Hey, Lawrence Summers, take a look at this! A recent study proves (yet again) that girls are just as good at math as boys. Broadsheet has written about studies that came to similar conclusions not once but twice. This latest study has a very simple hypothesis about why people continue to be surprised by the data: They're just not willing to believe it. The study suggests that bias from parents and teachers may influence girls to work less to succeed in math and science classes, in that they have been taught that they cannot, even though they are able to, and that testing methods have inaccurately portrayed a disparity between the abilities of children of different genders when, in fact, a girl can deal with sines and cosines as well as a boy.
Math has never been my strong suit. But as a woman whose godmother is an economist, and as someone who has benefited from the help of several wonderful female math teachers and tutors, not to mention female classmates who explained theorems to me again and again, I'm gratified to see women's mathematical capabilities affirmed. Women who excel at math are not flukes or anomalies or unfeminine. Math ability is a talent, one that should be nurtured in both genders.
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