BUSTING THE MYTH ABOUT WOMEN AND MATH

Notices of the American Mathematical Society - One commonly held belief to explain the extreme scarcity of females who excel at the highest level in mathematics is that women simply lack sufficient aptitude for the field. The data presented here neither prove nor disprove whether the frequency of occurrence of people with profound intrinsic aptitude for mathematics differs between women and men. What they do indicate, however, is that this scarcity is due, in significant part, to changeable factors that vary with time, country, and ethnic group. First and foremost, some countries identify and nurture females with very high ability in mathematics at a much higher frequency than do others. . . A strong correlation also exists between the magnitude of measured gender difference in mathematics performance by eighth and tenth graders in a country and other measures of gender stratification such as participation in the labor force and politics.

Second, girls perform as well if not better than boys in mathematics throughout elementary school; it is during the middle school years, an age when children begin to feel pressure to conform to peer and societal expectations, that they start to lose interest and fall behind in most, but not all countries.

In some of the most gender-equal cultures, a gender gap is not observed in mathematics among fifteen-year-old students on the Program for International Student Assessment, not only with respect to median score, but also in the ratio of girls to boys performing above the ninety-fifth and ninety-ninth percentiles.

Third, Asian girls and white girls who are immigrants from Eastern Europe are well represented among the very top students identified in the extremely difficult mathematics competitions; it is only USA-born white and historically underrepresented minority girls who are underrepresented, underrepresented by almost two orders-of magnitude relative to Asian girls educated in the same school systems.

Fourth, the scarcity of females is much less pronounced in the sciences and engineering, fields that depend upon a solid understanding of mathematics. Their percentages in these . . . fields have been steadily increasing post-Title IX. . .

In summary, some Eastern European and Asian countries frequently produce girls with profound ability in mathematical problem solving; most other countries, including the USA, do not. Children, including girls, of immigrants to the USA and Canada from some of the countries that excel in the IMO are overrepresented among students identified as profoundly gifted in mathematics; USA-born girls from all other ethnic/racial backgrounds, including white, are very highly underrepresented.