An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles

Check out this Ars Technica post about a recent worldwide study on teenagers math and verbal skills:

It’s widely recognized that, in the US at least, there’s a gender gap in performance on tests of basic skills: boys tend to perform better at math, while girls get superior reading scores. It has been suggested that these gaps are the result of biological differences, as males tend to have better spatial reasoning skills and females better word recall. But a new study suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores.

Students from 40 countries took the same math and reading test, and girls and boys average scores in each country were compared against an index of women’s social equality. On the whole, girls outscored boys on the reading test, and boys outscored girls on the math bits. But the difference in math scores was closely linked to women’s status within each country:

The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn’t consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females.

Go Iceland!* The article gets oddly bogged down worrying that further advances in women’s status will eventually render men illiterate (I exaggerate, but it was strange), as the margin by which girls outscored boys in reading comp. also widened with increased social equality. So maybe you should just grab a copy of the current issue of Science instead, and read about it for yourself.

Full Disclosure: I have some family from Iceland, but I’d congratulate them anyway.