Gender and Math

There's a bunch of Larry Summers hate at Alas, a Blog based on a new study that says that girls and boys are doing just as well at math on average.

Evidence of lower scoring by females on the SAT is "explained away" according to the study as the result of more girls (and thus presumably a less selective sample of girls) taking the SAT (a traditional explanation that is not mentioned is that boys have a higher standard deviaiton than girls do, so if you test only the top half of the bell curve men will do better on average).

What is not mentioned, though, is the second half of the article, where it is stated that the tests used in the study did not include problems involving complex reasoning.

My guess on the probable translation: The NCLB tests are designed largely to test the most basic skills that almost everyone can have. That the tests may have been adjusted deliberately to acheive gender parity is not considered in the article, nor in the Alas post, which simply assumes that the issue has been settled once and for all.

So where do I stand on this? I doubt that there are as many females as males in the higher percentiles of math ability. Although it is likely that there are more females with math ability than actually wind up using it. In other words, it is not unlikely that stereotypes based on actual statistical trends may wind up exaggerrating those trends. If only 25% of of the top 1% is girls, this might intimidate girls from studying math so that only 15% or 10% of those taking the top 1% classes are girls.

But ultimately, my main concern is that we try to allow people to take what they want and feel they have the aptitude for. The main reason why I think that skepticism of these reports of equality is important is because I do not want the government to take the risk of destroying our science, technology, and math programs with quotas.

That is all.