Features

The previous KDnuggets Poll asked:
Is lower percentage of women in science partly due to genetic/biological differences ?

The results:

• majority (55%) of respondents said "No, society pressures are much more important than genes",
• only 18% said that genes explain a significant part of the difference
• 21% chose "Too early to tell" option.

• "There are obvious differences between the genders: men are taller; women live longer. ... Women appear to have had less trouble entering some of the "top" professions other than science and engineering, e.g., medicine and law --- both professions from which they were effectively excluded 50 years ago."

• "Why do Japanese girls do so much better than American boys on standardized math tests? Genetics? Probably not, eh?
  Why has the percentage of women in the sciences increased, in some fields several fold, over the last 20 years?"

Many, many researchers have analyzed the question of gender and math. For a good recent summary see New York Times Story, Jan 24, 2005.

Here are some highlights of that article:

Among findings of an international standardized test (TIMSS) administered in 2003 to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences.

But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys ... and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States.

The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores ... convince many researchers that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.

Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.

Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT's in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.