The XX Factor: What women really think.

How to Make Girls Succeed in Math and Science

Over on Slate, there's a really interesting piece by Ray Fisman about the importance of female mentorship. Apparently, a recent working paper from the NBER found a way to measure the effects of female vs. male teachers on students at the Air Force Academy. It can be hard to distinguish among various complicating factors when... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Do I Have to Be an Astrophysicist?

While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.

About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?

With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.

Are Boys Really Better at Math than Girls?

So over at Ars Technica there's a link to a really interesting study that came out the other week in Science. It suggests that the much-discussed "math gap" between boys and girls in American may stem more from social factors than from biology. The study looked at more than 275,000 students in 40 countries who took a particular exam. As the Ars Technica summary puts it:

Girls scored about 2 percent lower than boys on math on average, but nearly 7 percent higher on reading, consistent with previous test results.

The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn't consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females. countries such as Norway and Sweden score very high on gender equality measures; in these nations, the gender gap on math performance is extremely small.

So what do you make of that, Lawrence Summers? Now, to be fair, the study may not have tested for variance—I haven't read through it fully—which would mean that the gap between boys and girls in performance may still be larger at the ends of the bell curve. But the findings still are remarkable.

If you click on the study, too, you'll note an irony: It suggests that while the math gap correlates to gaps in social equality, boys' lagging reading skills don't. Of course, as the summarizer at Ars Technica puts it, that doesn't mean some other social factor isn't at work. I'm sure one is—or even many.