After volunteering in the schools, I noticed that girls do not perform nearly as well at math as boys do. It’s a statistically-significant difference, at least in the small samples I’ve been working with.
After studying it a bit more, I’m convinced that it is entirely cultural and has nothing to do with biology. Correlation does not infer causality.
There is, however, something that boys are definitely culturally (and perhaps biologically) predisposed to, that girls aren’t, and which more than adequately explains their proficiency at math: team sports, particularly the pro-level spectator variety.
If you are a kindergardener or first-grader who loves watching NBA basketball, you are counting by 2’s and 3’s up to and often over 100, nearly every night. You are also calculating differences between scores, on the fly, every few seconds. If you love NFL football, you as a young child are adding by 7’s, 3’s, 2’s, and 1’s, all day every Sunday and as late on Monday night as your parents will let you stay up. If you love baseball, you are adding and subtracting every night too, and also calculating percentages and ratios. Plus every morning in the newspaper you are poring over columns of numbers. Eagerly. Out of pure love of the game.
Anything you do a lot of, and love doing, you will become skilled at. I knew a few girls when I was a schoolkid who were very good at math– they also enjoyed playing a lot of card games.
My daughter does not like sports, or card games, but she is very competitive, and it drove her nuts that the boys were so far ahead of her at math. After finding some math games that she enjoyed, she worked on it and now she’s completing assignments at pretty close to their level. I hated sports as a kid, and still do, and I was always way behind the other boys at math (and still am). I didn’t develop any proficiency at math until the Apple ][ was invented and I got one and started programming computers. A few years ago, when playing around with embedded programming and device drivers, I could add and subtract in base 16, and to this day I can still rattle off powers of 2 from 0 to 65536.
