Education: Who Is Really Better at Math?

Chicago study renews the debate over boys’and girls’ability

It is well known that teen-age boys tend to do better at math than girls, that male high school students are more likely than their female counterparts to tackle advanced math courses like calculus, that virtually all the great mathematicians have been men. But why? Are women born with less mathematical ability? Or does society’s sexism slow their progress?

In 1980 two Johns Hopkins University researchers tried to settle the eternal nature/ nurture debate. Julian Stanley — who is well respected for his work with precocious math students of both sexes — and Camilla Benbow had tested 10,000 talented seventh-and eighth-graders between 1972 and 1979. Using the Scholastic Aptitude Test, in which math questions are meant to measure ability rather than knowledge, they discovered distinct sex differences. While the verbal abilities of the males and females hardly differed, twice as many boys as girls scored over 500 (on a scale of 200 to 800) on mathematical ability; at the 700 level, the ratio was 14 to 1. The conclusion: males have inherently superior mathematical reasoning ability.

Benbow and Stanley’s findings, which were published in Science, disturbed some men and not a few women. Now there is comfort for those people in a new study from the University of Chicago that suggests math is not, after all, a natural male domain. With Researcher Sharon Senk, Professor Zalman Usiskin, a specialist in high school mathematics curriculums and an author of several math texts, studied 1,366 tenth-graders. They were selected from geometry classes and tested on their ability to solve geometry proofs, a subject requiring both abstract reasoning and spatial ability. Says Usiskin: “If you’re a math whiz or a computer bug, you’re going to pick up equations and formulas that will help you with tests like the SAT. But geometry proof is never learned outside of school.” The conclusion reached by Usiskin and Senk: there are no sex differences in math ability.

The results of their study will be presented at this week’s meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. In a draft that has already been circulated, the Chicago researchers decided to take a few swipes at the recent Johns Hopkins findings. They argued that Benbow and Stanley had measured performance, not ability. Says Usiskin: “To assume that the SAT has no connection with experience is poppycock.” Replies Stanley, who now has 50,000 subjects to bolster his conclusion: “People are so eager not to believe that there is a difference in mathematical reasoning ability between boys and girls that all kinds of people are taking potshots.”

The Chicago study, says Stanley, is “irrelevant” because it tests knowledge of mathematics rather than raw ability. He points out that the students were receiving geometry instruction at the time of the test. “What they’ve done,” says Stanley, “is to show that when you teach boys and girls together in math classes, the girls learn quite well, and we’ve known that for 50 years.”

While the critical volleys fly between Baltimore and Chicago, some educators believe that both sides are missing the real target. University of Wisconsin Professor Elizabeth Fennema, who has been studying sex-related differences in math for twelve years, maintains that most female mathematical disabilities result from environment. Says she: “Neither study has collected a bit of data on the genetic evidence. Neither is measuring innate ability.” She discourages debate over mathematical genetics, since she believes it is insoluble and burdens one sex with an implied deficiency for which there is no remedy. Indeed, the researchers agree on one important fact: if boys and girls are given capable teaching and comparable attention, both will achieve.