Boys Are Better At Math? That Could Be Because School Favors Them Over Girls

You could be forgiven for thinking so. There are real, demonstrated differences in the distribution between men and women in math: far more professional engineers and research scientists are male than female; there are more men in STEM PhD programs; heck, even school kids show a clear bias toward boys in science and math. Those differences don’t come from nowhere – perhaps boys really are just better than girls at math for some reason.

Like so many “obvious facts”, however, this just doesn’t hold up. “There are no differences in overall intrinsic aptitude for science and mathematics among women and men,” Elizabeth Spelke, now Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, told The Harvard Gazette last week. 

It’s been her position for two decades now – and with the publication of a new paper, analyzing data on the math ability of more than 2.5 million schoolchildren, she is now more confident than ever. 

But here’s the question: if that’s the case, then what’s with the disparities?

What’s going on?

So, we have two facts, seemingly at odds: in babies and infants, there’s little-to-no difference in mathematical and numerical ability between boys and girls; on the other hand, by adulthood – in fact, far before then – there are clear discrepancies between the genders’ achievement in STEM areas. Clearly, something is going awry at some point.

Now, perhaps that “something” is nature, not nurture. But the evidence, as shown in Spelke and colleagues’ new research, offers an alternative explanation: that the difference in ability is learned.

“The headline […] is that the gender gap emerges when systematic instruction in mathematics begins,” Spelke said. “It was even bigger in fourth grade […] and in sixth grade it was bigger still.”

It’s a conclusion that certainly has the weight of data behind it. The study followed 2,653,082 children in first and second grade in France – that’s almost literally all of them, which was possible thanks to a 2018 government testing initiative from the French Ministry of Education. 

The results were clear: “Boys and girls exhibited very similar [math] scores upon school entry, but a gender gap in favor of boys became highly significant after 4 months of schooling,” the paper reports. 

“These findings were repeated each year and varied only slightly across family, class or school type and socio-economic level,” the researchers point out. “Although schooling correlated with age, exploiting the near-orthogonal variations indicated that the gender gap increased with schooling rather than with age.”

There are some neat nuances that bolster this latter point – that it’s specifically the amount of time a child has been in school that influences the gender gap, rather than simply their age. Take the kids born in 2012-2013 – or, to put it more evocatively, the ones who started school in 2019. That cohort spent the last 2.5 months of their school year in COVID-19-induced lockdown, away from their teachers and schoolmates – and the result, Spelke said, was that “the amount of the gender gap grew by less than it did in the other years where there wasn’t a long school closure.”

Further damning the educational system as the cause of girls’ comparative weakness in STEM was another initiative, in the same year, that introduced more math into children’s preschool education. It was a move made with noble intentions – France had recently come dead last out of 23 European countries in a comparison of school math ability – but it had an unsettling effect. For the first time, a gender gap started to appear in kindergarten-aged children.

All in all, the researchers believe, the answer is clear. “These findings point to the first year of school as the time and place where a [math] gender gap emerges in favor of boys,” they write.

How it happens – and what should be done

As clear-cut as the conclusion seems to be, there’s a pretty major puzzle left unanswered: how does this happen?

It’s not as simple a question as it sounds. The immediate solution is the teachers, right? Unaware of their own biases, perhaps, they judge girls more harshly, or spend more time with boys, or somehow impart some other subliminal messages that the children pick up and internalize. But Spelke doesn’t think that’s the case: “If there was really a pervasive social bias,” she said, then presumably the parents would be susceptible to it – and “we would expect boys to be more oriented toward spatial and numerical tasks when they first got to school.”

Maybe, then, it has something to do with the way math is taught. Not for budding mathematicians are the extended essays and discussions of, say, literature classes – it’s rare, even, to see a research project before you reach college-level math. “Showing your working” is encouraged, but not always necessary; rather, the emphasis is often on achieving a correct result, with an exploration of the underlying ideas and processes sometimes skipped over for time or convenience.

In a way, all that is understandable: it’s how math has always been taught. But it’s also quite possibly putting girls off the subject, said Marta Macho-Stadler, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of the Basque Country who was not involved in the new study. 

“Competitive pressure affects girls and boys differently,” she told the Spanish Science Media Centre. “A previous study conducted in a two-stage [math] competition in Spain would indicate […] that the motivations and performance of boys and girls may differ in competitive environments.” 

“In addition, expectations from the family and teaching environment may push girls to limit themselves and perform worse than boys in this type of test.”

Perhaps compounding this is the idea, especially pervasive in the West, that math ability is as all-or-nothing as the subject itself – that you’re either a genius at it, or useless. The truth, of course, is that math takes effort; a handful of singular cases aside, you should no more expect to be “naturally” able to solve a math problem than you should expect to “naturally” play a piano sonata or paint the Mona Lisa. But societally, we’re told it takes brilliance to succeed in math – and crucially, we’re also told boys are brilliant. The equation almost finishes itself.

“Culturally, boys are told they are brilliant, while girls are told that everything they achieve is through effort Macho-Stadler told El País. “This makes you end up believing you are not clever and puts even more pressure on you.”

Solving the problem

What to do, then, about the problem of potentially 50 percent of future mathematicians and engineers being artificially held back throughout their lives? Well, future research will hopefully find some concrete policies – but in the meantime, it seems we’ve got some serious cultural and societal biases to grapple with.

“Parents and adults around children ages 0 to 6 should teach and play with both genders equally,” advised Pauline Martinot, a neurology researcher at the University of Paris and coauthor of the new paper. “And it is essential for teachers to overcome their fear or anxiety about math, modify their formal teaching methods, and equally encourage the performance of boys and girls.”

“It is key to reflect on how to interact equitably in class, emphasize effort over results, and highlight female role models in math and science,” she told El País. 

That said, it’s not only sexism, whether unconscious or not, that needs addressing. Perhaps even more important may be how we think about math itself: how it’s taught; how it’s assessed; what “success” in the subject even looks like. 

“Parents should encourage curiosity and logical thinking in boys and girls alike, avoid phrases like ‘girls are less logical’ or ‘boys are better at math,’ play logic games with both genders, and help reduce math anxiety in girls at an early age,” Martinot said. “We need to reinforce the idea that intelligence is built through effort in both boys and girls, and normalize mistakes as part of learning, preventing girls from interpreting them as a sign of incompetence.”

The study is published in Nature.