The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Are Boys Really Better at Math than Girls?

So over at Ars Technica there's a link to a really interesting study that came out the other week in Science. It suggests that the much-discussed "math gap" between boys and girls in American may stem more from social factors than from biology. The study looked at more than 275,000 students in 40 countries who took a particular exam. As the Ars Technica summary puts it:

Girls scored about 2 percent lower than boys on math on average, but nearly 7 percent higher on reading, consistent with previous test results.

The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn't consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females. countries such as Norway and Sweden score very high on gender equality measures; in these nations, the gender gap on math performance is extremely small.

So what do you make of that, Lawrence Summers? Now, to be fair, the study may not have tested for variance—I haven't read through it fully—which would mean that the gap between boys and girls in performance may still be larger at the ends of the bell curve. But the findings still are remarkable.

If you click on the study, too, you'll note an irony: It suggests that while the math gap correlates to gaps in social equality, boys' lagging reading skills don't. Of course, as the summarizer at Ars Technica puts it, that doesn't mean some other social factor isn't at work. I'm sure one is—or even many.