IN A thought-provoking article in the November issue of the , Janet Mertz reflects on the import of a survey she carried out on the difference in levels of mathematical achievement between girls and boys in high school.
Counting entrants from each sex to two major mathematical competitions, the and the , she found that there were fewer female than male entrants in every team, and in some – including the United States team – there were none.
There are various familiar theories about why this should be, the standard though controversial one being that differences in the wiring of male and female brains lead to different capacities for mathematical thinking. Proponents of this view are keen to state that this does not mean there can be no brilliant female mathematicians or unmathematical males, only that as a general rule there will be more male than female mathematicians.
Advertisement
But if one shares the view of Mertz and her team – namely that there is no innate difference in aptitude for mathematics between the sexes – the factor that makes for the difference detected by her survey has to be cultural. “Something is happening in the US,” Mertz says, that inhibits girls’ interest in mathematics at school. The root of that “something”, she reckons, is a cultural attitude that girls cannot excel at mathematics – which, by the simplest of familiar mechanisms, turns out to be self-fulfilling. Believing makes it so.
In Mertz’s view, and in the view of other high-achieving women mathematicians, that attitude is allied to strong peer pressure back in high school: maths, especially for girls, is not cool; it is nerdy. Given that this is a perception about maths among boys too, there is some cause for anxiety about the future supply of suitably trained maths and science students at university level.
There are some good reasons for thinking that wiring has less to do with sex-related differences in mathematical achievement than culture. One is that girls frequently make up 20 per cent of the members of maths competition teams from eastern Europe and Russia, whereas the percentage for US teams is consistently zero or close to zero.
No doubt Mertz and her team are right in identifying public attitudes and the “coolness” factor in adolescent school culture as major contributors to this. But it might be of interest to speculate whether another aspect of social geography affects the difference between eastern Europe and the US in this connection. It is that the manner of life, expectations, resources and customs of adolescents in the two regions have been markedly different during the last half-century and more.
During the cold war, countries in the Soviet bloc placed great emphasis on applied skills in their human resources. There was a pressing need for scientists and engineers, not merely for the construction of the socialist utopia but – more immediately – for competing militarily and in space exploration with a far richer western bloc dominated by the US. Thus exigency made the education system of the Soviet bloc impatient of anything that got in the way of obtaining the best from pupils. If a girl was good at maths, she was praised for succeeding, and admired by fellow pupils.
“Let’s have freedom, soda pop — and girls who are good at mathematics”
For American youth in the same period there was much greater individual freedom and far more latitude in out-of-school life. Conjure the image of high-school kids in America with their open-top cars and soda-pop bottles, compared with their muffled-up Soviet contemporaries shuffling through the Moscow snow, and the caricatures make a point that adds support to Mertz’s conclusion.
The trick would be to have it all: the freedom, the soda pop, and the mathematically successful girls. Can that really be too hard?