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Countries with Higher Gender Equality Produce Girls Who Are Better at Math

This is why I think international studies in education are so valuable. You cannot argue that something is purely biological if you're not seeing the same result in other countries.

In this case, an analysis of PISA scores shows girls in Iceland outperform boys in math and that boys and girls have roughly equal scores in Scandinavian countries. In the U.S. and Britain, boys slightly outperform girls. The gap (in boys' favor) grows larger in countries like Italy, South Korea, and Turkey. Researchers studied a total of 40 countries and found that girls' math scores generally correlated to their countries' rank on gender equity as measured by the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index and other similar research. The study was controlled to ensure the findings "are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women."

The reading gap (where girls traditionally outperform boys) did not disappear with increased gender equity. The average reading gap is also larger than the average math gap (6.6% to 2%) and there is no country where boys outperform girls. But overall scores for boys were higher in both areas in countries where women have the most advantages: "This is important because it shows that advances for girls do not come at the expense of boys," Sapienza says.

There's room to quibble with the results, and I'm sure people will be falling all over themselves to do just that. There were a few anomalies: Germany has a larger math gap than its high gender equity rank would suggest; Indonesia and Thailand have lower gender equity but girls and boys perform equally. One gender equity index can be found here (pdf); the PISA scores can be downloaded here (xls — look at table 6.2c). One thing that jumps out is that the country where girls outperform boys most is Qatar — by 14 points to Iceland's 4 — and yet the country earns a dismal 109th place on the gender equity scale. Expect that to be headline news in every article and blog post questioning these findings; as an Arab Muslim country it will serve as convenient shorthand for a Handmaid's Tale-style learning environment. Having never studied Qatar I have no idea what's going on there, but I do know that the "boys study math, girls study languages" trope is not universal, and that in the Middle East medicine and engineering are valued for both genders to the point of being a cultural cliche. It would be interesting to tease out what's going on with these outliers, but the fact that they exist does not, in and of itself, negate the entire study. There may be other things that do, however, so it's worth watching to see how this does or doesn't change the discussion around learning differences.

At a bare minimum, though, research like this shows how inadequate it is to use American data alone (or British, or Namibian, etc.) to try to explain biology. Especially when even -that- data evolves over time. Biological differences may still play a role — the researchers themselves discuss this — but it's not the result you'd get if you limited yourself to a single country's test scores.