 2008 - 3:14 pm 9. DrawMaster:FYI, currently Judit Polgar is ranked #22 among top chess grandmasters. She’s consistently been ranked in the Top 50 for over a decade. True, she’s the only woman in that elite group, but it’s been done already – for the record.
Aug 7, 2008 - 4:58 pm 10. Radtop:The only reason girls can now compete with boys in math is the mediocratization of our school system. The fact is that the “new math” is intuitive based which favors girls rather than analytical that favors boys. They really should be taught differently. the proof of this is the one statistic not covered in the article and that is the poor showing we now have compared to other countries.
Aug 7, 2008 - 6:04 pm 11. no name:My wife and I are both professional mathematicians. We had independently the same reaction to this report: the “researchers” are most likely ideologues, and they are using data based on mid-level tests, which do not test for high mathematical ability. Mathematicians tend to assess eachother in terms of “strength”, and these judgments are surprisingly repeatable from observer to observer. These assessments are NOT made on the basis of accuracy on routine problems, which is almost certainly the kind of problem found in the test used by these “researchers”. On the contrary, we’re interested in performance on the very hardest questions. In our experience, males heavily outnumber females on these questions. The study claims
“Looking at math ability alone, about one third of engineering Ph.D. candidates should be female, the researchers wrote. The fact that it’s only 15 percent suggests that old stereotypes have held women back, they believe.”
But assessment of math ability on the basis of accuracy performing routine problems is a very poor indicator of the math ability required in the professions in question.
Here’s a personal example, but one which I think is typical. Our son (now a star in a math PhD program) was an indifferent student in early math classes ( JHS math, HS algebra & geometry etc) and didn’t start to do well until the problems got really hard. At that point they got his interest, and his talent began to outweigh his carelessness and (mild) hyperactivity. By the end of HS he was typically the only kid in his class to actually ace the hardest problems on tests, but still got middling grades on these tests overall because of (characteristic) careless mistakes on problems he understood.
Both of us have seen this pattern numerous times, both with students and with colleagues. consider this sentence from the article:
“Males hold the lead in only a few disciplines: engineering, physics, chemistry, and computer science.”
What these disciplines have in common is they are heavily math loaded. (also some parts of economics). To a fair minded observer, this pattern is more persuasive then the crummy data used in this study. There’s no reason why math or physics departments would be more “sexist” than biology or psychology
Aug 7, 2008 - 8:23 pm 12. John Moore:My mother was a mathematician and an engineer. My daughter taught herself calculus while in the 6th grade and is now a neuroscientist. And my daughter agrees with “no name.” That shape of that curve really matters, and Summers was persecuted for telling the truth – probably by people who have no clue what “standard deviation” means.
Actually, given modern ecuational trends, many who hear it probably think it’s a sexual term
Aug 7, 2008 - 11:45 pm 13. John Moore:Oh, one other comment…
I’m a computer scientist. I do not find most of the work in that field to be math loaded, although the academic work often is (which I think reflects a bias in approach rather than the nature of the field). Most applied computer science is more akin to language processing than mathematics, so I’m surprised there aren’t more females in the field. I suspect social issues rather than ability, and an inappropriate emphasis on math in the college curricula may be the reason.
Aug 7, 2008 - 11:48 pm 14. NB:I took both the SAT and ACT. Got a perfect score on the ACT and didn’t do so hot on the SAT. The fact that ACT scores were used here doesn’t mean a thing to me, as my experience was that the ACT was significantly easier math-wise at least.
Plus, I thought it was common knowledge that testing has been “adjusted” in the name of gender/racial bias in such a way that the the expectation wasn’t as high. It’s the same thing that’s happened in the military. Women couldn’t meet the intense physical requirements (sorry girls no offense meant but you aren’t generally as big or strong) so the requirements were lowered. Of course you’ll have a group catching up when the bar is being lowered.
I’m not saying that women can’t do math just as well as men, just like I wouldn’t agree that men can’t be as successful in literature or social science fields. My point is, the validity of this study is suspect.
Aug 8, 2008 - 2:09 am 15. John Samford:“Most applied computer science is more akin to language processing than mathematics,”
Mathematics IS a language. It is the language of the physical world. A computer scientist? How many hours did you spend in the lab yesterday? You might have an advanced degree in CompSci, but that DOES NOT make you a computer scientist.
A scientist is someone who does research. Having an advanced degree just means you have an advanced degree. If you have a PhD. in Nuclear Physics and work for the Government inspecting Reactors, you are NOT a scientist. You are a bureaucrat. If you head that team, you are an Administrator not a Scientist. If you used your PhD to get a teaching position at Slick Thigh U., you are an educator. NOT a scientist.
“Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”
Aug 8, 2008 - 2:34 am 16. Lisa:Henri Poincare
French mathematician & physicist (1854 – 1912)
I have an engineering degree but never practiced; went into teaching and I am much happier.
I suspect that there aren’t as many women in the upper levels of engineering, physics and computers is simply that there are other things we want to be doing. I got tired of dealing with a bunch of socially incompetent men who were more interested in the latest computer toy than current events.
I suspect that these numbers will change. We are seeing more parity in the numbers of girls and boys taking advanced math and physics. As more women go into the field, more women will be comfortable staying in the field.
But I don’t see how this is at the expense of boys; most schools are adding a second section of the advanced classes or squishing kids into them rather than just cutting out boys.
Aug 8, 2008 - 6:06 am 17. cwm:When will title 9 address the concerns of males. With undergraduate degrees approaching a 60/40 ratio in favor of girls when will there be a push to put more boys in college. How many scholarships do you know of that are for boys only, how many for girls only. That ratio is about 80% for girls and 20% for boys. If a school is graduating females to males at a 60/40 ratio than there sould be an immediate budget cut of 20% of federal funding for female programs. When I was studying to be an accountant and later a CPA there was crisis in the field because more men were becoming CPAs than women. To address this no scholarships were given to men in the state of South Carolina for 3 years. To make the exam easier they allowed calculators to be used because the girls have a harder time at math. Then the exam went from 5 sections to 4. Everything focused on increasing the number of females. Now we have CPAs being certified at a ratio of roughly 65% female to 35% male. Guess what the scholarships are at the same ratio because now they want to match scholarships to percentages of genders entering the profession.
Aug 8, 2008 - 6:36 am 18. Bhanu Prasad:–I got tired of dealing with a bunch of socially incompetent men who were more interested in the latest computer toy than current events.—-
Sorry, this is plain old argument championed by feminism’s apologists and their male lap dogs.And these researchers(mentioned in the article) fit into that mould effortlessly.
Lot of fields were male dominated 40 years back. Most of them have accommodated women. Even the business world, which was considered “manly”, has succesfully accommodated women.
The main reason is the inherent biology of the females. They are less likely to derive pleasure from supposedly “dull” and “dry” aspects of logic and reason.
Classic example is the field I work in, Software. Legions of women enter the field as programmers, dream of being software architects, only to find it unappealing and move on to people management.
People(men and Women both) in math and science have better things to excercise their brain on than “socializing” around with opposite sex by pointless and dumb chatter.
If you want a profession, where you can readily socialize, I advice you to look away from a career in math.
Aug 8, 2008 - 6:58 am 19. Suzee Q:Please folks. Nothing stirs up more controversy than gender. Mines bigger or better than yours… Or my gender is the more put upon.
Blah blah blah. Boring. I say Viva la difference!
Aug 8, 2008 - 7:34 am 20. Kevin:I don’t think anyone ever doubted that girls could do the simple arithmetic and algebra that appear on the ACT and SAT — levels of math that are taught by 8th or 9th grade. Or that they could handle high school-level trig and precalculus; or even major in math in college.
The word “computer” after all once referred to young female mathematicians doing donkey work. If the “gap” among teenagers is disappearing it’s probably a mix of massive encouragement for young women, better test preparation available for those motivated to take advantage, and the feminization of schooling that further alienates and de-motivates young men.
But as No Name touches on above, the real sex difference is that (so far) men have been the ones most interested when it gets hard, and emphatically masters of the abstract boundaries of math and physics. One can hardly stress the historical dominance here — 100% male among leading edge intellects is scarcely an exaggeration. That far exceeds the male dominance seen in fields that are male-dominant merely by social convention — rulers, soldiers, pilots, etc. History has its Elizabeths and Joans of Arc and Amelia Earhearts and female pirates, but ALMOST zero great female mathematicians and physicists (count em on one hand. A hand with two or three fingers missing.)
Hence the next group of Fields Medal winners will all be men. The next winners of the Nobel prizes in Physic and Economics will be men. Not 95% men. 100% men. Now maybe when that begins to change, we’ll know women are making some intellectual progress and closing a real gap that’s not just a current social habit.
Finally, I’m not sure what mere majority of numbers even really means. Young men are attracted to a wide range of outdoor, physical, hazardous, and mechanical jobs that pay a high school grad better than many of your women PhDs. Men are virtually the only ones to do these necessary jobs, leaving a vacancy among the social scientists and marketing professionals of the world that someone has to fill. If not women, who else does these jobs? Robots?
Aug 8, 2008 - 1:08 pm 21. Night Owl:It seems possible that tests are being dumbed-down to get girls numbers up. If true, it should be strongly criticized and stopped. But it seems equally likely to me that todays girls are not as math phobic as previous generations, and are sticking with it long enough to achieve.
Whether they decide to continue on with math and science as a career is another issue. As many other people have said, it’s about choices. Many women apparently do not find high level math interesting. Nothing wrong with that, as long as women admit it and stop crying sexism when they are under represented.
On the other hand, there will always be some small number of women who, despite prevailing stereotypes, enjoy math and can compete equally with men. I hope we all agree that they should not be judged by the performance of other women, but on their own merits and faults. And again I emphasize that I don’t approve of lowering standards. That ultimately helps no one.
BTW I agree Suzee Q- We should appreciate and respect our differences. Men and women as groups and as individuals, are all different in how we think, our motivations, drive and desires. And I think the differences are for the betterment of society. Consider testosterone w/o compromise, and vice/versa. I don’t see either as a recipe for an optimum society (or an optimum person, for that matter). Sparta or the bee-hive. Shudder!
Aug 8, 2008 - 1:10 pm 22. Night Owl:Let’s be realistic:
The percentage of people, male or female capable of winning noble prizes in any field, is small to begin with. Very few people are that talented. Since most woman for centuries were discouraged or barred from higher education, their lack of achievement in fields accessible only to the brightest and most highly educated members of society, should not really be surprising.
To assume that the negative effect of past inequalities means women will always be intellectually incapable of success in those fields, is illogical, imo. The fact that any women were able to excel in those fields, in spite of the roadblocks, proves that there are superior women up to the challenges of hard sciences and math.
Aug 8, 2008 - 4:10 pm 23. david levavi:So much blather, so few facts. I would wager that most mathematicians aren’t nearly so hot and bothered by the subject of women in math as some of those commenting here.
I have friends and relatives who are mathematicians and computer scientists, most of them academics. Most, if not all, are pretty laid back. Mathematicians seem to do a lot of traveling and conferencing and communicating with other mathematicians. I may be naive, but my impression is that math research is a friendly and social pursuit, partly perhaps because mathematicians share a language others don’t understand.
My middle daughter is a discrete mathematician and she has become accustomed to being a minority, often of one, in her classes. She’s an attractive young woman and she hasn’t suffered. She’s had two papers published in respectable math journals as an undergraduate and she’s too busy with her research to bother about gender statistics best left to journalists and professionals in the soft sciences to ponder.
Aug 8, 2008 - 6:09 pm 24. Dormative Principle:re I got tired of dealing with a bunch of socially incompetent men who were more interested in the latest computer toy than current events.
Don’t know about the socially incompetent jibe, but them being more interested… is not an explanation, it is identical to the statement of the issue, they are interested in the field and you are not.
Aug 9, 2008 - 9:57 am 25. digidude:my experience as an applied math major in college 20 years ago and the father of a junior in high school and professional tutor is that the overall math competency of students had declined to the point that there is less statistical evidence of a sexual bias. IE the boys are failing as badly as the girls so they are approaching equality. the spin is that girls are improving while the reality is that boys are simply falling faster as they had further to fall.
Aug 9, 2008 - 7:04 pm 26. Mike:Shouldn’t Pajamas Media be resisting collectivism?
Aug 9, 2008 - 8:10 pm 27. John Blake:My daughter just graduated with a BS Degree in Biochemistry. Her freshman biochem class totaled thirty students, sixteen of them girls. By Junior year, she was the only female left majoring in biochem.
When I asked why, she said, “They [the female students] realized they could get a perfectly good degree without doing that much work.” “Then why are you still there?” I asked. “Because I really like biochemistry,” said she.
Title IX, hogwash. Female parity on math tests represents dumbed-down curricula, which most will abandon post-haste. Group identity has no bearing in such stringent disciplines: You do the work for love, or not at all. The premise that creative work is an equal-opportunity affair is a ludicrous misapprehension. Just ask my beloved daughter.
Aug 9, 2008 - 8:15 pm 28. intheblusea:In reading these commonts, Obviously men have a better perspective (on this issue) then the ladies.
I agree with Suzee:Q- “viva la difference.”
Joanne;
Aug 11, 2008 - 5:09 pmFor boys, the Ed. system & it’s management contains toxic. What radical feminist institution actually cares for or care to understand boys? Their goal is to oppress them-dumb down.
Your article is misleading. It belongs with MSM.
You should know better.