This morning I read an article in the Economist entitled Education and Sex: Vital Statistics. The article discussed how the gap in math scores is closing between males and females. The article cited a study that showed how, especially in countries where the sexes are treated more equally, the gap has pretty much vanished. Females still score higher than males on reading tests, indicting that females may be on their way towards having an absolute advantage in both math and reading skills (perhaps?).
One interesting thing in the article was that, while more women are going into highly mathematical fields like engineering and such, they're not entering in the numbers that one might expect. I assume this may be due to social reasons rather than an actual lack in skill or competency.
If you were a young girl who was naturally good at math, you would likely attribute your skills to your intelligence and hard work (attribution theory). If you're a boy and good at math you may do the same and attribute your skills to intelligence, but you may also conclude that you're good at math because you're a boy--and well--boys are just good at math! The difference here is that girls will use internal attribution to determine their intelligence and boys will use both internal and external attribution to determine theirs. This isn't the way the theory is usually applied, but I think this shows something important and may help explain why females are not totally comfortable with natural skills they may have. Girls are lacking that external reason for why they are good at math, which may cause some discomfort. Their female peers may struggle with math and may indirectly pressure the mathematically-gifted girl to say she loathes math just as much as they do. For the girl who is good at math this could be quite a conundrum. Does she choose to side with her peers and talk about how hard math is and how much she struggles, or does she choose to defy social norms and play with her calculator instead of Barbie?
Enter Leon Festinger. Cognitive Dissonance is a theory that says that when people perceive dissonant signals they change their behavior to reduce the dissonance. When our math-whiz girl perceives that she is good at math, but her female peers are not, she experiences some amount of cognitive dissonance and will inevitably work to reduce it somehow. She may do this by becoming more like her female peers and adapt an anti-math attitude, or if she really likes math she may choose to hold out and continue her ''mathiness''. Her choice depends on a number of things--interests, age, maturity level, level of acceptance or non-acceptance by peers, etc.
I always say I was terrible at math in school. I would tell people that it was by far my worst subject and that I just stunk at math-- end of story. However, I never got anything less than a B in math in high school or college and even that only happened in few semesters. I was far worse at things like French where I ALWAYS got B's... and I had to work very hard for those B's. In math I never tried too hard and got by with mostly A's. Was this because I was hard-wired to not be good at math, or was this because somewhere along the line I was socialized to believe that women weren't supposed to be good at math? Most likely it was both, and probably some other things that are unknown. I have a feeling when my peers would talk about how hard that last math test was I'm sure I didn't chime in with "oh come on-- it wasn't that hard" (in middle school that's called social suicide)-- more likely I just nodded and rolled my eyes with everyone else in a sort of spiral of silence-esque manner.
Socialization is a complicated process that even the most highly educated psychologists and others probably do not fully understand. We do know that understanding one's gender and what it means happens very early and that perceptions of your gender are difficult to change once you become older. While gender is an ever changing definition, making fundamental changes to your beliefs about who you are as a male/female is extremely difficult--maybe impossible. How many generations did it take for people to accept working moms? (or has it even happened yet?)
So while our girls may be more talented in math, I don't think it's because all of a sudden women are just getting smarter, I think it's because they're allowing themselves to be smarter. This jives with the article--surely in countries where there is more equality between the sexes women feel more inclined to pursue once male-dominated subjects than those countries where women are still suppressed. I bet it will be another couple generations before we see equal amounts of men and women in highly math-oriented careers.
An interested aside--boys are still better at geometry. "This seems to have no relation to sexual equality, and may allow men to cling on to their famed claim to be better at navigating than women are".
