Will women and men ever add up to equals in maths?

There are many girls and women around the world who are brilliant at maths – but they are overwhelmed by the male majority who excel in the subject (and allied fields like physics and computer science) and stick with it right to the top.

For 20-odd years there has been a widely-held belief that women’s underachievement at the highest levels of maths is connected to a lack of female role models and poor self-image where the subject is concerned. Approaches to teaching strategies and policy have been based on these ideas.

However, according to a new study by psychologists Dr Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Leeds and Professor David Geary of the University of Missouri, the notion of poor self-image as an explanation for the disparity in performance between men and women is fundamentally flawed.

Their findings suggest that recent strategies aimed at improving girls’ performance in maths are misguided and unlikely to work.

The low number of women at the top of the tree in this and other ‘difficult’ subjects has long aroused heated debate, with one favoured theory suggesting that men are just inherently better at maths than women – something to do with the way their brains are wired.

The theory that male mathematical dominance has led girls and women to underrate their own abilities is called the ‘stereotype threat’. The principal was first proposed in 1999 by a study in the US and was subsequently backed up by a number of other research projects.

However, Dr Stoet and Prof Geary recently reviewed the research and found major flaws in the way many were carried out. These included the lack of any male subjects in the original study, so no comparison could be made between the sexes, as well as incorrect use of statistical techniques.

“It’s important that we find a good, scientific explanation for the gender gap in maths, but I am not convinced anyone has done that yet,” says Dr Stoet.

But if the old theory is being debunked, what is the true reason behind the lack of women as top mathematicians and physicists – and does this lack of gender balance really matter?

Dr Stoet says if the stereotype theory and the need for more female role models as an answer to it were correct then closing the gender gap between numbers of men and women climbing to the top of these fields of study would have been easy. In some areas, particularly computer science, the gap has widened in the last couple of decades.

What’s clear, he says, is that more research is needed to pinpoint at what stage girls disengage from maths and rule it out as a longer-term choice.

“In UK high schools, girls perform better overall. But in maths and physics it is boys who tend to do exceptionally well and boys who will apply for those subjects at university. In physics 80 per cent of A-level students are boys, and at university they form two-thirds of undergraduates in the subject.”

Leading experimental physicist (one of the few females at her level in the field) Dame Professor Athene Donald of Cambridge University said last year in her Times Educational Supplement article ‘Where is Physics Barbie?’ that the question of diversity really does matter. In science, as in Parliament, the board room and in the media, she said fair representation of both sexes is crucial. Biology and chemistry are gender balanced at undergraduate level, but maths and physics suffer from “a leaky pipeline”.

Dr Stoet believes it’s time to look beyond culturally-imposed stereotypes for the root of the mysterious problem.

“Boys and girls have different interests and enrol themselves in different kinds of activities quite early on. Research shows that boys are better at maths-based and spatial tasks, and that they are more interested in things, while girls are interested in people.

“The female interest in people can account for some of the loss of women from academe into jobs outside maths and physics that are more involved with people So how can we, for instance, teach maths in a way that is more appealing to girls’ interests?”

He believes culture plays a role but biological factors can’t be brushed aside. But, he asks, if the gender imbalance in mathematics reflects each sex’s genuine interests, “would it not be patronising to aim to change it?”