Summary New study debunks idea that there is an innate difference in math ability beteween males and females. Countriees that have the greatest gender equality have the least disparity or none at all.
Author Science Daily
Citation University of Wisconsin-Madison (2009, June 2). Culture, Not Biology, Underpins Math Gender Gap.
Link http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090601182655.htm
For more than a century, the notion that females are innately less capable than males at doing mathematics, especially at the highest levels, has persisted in even the loftiest circles.
This was one of the primary reasons posited in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University and current economic adviser to President Barack Obama, for the extreme scarcity of tenured women math professors in top-ranked research universities in the U.S.
Now, however, in an analysis of contemporary data published June 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that the primary cause for the gender disparity in math performance at all levels is culture, not biology.
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