What girls know about math

So much for the assumption that boys are better than girls at math, said Eliza Strickland in a Discover magazine blog. Researchers who looked at standardized test scores for 7 million students in grades 2 through 11 found no difference in performance between girls and boys, according to a study published in the journal Science.

The facts are clear enough, said Alice Park in Time.com, but the myth that girls can’t do math is slow to die. And that skewed view, rather than some lack of aptitude, is still “what keeps girls from pursuing math and science as a career.”

Girls did score lower on math tests, 20 years ago, said Ed Morrissey in a Hot Air blog. But “concerned parents getting involved solved the problem” by getting girls to take advanced math classes. This just goes to show that quotas imposed by politically correct bean counters aren't the answer.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This study is hardly an indictment of political correctness, said Jeff Fecke in Blog of the Moderate Left. It merely proves what feminists have always said: Women haven’t been shut out of the hard sciences because “they’re just too emotional and giggly to do math.” Sexism was the problem all along.