There are a couple of interesting recent studies that provide updates to the gender and science discussion between Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke both pointing toward Spelke’s side of the argument that most, if not all, of the gender gap can be explained by the influence of social forces rather than by innate differences.

First, there is an interesting post on the Feminist Philosophers’ blog that summarizes a NY Times article on gender discrimination at universities, clearly supporting Spelke’s side by documenting differential treatment of applicants depending on gender. Although Pinker might be correct that there are innate differences, that does not excuse discrimination, though they might provide convenient self-justifications. If anything, the social forces are exaggerating these innate differences rather than compensating for them.

And then, articles here and here summarize a recent study using data collected by PISA, which

suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores.^(source)

The overall result showed the usual pattern: Boys did better than girls in math and girls did better than boys in reading. But there was a catch: that result differed by country making the authors curious if there might be a relationship between the score differential and the status of women. They created a gender equality score and found that countries with very high gender equality do indeed have a much smaller math performance difference. Whereas countries with lower gender equality showed a much larger difference in math performance.

The correlations between gender equality and math scores held up under a statistical test designed to catch spurious associations. The authors even checked out the possibility of genetic effects not linked to the Y chromosome by examining whether genetic similarity between various European populations could account for these differences, but they found that it could not.^(source)

One of Pinker’s central arguments was that the gender gap was primarily prevalent in the extremes of the distribution. So, it is particularly interesting what this study found there:

The researchers also studied the percentage of students of each sex among the top scorers on the test. In the gender-equal countries, girls made up half or more of those who scored in the top one percent.^(source)

The results support Spelke’s argument, although it is interesting to note that Pinker never said that all of the gender gap can be explained by biology. His claim was that “the contribution of biology is greater than zero.” However, it seemed that he was using that to argue away the societal influences. We clearly cannot do that. This latest study shows the influence of gender inequality on girl’s math performance. It does not say that there are no innate differences. It simply highlights that the social forces Spelke pointed to have a dramatic effect. This study might also be the first step to the experiment Spelke suggested at the end of her talk: Remove the gender discrimination and biased treatment and then see what happens to the percentage of women in mathematics and science.

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