Sorry, Larry Summers. An analysis of standardized test scores from more than 7 million students in grades 2 through 11 finds no difference in math scores for girls and boys. Everybody is on this one, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, TIME, lots more.
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Mr. Pondiscio please stop joining the chorus in criticizing Dr. Summers whenever you want to hit a punching bag. All he said was that differences in males and females should be researched. Wow, what a concept. In the hyper-politically-correct venue of academia, this is off limits, unless discrimination against a group is the research. You know this. You should realize that attacking people, who do not deserve to be attacked, is despicable. It’s bullying for fun. Shame on you. You merely gave an unprovoked ad hominen attack on someone who cannot defend himself. This is inappropriate on a “Core Knowledge” blog, stick to MoveOn.
Bullying?? My goodness. A pretty mild and simple jape by my (or anyone’s really) standards. Anyone who IS interested in Summers controversial remarks can read what he said. The one thing I can say with accuracy and without fear of contriction is that it amounts to many hundreds of words more than “differences in males and females should be researched.”
http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
I always liked this take on Summers’ statements:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/02/grading_larry_summers/
So what explains the paucity of female winners of Fields Medals and Putnam challenges? Discrimination?
I find the evidence that the “tails” of the male math-ability distribution are wider than those of the female distribution more compelling than most other arguments about sex/gender ability differences – and that could explain the differences in dearth of women Fields Medal and Putnam winners. But there’s a long, long, long way between Algebra II in high school and the Fields medal.
And one thing that’s rarely noted when the “wider tails” argument is brought up, is that even with wider tails, you still expect just as many females as males to be “above average,” and in any test that most students take, you would expect the average scores to be very similar for males and females.
Jim scored a 97, Bob scored a 76, Dan scored a 45.
Jane scored a 81, Barb scoed a 78, Dana scored a 66.
Who is better at math, the boys or the girls?
Which gender has the worse performer?
Which gender has the top performer?
This study has been wildy misreported. The study found (i.e., confirmed once again) that males have a greater variance in mathematical ability.
From Project Talent, the variance was 1.2 (mae/female ratio) and also the male mean was 0.12 sd higher.
From these numbers alone we can predict the upper bound of females in any field requiring high levels of mathematic ability.
At the 95th percentile, we’d expect to see 64% male, 36% female. This might be a representation of females in engineering or science fields that are math heavy.
At the 99th percentile, the pecentage of females drops to 21%.
At the National Academy of Sciences and Putnam fellow levels (+4.7 sd and + 4.9 sd respectively, the percentage of females drops to 17%.
At the Fields medal level (+ 5.8 sd), the percentage of females drops to 1%.
See here for a full explanation.