Math Gender Gap Takes A Dive

by Deborah Franklin

Madame Curie would be so proud. /Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Good news today for girls, women, and the men who love them: The math/science gender gap in the U.S. seems to be shrinking on many fronts.

A report released this morning by the National Research Council (NRC) found that, on average, women scientists and engineers with PhDs fare just as well as men in terms of getting a top job, getting grants, getting promoted, publishing research in high-profile journals, and earning a decent starting salary. That's based on a survey of 89 top research institutions.

That's on top of a new finding that young girls on average are now performing just as well as boys in math in the U.S.

Some Differences Persist

Still, there are some stubborn differences that need to be fixed, says Claude Canizares, a physicist at MIT who co-chaired the committee that analyzed the NRC survey:

*Male full-professors earn eight percent more than women on average. (There's a chance, Canizares says, that's because men have been full-professors longer at this point. The gender gap did not hold among associate and assistant professors.)

*The pool of women with PhDs in science and engineering has gotten a lot bigger in recent years, and if they apply for a top research job, they're just as likely as men to be hired. But not as many women apply. And though women are just as likely as men to get tenure once they become eligible, and to be promoted once they have tenure, not as many women get to stage of being eligible for tenure.

Sally Shaywitz, a Yale neuroscientist and co-author of the report, says some women still seem to be taking themselves out of play at key transition points in their careers. Getting more women to lead hiring committees could encourage more women to pursue top jobs, Shaywitz says.

Great Gains for Girls in Math Scores, Too

The NRC report comes on the heels of another encouraging study from the University of Wisconsin, showing that, on average, girls from first grade to high school now do just as well in math as boys in the U.S..

The highest math achievers are still mostly boys, as in some other countries, but that gap's narrowing, too, according to Janet Mertz, one of the University of Wisconsin researchers who analyzed the data.

As Mertz told Newsweek:

The main reason many fewer females than males excel in math in most countries is not lack of innate ability or 'intrinsic aptitude' but gender inequality. Nations with greater gender equality typically have a smaller math gender gap.

Mertz says her study should go along way to quelling the notion that boys are innately better at math. It's culture, she says, not chromosomes.