Girls Close the "Math Gap"

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise at 9:38 AM on July 28, 2008.

Fifteen years ago, girls trailed boys by 50 points on SAT math scores. Today, the gap is gone:

But a new study, published in this week's edition of the journal Science, shows the gap has disappeared. Researchers looked at standardized test scores of more than 7 million students, ranging from the second grade to high school junior. Whatever gender differences there once existed between girls and boys in terms of math performance are gone.

"The differences are now trivial," said Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, who led the research. [ABC]

The news is that analysis of 7 million test scores by researchers at UC-Berkeley and the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison found dramatic trends in recent decades. In the 70s, boys were ahead at all grade levels. By the 80s the girls kept even well into grade school. Now they're essentially tied, statistically, all the way through adolescence. One doesn't see many women's names in the roll of winners of the Fields Medal (sometimes called the Nobel of math) -- no obviously female names at all in a quick search just now. Maybe that's next. Unclear is how much of the gap's disappearance is due to boys scoring lower and to girls scoring higher. One difference remained. More boys are in the top one percent - but girls still make up one third of these elite scorers.

Tagged as: math scores

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.