When a stubborn, presumed feminist does research! According to her Google Scholar profile, she is highly cited at 81,796.
What about subjects that girls are better in than boys? This is obviously biased research!
It is not so much a question of birth or who is bad at math, but of developing interests or specialization in subjects after birth. Perhaps, females show less interest in math than males as they grow up and later in life.
Generally speaking, there is nothing wrong if females and males pick different subjects of interest during their lifetime.
What about the influence how math is taught in school. From my own experience (from several decades ago) the pedagogy of math teaching in school sucked!
"Twenty years ago, cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke took a strong position in an ongoing public debate.
“There are no differences in overall intrinsic aptitude for science and mathematics among women and men,” the researcher declared. ...
A French government testing initiative launched in 2018 provided data on the math skills of more than 2.5 million schoolchildren over five years. Analyses showed virtually no gender differences at the start of first grade, when students begin formal math education. However, a gap favoring boys opened after just four months — and kept growing through higher grades. ..."
From the abstract:
"Preventing gender disparities in mathematics is a worldwide preoccupation. In infancy and early childhood, boys and girls exhibit similar core knowledge of number and space. Gender disparities in maths are, therefore, thought to primarily reflect an internalization of the sociocultural stereotype that ‘girls are bad at maths’. However, where, when and how widely this stereotype becomes entrenched remains uncertain.
Here, we report the results of a 4-year longitudinal assessment of language and mathematical performance of all French first and second graders (2,653,082 children). Boys and girls exhibited very similar maths scores upon school entry, but a gender gap in favour of boys became highly significant after 4 months of schooling and reached an effect size of about 0.20 after 1 year.
These findings were repeated each year and varied only slightly across family, class or school type and socio-economic level. Although schooling correlated with age, exploiting the near-orthogonal variations indicated that the gender gap increased with schooling rather than with age. These findings point to the first year of school as the time and place where a maths gender gap emerges in favour of boys, thus helping focus the search for solutions and interventions."
Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade
Elizabeth Spelke. This is her official photo (very blurry) or it represents a confused mind.
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