Narro Math?

I never thought about math much until I found out, some where around 12 or so, that girls weren’t supposed to be good at it.  Ever the tomboy,  I just had to prove them wrong and I’ve frequently been the only woman (and definitely the only American woman) in advanced math classes at university.  Both my daughters excel at math.  However, the old stereotype has been out there for my mother and grandmothers as well as my daughters and me.  Ask current Obama economic adviser Larry Summers who stirred up women scientists every where with this gem during his tenure as Harvard’s president.

This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same ”innate ability” or ”natural ability” as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, ”It’s possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That’s what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied.”

Summers said cutting-edge research has shown that genetics are more important than previously thought, compared with environment or upbringing. As an example, he mentioned autism, once believed to be a result of parenting but now widely seen to have a genetic basis.

In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ”daddy truck,” and one ”baby truck.”

It was during his comments on ability that Hopkins, sitting only 10 feet from Summers, closed her computer, put on her coat, and walked out. ”It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way,” she said later in an interview.

More and more evidence demonstrates just the opposite of the stereotype.  Girls can and do kick ass at math.  It’s not that they lack they aptitude, they lack they opportunity and environment to do so.  Science Daily reports that study after study now show that it’s  Culture, Not Biology, Underpins Math Gender Gap.  Both Riverdaughter and I live the nightmare that comes with being woman practitioners of a field that requires heavy math.  She is a research chemist doing work on drugs.  I am an economist who relies heavily on econometrics and models that borrow heavy from physics models.  One of my colleagues, another woman economist from Finland who absolutely kicks ass when it comes to high level mathematical models on trade, has similar stories.  One friend I’ve had the longest has taught university level math for nearly 30 years now. At various times,  I’ve had to adopt some kind of charade to make my numeracy less threatening to colleagues, bosses, and institutions. It adds a completely different dimension to how you do your work.  You can do it, you can kick ass at it, but you have to make sure that you’re deferential enough not to make the boys pee their pants and vote you off their islands.  It’s a strange, demented and twisted kabuki dance.

We know it’s not the innate ability. It’s the damned old geek boys club and stupid sayings like “boys don’t make passes at girls that wear glasses!”. Larry Summers and his 2005 comments just absolutely epitomize it.

Now, however, in an analysis of contemporary data published June 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that the primary cause for the gender disparity in math performance at all levels is culture, not biology.

“It’s not an innate difference in math ability between males and females,” says Janet Mertz, a UW-Madison professor of oncology and one of the authors of the article that analyzes and summarizes recent data on math performance at all levels in the United States and internationally. “There are countries where the gender disparity in math performance doesn’t exist at either the average or gifted level. These tend to be the same countries that have the greatest gender equality.”

Discover puts some of the meaning of these findings in clear perspective as they borrow from both Newsweek and LiveScience.

They found that countries with poor gender equality, like India, had a larger gender gap in math, while in countries with excellent gender equality, like the Netherlands, girls performed as well as boys. If males really did have an innate advantage in math, the researchers note, that advantage should be obvious throughout all these cultures. Instead, the study suggests that cultural issues are the basis of the math gender gap.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also tackled a more subtle stereotype: Even if girls and boys perform equally well in math on average, is it true that more math geniuses are male? That was the idea expressed by then-Harvard president Larry Summers in 2005 when he raised an uproar by talking about males’ “intrinsic aptitude” for math. The researchers looked for evidence of such an imbalance, but found that in countries with the greatest gender equality, as many girls as boys scored above the 99th percentile–and in a few countries, there were more girls in that elite rank than boys. The “scarcity of top-scoring females in many, but not all countries .. . must be largely due to changeable sociocultural factors,” the scientists write, “not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes.” If the differences were innate, they should show up in every culture [Newsweek].

To erase the last remnants of the math gender gap, the researchers say that adults should tell all girls that they can excel at math, and should nurture girls who are especially gifted in the subject. Says Hyde: “There’s a gender stereotype that boys are better at math than girls are, and stereotypes die very hard…. Teachers and parents still believe that boys are better at math than girls are” [LiveScience].

Again, as the mother of a two daughters (the oldest having just graduated from med school and the youngest working on a degree in finance which is highly mathematical these days) and as some one whose career is math-dependent, I would just hope that more people drop the girls can’t do math meme.  The authors were quick to point out how hard it has been to overcome this stereotype in the United States.

“For example, only 14 percent of the U.S. doctoral degrees in the biological sciences went to women in 1970, whereas this figure had risen to 49 percent by 2006,” they wrote.

“The percentages in mathematics and statistics were 8 percent in 1970 and 32 percent in 2006.”

About a year ago (07/25/2008), the journal Science found that girls now score on par with their male peers on second- to 11th-grade math tests. However, the perception that boys do better in math tends lingers on. This actively discourages some girls from tackling math-heavy careers in science and technology.

Probably some of the most damning evidence of sexism comes from the current study, however, which uses a gender equality index as one of the explanatory variables.  Here are the results.

“We conclude that gender inequality, not lack of innate ability or ‘intrinsic aptitude’, is the primary reason fewer females than males are identified as excelling in mathematics performance in most countries, including the United States,” Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison wrote in their report.

They did a statistical analysis comparing various math scores and contests with the World Economic Forum’s 2007 Gender Gap Index. This annual report ranks countries according to employment and economic opportunities, education and political opportunities and medical status.

The United States ranks 31 out of 128 nations on the World Economic Forum index.

“We asked questions about how well females relative to males are doing at the average level, at the high-end level — 95th percentile or above — and the profoundly gifted level, the one-in-a-million type level,” Mertz said in a telephone interview.

“Countries with greater gender equity are also the ones where the ratio of girls to boys doing well in math is close to equal,” she said.

Both the index rating of this country as well as their results raise serious questions for parents of girls.  If we truly want unlimited opportunity for our children, then we damn well better make sure that our local school systems recognize the research and work to overcome the stereotypes.  In a future were science and technology will be increasingly important, we can not afford to leave over half of the population behind.