Math Class Isn't Tough Any More

Forget what Teen Talk Barbie said. A new study from the University of Wisconsin found that "girls in the U.S. have reached parity with boys in mathematics performance, a pattern that is found in some other nations as well." This is true even in high school and even in measures requiring complex problem solving, areas where gaps were found in older studies.

Conventional wisdom in the last few years has been that boys are more extreme than girls both ways -- found more often among geniuses but also more often among failing students. This study was not kind to that conception, either. While boys were more common at the 95th and 99th percentiles, the gap is narrowing, and in some other countries and among some US ethnic groups (such as Asian Americans), it doesn't exist at all. Where greater variability was found in boys, it "correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes." I bet Larry Summers feels like an ass now. (Well, probably not, but he maybe oughta.) via