Three years ago, Lawrence Summers speculated publicly that biological differences between the sexes were the primary reason for the low numbers of women at the highest levels in science and engineering. The ensuing fury led to his resignation as president of Harvard – and to renewed interest in the science of gender differences. Girls have, on average, consistently scored lower than boys on many test of mathematics, for example the math SATs. But the big question that Summers’ remarks highlighted is whether those differences are cultural or biological.
New research shows that in countries with greater gender equality, the gender gap in mathematics closes. The research doesn’t, however, argue that biological differences play no role in academic performance. In every single country, girls score substantially higher in reading than boys do. The girls also tended to do better in arithmetic than geometry in all countries.
Paola Sapienza of NorthwesternUniversity in Evanston, Ill., and her colleagues analyzed the results of a newly developed, challenging mathematics and reading test for 15-year-olds, administered in 40 countries in 2003 and designed to be free of cultural biases. On average, girls scored 2 percent lower on the math portion and 6.6 percent higher on the reading portion than boys did. The U.S. scores were close to this average, but those percentages varied widely from country to country: In Iceland, for example, girls scored more than 3 percent higher than boys on the math section, whereas in Brazil, they scored more than 4 percent lower.