Showdown at sex gap: women's intrinsic math and science aptitude divides scientists

Science News,  Nov 24, 2007  by Bruce Bower

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Here's a good way to inflame the tempers of all those within earshot. Do as former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers did in 2005 and suggest that the relatively low number of high-achieving women in mathematics and science partly reflects a lack of an inherent aptitude for such pursuits. Summers lost his job in the campuswide tumult that followed his remarks. But in the ambiguous world of research on sex differences and their influence on math and science abilities, Summers' saga prompted new attempts to clarify what scientists know and how their data apply to education and test taking.

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At an Oct. 1 meeting at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., scientists tried to hash out why females lag behind males in math and science achievement. Participants focused considerable attention on a recent extensive review that found a place for sex-related biological disparities in explaining such achievement differences as well as on an earlier report that dismissed biology as a factor.

The latter report was issued in 2006 by the 18-member Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, convened by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). "It is not lack of talent," the committee concluded, "but unintentional biases and outmoded institutional structures that are hindering the access and advancement of women" in technical fields.

Controversy greeted the NAS report, notes psychologist Susan M. Barnett of the University of Cambridge, England. Some researchers suggested that committee members held their own biases against acknowledging any sex-related biological differences in math and science aptitude.

Enter a consensus statement, published in the August Psychological Science in the Public Interest, written by six researchers with varying takes on the reasons for sex differences. They conclude that "early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math" and that "these effects add and interact in complex ways."

Psychologist Diane E Halpern of Claremont (Calif.) McKenna College directed work on the consensus statement. She also spoke about sex differences to the NAS committee during its deliberations.

"Can we increase the number of women who enter careers in science and math? Yes," Halpern asserts. "Is there evidence of a sex-related biological component to success in science and math? Yes."

WHAT DIFFERENCE? At the AEI sessions, two psychologists challenged the assumption that biology in any way undermines women's math and science proficiency.

Psychologist Rosalind C. Barnett of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., noted that several research reviews--including analyses conducted by Janet S. Hyde of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a contributor to the consensus statement--find no or minimal sex differences in math and science aptitude.

Although more males than females earn extremely high scores on standardized math tests, such scores predict surprisingly little about who will succeed in math and science careers, Barnett says. Among college-educated men with math, science, or engineering jobs, less than one-third scored 650 or better out of 800 on the math portion of the SAT.

Men's monopoly on high-level math and science achievements derives largely from unfair social and institutional advantages, the Brandeis psychologist says. For the past several hundred years, social forces have limited women's access to education and employment in the sciences, Barnett argues. Now, women receive the same education as men do but struggle against academic undercurrents of bias, she says. One study, cited in the NAS report, evaluated peer-reviewers' ratings of applications for postdoctoral fellowships in Sweden. Researchers found that a woman had to be twice as productive as a man in publishing research and in other areas of scientific achievement in order to be judged equally competent.

Productivity aside, boys and girls possess the same three mental systems at the core of mathematical and scientific reasoning, according to Harvard University psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, a member of the NAS committee.

"Evidence to date does not favor the hypothesis of a male advantage in intrinsic aptitude for math and science,' Spelke says.

From infancy on, in her view, all typically developing children rely on one mental system that represents and reasons about objects, another that represents and reasons about numbers, and a third that does the same for geometric relations.

For instance, preschool-age boys and girls are equally adept at tracking items moving among distracting objects on a computer screen. Moreover, infants of both sexes recognize approximate quantities of items.

Spelke and her coworkers have also tested 6- to 10-year-olds in the United States and in a remote Amazonian population for the ability to recognize relationships among simple visual forms and basic geometric concepts, such as distance and angle.