How It Works (from the fabulous xkcd)
First, let me explain the title reference. As most of you know, I am a chemist. As a chemist I am a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS is one of the best professional organizations in my opinion because of the data that it collects and analyzes for its members. One of the often-analyzed issues is what they call the “leaky pipeline,” which refers to the loss of women at each level of chemistry. Women now get more than 50% of chemistry B.S. degrees and 30% of Ph.D.s but are only 11% of chemistry professors at the top 50 universities.
Anyway, articles on the leaky pipeline appear on a regular basis in the society’s magazine Chemical & Engineering News. Someone must have brought one of the articles to Phyllis Schlafly’s attention because a few weeks after the story appeared, a letter from her appeared in the Letters to the Editor section (sorry no link, it’s several years old and subscriber only). In the letter she wrote her usual tripe about a women’s place but she brought out the big guns – data! She stated that since neither of her daughters were interested in science, that is proof that women aren’t good at science. (I don’t think any of her sons are scientists either, but don’t let that get in the way.)
A new study by Professors Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz (blogged here) at the University of Wisconsin (go Badgers!) strongly suggest that the gender gap is due to social factors, as many people have long suspected.
The duo of Janets have published a review that tackles the issue from three different angles. They considered the presence of outstanding female mathematicians. Looking beyond individuals, they found that gender differences in maths performance don’t really exist in the general population, with girls now performing as well as boys in standardised tests. Among the mathematically talented, a gender gap is more apparent but it is closing fast in many countries and non-existent in others. And tellingly, the size of the gap strongly depends on how equally the two sexes are treated.
Hyde and Mertz used a wide range of data sources, including the standardised maths tests that all US children must sit as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act. Last year, Hyde reviewed data from 7 million children across 10 states and found that neither gender had the edge in performance, regardless of ethnicity or grade, even in schools which had seen disparities in past decades. The duo also looked at data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a programme that tests a random sample of students every year, and found that male and female 12th-graders had only “trivial differences” in terms of complex problem-solving.
The alternate hypothesis was about greater variability in intellect between men and women. In IQ tests, boys were much more likely to be in the top 1% and the lowest 1% even though the mean between the two genders was the same. This is the “men are more likely to be geniuses” argument, AKA the Larry Summers argument. The study addresses this as well.
To test that, Hyde looked at data from maths tests in Minnesota and compared the numbers of boys and girls who scored in the top 5% of their year. The ratio was 1.45, meaning that for every two girls in this elite group, there were around three boys. In the top 1%, the ratio was 2.06, meaning two boys for every girl. That seems to vindicate the Variability Hypothesis, but those figures only applied to white American children. In other ethnic groups or, indeed, in other countries, the picture was very different.
For Asian-Americans the ratio was actually 0.91, meaning more girls than boys in the top 1%. International studies have found similar trends. One analysis of tests from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that 15-year-old girls matched or outnumbered their male peers in the top tiers within Iceland, Thailand and the UK. Two studies found that 15-year-old boys and girls were equally varied in their mathematical skills in most of the countries taking part in PISA and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). In some, like the Netherlands, girls actually turned out to have the wider range of ability.
You can suck it, too, Larry Summers.
*h/t Jason, for the post title idea