Mathematics and the age old boys vs. girls debate

Previous generations of Americans saw tremendous disparities in the number of boys and girls that excelled in math classes. Women would either be discouraged from or discriminated against achieving on the level of men in math and sciences. However, my own personal (and more recent) experience in the American public school system has seen a much different angle. In my childhood, I saw that the other high achievers were as likely to be women as men. It was probably relatively close to a 50-50 balance in my AP classes, a far cry from the male bias of previous decades.

I see a more visible, perhaps even counterintuitive, disparity as a teacher: the girls in my class far outnumber the boys. I was shocked to see an approximate 3:1 ratio of women-to-men in my classroom. Talking with my co-teacher and the program’s director/principal, I learned that a larger trend is also apparent program-wide. When the students come into the program in middle school, the gender split is fairly equitable. As they grow up, the boys drop out at a far faster rate than the girls…and you end up with advanced high school math classes, like mine, with a student body largely composed of girls.

The ubiquitous studies on the gender gap in math show that as an entire population that males generally score higher than females. I have yet to come across studies that analyze the lower-income communities, though, like the ones that my students come from. And personally, I have yet to come to a satisfactory reasoning myself as to why this may be the case. Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, once mentioned in my lectures that the current school system favors females because males have a harder time sitting around longer. Could this thought be exacerbated as the males feel more pressure from their social environment? What other factors, maybe even confounding ones, nuance this discussion?

We often focus on the high achievers who may skew our understanding of the overall achievement of our society. As you can read in my about page and see in the header, I am new to teaching. I am striving to understand and work on not just the microscopic level of teaching for students’ success but also gaining a broader perspective on the American education system. Particularly as to how it relates to mathematics. I’m very curious to see what the future hold for American male and female students in terms of math education and STEM-related careers.