Math Quiz: Why do men predominate?

"Hyde and Mertz found there are more girls in the top tier in countries such as Iceland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom–and even in certain U.S. populations, such as Asian-Americans."<p>I don't buy this at all, if you mean "top tier" in the sense of people who are at the Olympiad/math professor level. Look at the numbers- there have been ten Fields/Abel/Wolf Prize winners from the UK, all of whom have been male. The odds of this happening given "more girls in the top tier" are less than 1:1000.<p>"Furthermore, they noted that a small math gender gap correlated with a higher rank on the World Economic Forum’s 2007 measures of gender equality, in which the United States ranked 31st, between Estonia and Kazakhstan. A similar correlation was found for the number of girls on International Mathematical Olympiad teams."<p>Yes, but <i>what was the correlation</i>? 0.02? 0.2? 0.9? The article doesn't tell you, conveniently for them.

"Then there’s the cultural perception of math achievers–the nerds who are heckled in one society are exalted in another. Irina Mitrea, a math professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, who finished high school in Romania, says she never felt discouraged there ..."<p>in my experience (with a sample size of ~10), the only women i've interacted with who were super excited about (and good at) pure math and theoretical CS (Ph.D. students) grew up in eastern europe or india, and when i asked them about their experiences growing up as females who loved math, they said that it felt completely normal in their home society and that they were shocked that there was this stigma against girls being able to do math in the US ... [again, this is only my tiny biased sample size, just my 2 cents!]

It must be easy to publish research like this in a journal.<p>How could a reviewer -- even an anonymous one -- object? Doing so would put his/her career at risk.<p>Maybe it's best not to do research like this at all.

The original paper by Hyde and Mertz can be found at <a href="http://tctvideo.madison.com/uw/gender.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://tctvideo.madison.com/uw/gender.pdf</a> . In it, the authors reference data from the Program for International Student Assessment as their primary evidence in attempting to discredit the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis (apart from their discussion of differing degrees of female membership on IMO teams). Careful examination of the 2006 PISA data, however, indicates a positive correlation between variance ratio and mean performance amongst OECD countries with above average performance (selected to control for availability of educational resources, and overall social stigma against mathematics). This suggests that countries which have taken action to reduce Variance Ratio in order to equalize educational outcomes have also reduced overall mean outcomes.<p>In other words, countries which have successfully suppressed greater male variance (if it is inherent) or have through cultural engineering increased apparent female variance, have done so at the cost of reducing mean outcome.<p>It is worth noting, however, that this result was achieved by looking at countries that were assumed to already have adequate educational resources, and have already achieved above average mean outcomes--presumably through some sort of cultural emphasis on the value of mathematics. Both of these effects appear greater than that of suppression of male variability.

Interesting. Men have more variance in aptitude but there is same amount of boys and girls in math olympics (in countries with gender equality).<p>That might mean that people able to achieve olympic level of math skill are actually abundant enough so small random pick from all available people with such potential does not show differences.

"In a 1990 study, Hyde had found that high school boys solved complex problems on standardized tests better than girls. But 19 years later, test scores of 7 million students across 10 states show that the gap is close to zero."<p>That's because many of the tests were redesigned in the 1990s to eliminate their correlation with <i>g</i>, the general intelligence factor. This was explicitly done to eliminate the gaps between sexes and races.

This again? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? Why do women predominate sewing circles? If women wanted to have math careers they would. Move on to something important. Geez.