Are Boys “Naturally” Better at Math and Science?
In this punchy Newsweek column, Sharon Begley attacks the widespread notion that girls are less able in science and math. “If I ever hear the word ‘hard-wired’ used to describe anything other than an electrical system – the human brain, for instance – I’m going to scream,” she writes. “…[T]he dogma of the hard-wired brain has endured for an inexcusably long time given the evidence against it.” Begley cites two research findings:
- We know that the left side of the brain’s motor cortex controls the right side of the body and the right side controls the body’s left side, but when stroke victims receive therapy, they can use the left motor cortex to control the left side of the body, or vice-versa.
- When people are blindfolded for a week and receive intense tactile stimulation (including feeling Braille dots), their visual cortex switches from processing stimuli from the eyes to processing stimuli from the fingertips. This also happens in the brains of people who are blind from birth.
“If not even a structure as fundamental as the visual cortex is hard-wired,” says Begley, “can we please retire the claim that boy brains are hard-wired for math and girl brains are not?”
So what accounts for the small number of U.S. women earning doctorates in math (29 percent), holding tenure-track appointments in university math departments (19 percent), and winning the Fields Medal, the math “Nobel” (zero percent)? It’s cultural, says Begley. In countries that send a different message – that you can get good at science and math by hard work – females do far better. In the International Mathematical Olympiad, a grueling nine-hour competition, the Bulgarian, German, and Russian teams have historically had strong female representation, while the U.S. team had no girls for 23 straight years. “Whether mathematical ability is identified depends on social, cultural and other environmental factors,” says Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin. Nurturing and support also matter; high-achieving girls got extracurricular support and practiced their math problem-solving strategies in their free time. “Countries whose girls lag behind boys tend to see math as for nerds only, which drives away many U.S. girls (who are more sensitive to social status than boys),” says Begley.
Perhaps the most telling evidence is the stark difference between the composition of Math Olympiad teams from two pairs of countries that share a common gene pool. The former East Germany sent 18 girls to the Math Olympiad, while the former West Germany sent none; Slovakia sent 22, while the Czech Republic sent 10. “It’s hard to see that as anything but the result of the starkly different social and other environmental forces in each country,” says Begley.
As cultural beliefs have gradually shifted, there has been marked progress in the U.S. In 1983, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth found a 13-to-1 boy/girl ratio of children under 13 scoring 700 or higher on the math section of the SAT. In 2005, the ratio had fallen to 2.8 to 1. “Nothing in the brain that is ‘hard-wired’ can change that quickly,” says Begley.
Brain imaging studies are beginning to reveal how social and cultural messages can disable performance. In a 2007 study by Maryjane Wraga of Smith College, students were told that girls are less able at spatial intelligence just before they took a challenging test – and girls proceeded to do poorly on the part of a test that measured spatial ability. Brain scans revealed that as they took the test, girls had higher activity in their anterior cingulate (the site of negative emotions such as anger and sadness) and lower activity in the parts of the brain that handle visual and complex working memory. “Anxiety triggered by social forces had muted activity required for spatial reasoning,” says Begley. “Scale that up to years of messages telling girls they’re intrinsically inferior and then try to argue that a hard-wired brain rather than the messages society sends explains the math gender gap.”
And so I did some data digging from our most recent ISAT scores to find the real story on the question of Boys v. Girls when it comes to Math and Science here at W.J. Murphy. The results speak for themselves:
3rd Grade Math
Boys: 87.7
Girls: 72.9
4th Grade Math
Boys: 82.1
Girls: 87.2
4th Grade Science
Boys: 78.6
Girls: 89.7
5th Grade Math
Boys: 51.7
Girls: 65.2
Stay tuned for Reading results, which I will post next week. Also, check back over the weekend to the PTO link for some exciting new updates and family events coming your way!
Sincerely,
Mr. Prickett