Sharon Begley uses Dr. Andreescu’s recent study to make her case against a biological explanation for the fact that boys have historically out performed girls in higher math.
There is no denying that, at the elite levels of math, men vastly outnumber women. Women received 27 percent of the Ph.D.s in math awarded by American universities from 1993 to 2002, edging up to a still-woeful 29 percent last year. They make up only 19 percent of the tenure-track faculty in math departments. No woman has ever won a Fields Medal, the “math Nobel.” The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, which looks at kids younger than 13 who score 700 or above on the math part of the SAT, found a 13-to-1 boy-girl imbalance, implying what the researchers called “superior male mathematical ability.”
Now for the “however” part. That 13-to-1 ratio was true in 1983. In 2005 it fell to 2.8 to 1. Nothing in the brain that is “hard-wired” can change that quickly. Cross-cultural data on young people with off-the-scale math ability are even more telling, as researchers will report in next month’s issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
[…] paper set off a global debate in popular media including The New York Times, Reuters India, and Newsweek about the role of American culture in discouraging math achievement particularly among young […]