Social Equality Means Improved Math Skills for Girls

May 31, 2008

New research appears to demonstrate that girls perform as well as boys do in mathematics when they live in societies in which men and women are socially on a more equal footing. Girls who live in Iceland, Sweden, and Norway, for example, rank at least as highly as boys do in math achievement.

"The so-called gender gap in math skills seems to be at least partially correlated to environmental factors," says Paola Sapienza of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "The gap doesn't exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities."

Sapienza and colleagues Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute and Ferdinando Monte and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago describe their findings in the paper "Culture, Gender, and Math," which appears in the May 30, 2008, issue of Science.

The researchers reviewed the results of the same math test taken by 276,000 children in 40 countries. They examined a range of social factors that could account for differences in the results from country to country and took a measure of how well women are integrated into each society.

Girls in the United States, on average, scored lower than boys, doing no better than average among the countries in the study. In other countries, such as Sweden, girls even outpaced boys. In general, average girls' scores improved as equality improved, and the number of girls reaching the highest levels of performance also increased.

It all indicates, Sapienza says, "that in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys."

Source: Science, May 30, 2008; Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, May 29, 2008.