Talented Girls, Mathematics

Discrepancies for Men and Women

Although mathematics performance before high school is comparable for boys and girls in the general population, this is not the case for mathematically talented boys and girls. Even in elementary schools, more boys than girls earn top scores on standardized mathematics assessments, particularly on above-level assessments that reduce the ceiling-effect for mathematically talented students. Similarly, significantly more boys than girls are identified as “mathematically precocious” through national talent-search programs, such as the Study for Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which reported a 17-to-1 ratio of preadolescent boys to girls scoring above 700 on the mathematics section of the SAT.

Several claims about biological bases of these discrepancies have been made. More attention in recent years has fallen on spatial abilities. Although research results are conflicting and inconclusive on gender differences in spatial abilities, evidence showing a connection between gender differences in mathematical achievement and gender differences in certain spatial skills is accumulating. Although in the early years of schooling the focus is on encoding and retrieving information from long-term memory, the later years include more visual-spatial problems that require constructing and transforming visual-spatial representations within one's working memory. Because girls excel at cognitive processes like those on which the early schooling years focus, they have the advantage in the early years. However, gender differences in visual-spatial working memory favoring boys can be found as early as preschool, and boys have the advantage later in school. In fact, mechanical and visual-spatial skills are a stronger contributor to gender differences on Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) items than mathematics self-confidence is. Infant studies, however, have shown for more than three decades that there are no sex differences at birth in orientation toward spatial skills.

Another claim for the existence of sex differences in mathematics ability has involved the evidence that boys outperform girls is mathematics fact retrieval. By fourth grade, boys in the top half of the speed distribution are faster at mathematics fact retrieval than are similar girls, and they are equally accurate. This is significant because speed of mathematics fact retrieval is a statistically significant predictor of mathematics test performance in middle school and college, affecting later scores and decisions to pursue higher-level mathematics. This may be one reason that overall gender differences on the mathematics portion of the SAT are eliminated when the time limit is removed. On the other hand, it has been found that many categories of items that favor girls have been removed from the SAT–M, and that when SAT–M scores are considered with regard to their power to predict college achievement in advanced mathematics, gifted girls' achievement is significantly under-predicted by these tests. This, and the fact that findings of extreme gaps in SAT–M performance at the highest levels are based on samples in which boys represent a much more selective sample than girls do, leads Elizabeth Spelke and other researchers to believe that the SAT–M may not be an appropriate measure of talented girls' true abilities to achieve the highest levels of mathematics performance; the SAT–M's tendency to overestimate boys' abilities and underestimate girls' abilities makes it suspect as evidence of biologically based sex differences.

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