Math Brains Come in Both Genders
Hi Friends of Women in Science,
As Ilona Miko commented in the forum post on Debunking brain differences earlier, there is a strong new study by Jonathan Kane and Janet Mertz, professors at different campuses of University of Wisconsin, on the alleged differences in male and female mathematics abilities.
One of the things the authors tested was the scatter by gender. You may recall that was what Larry Summers cited as a reason for low numbers of successful full professor women compared to men at Harvard. The higher variability in math scores for men meant to Summers that the most creative mathematical population should be richer in men, with no social-cultural influences needed to explain the discrepancy. Well, if it's a function of XX versus XY chromosomes, it should not vary from country to country. However the authors of the new study found it did just that. In some countries, the variability is equal for both genders. In at least one, the women's scores had higher variability than the men's. A factor that explained a lot of poor showings was poverty, another was value the culture placed on education.
I'd encourage you to download the pdf for this study and read through it. The evidence is very convincing in my opinion.
cheers,
Laura
It's good that we see information about other countries sometimes. A lot on this forum is just related to USA, and I know that is important, but so is what women in science experience in the rest of the world. So good to see that women can be out in the "tail" of a math distribution! I'm very tired of hearing about that from men in the USA.
Hi Laura,
I thought your article a while back for AWIS Magazine about Diane Halpern, the woman who was president of the Psychological Association and who was speaking the day Summers made his remark, was on the mark. It suggested to me that he came, he refused to listen, and therefore he assumed no one had any data about what was wrong (no one male, perhaps, had any data?) So it's gratifying but not surprising to see the results of this study.
CLR
