Do we have gender gaps even when we are young?

Are men “more oriented to objects”, more “gifted” at math and spatial tasks, and more capable of having the better brain for science? These are the questions that Spelke and Grace tackle in their essay Sex, Math and Science. They try to take the reasoning of Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s former president, and prove that the 3 reasons are not valid. Spelke and Grace take on the first question on object orientation by talking about why people believe this assumption. Baron-Cohen’s research showed that men have a predisposition to being good at objects and mechanical relationships, causing them to be systemizers. Yet, women have a predisposition to people and emotions, causing them to be empathizers. The predisposition to being a systemizer is more ideal than being an empathizer because the sciences require you to be able to think quickly on your feet, to be able to think things through logically, and to be able to rationalize. All three of these things get hindered when you are an empathizer because you think more with your feelings rather than your head, causing you to be unable to maintain the distance from your research that allows you to be logical and rational. Yet, Spelke and Grace go on to cite several other studies that contradict Baron-Cohen’s findings. These studies targeted infants and toddlers and the results from all of these studies showed that at this young age, there was no sex difference in how well they are with objects and mechanical relationships. In fact, Maccoby and Jacklin, one of the studies, said that their results showed that both sexes learned about these abilities “in strikingly convergent ways”, which is further proof that there are no sexual differences when talking about abilities (58, Spelke and Grace). The National Infant and Toddler Child Care Initiative helps support Spelke and Grace’s view that there is no difference in cognitive skills in infant and toddlers. This article states that “cognitive development does not result from neurobiological development alone” which means that cognitive skills are developed by a combination of neurobiological connections and the child’s own experiences (9, National Infant). This also shows that one’s own experiences are very important in childhood development and can help a child advance their own cognitive skills regardless of gender. Yet, I would have liked to have seen Spelke and Grace citing a study that gave children tasks that challenged their spatial, navigational, and object skills so that there could be a comparison on how females and males would differ in these tasks. Instead, they touched a bit on some studies that supported them but never did they describe the experiments that the studies did or the figures that go with the studies.
Another claim that Summers made is that men tend to be more “gifted” than women at math. Spelke and Grace first asked the question of what defines mathematical talent because this will serve as the guiding point to what it means to be more gifted at math. They then defined math talent as an evolutionary trait since there are both nonhumans and humans that do not engage in math. This is evidence that there was a need to be able to have math talent, and so we evolved and acquired mathematical talent. This math talent is first used when very young, since babies use sorting and classifying (when recognizing adults), spatial relationships (when climbing into boxes of various sizes), and patterns (saying “words and phrases from similar stories and songs”) (Naeyc). This goes to show that babies and toddlers naturally start using these math skills and both boys and girls use the same math skills. Yet, when they grow older, a gender gap is formed. Spelke and Grace assume that this is due to math problems becoming more complex and each gender forming different ways to solve these problems. Due to these different ways to think about problems, certain problems will not be solved the way one gender is doing it. Yet if this is true, then why are boys and girls scoring similarly in high school in most kinds of math? The National Center for Educational Statistics performed a survey taking the math scores from around the country on math assessments. Among 2009 graduates (seniors in high school), there was no real difference between girls and boys in any kind of math, and overall, boys scored a 158 (out of 300) and girls scored a 154 (8, National Center for Educational Statistics). This shows that even if women and men are using different methods to solve problems, both genders are doing about equally as well as each other on tests. What I would have liked to have seen Spelke and Grace do was either research or find a study where both boys and girls were given the same math test that was a “gender-fair test” and to see how the boys and girls scored compared to each other (60, Spelke and Grace).

 

The third claim of Summers was that men have brains that are more capable for science and math. Spelke and Grace believe that men do not have an advantage in having “greater variability” in math (61, Spelke and Grace). They back this assumption through Benbow’s study, where she and her colleagues followed a group of students from high school to when they got a job. They collected data from students in the high scoring and the low scoring brackets and the results from the study showed that this male advantage didn’t exist. In college, both males and females were equally likely to major in math and science, and the students who majored in math had no gender gap. So despite the males having more of the higher SAT-M scores in high school, both males and females had equal math ability in college. Yet how do we, the readers, know this? In this claim, Spelke and Grace should have included some average test scores on college students across the country in the math and sciences. By doing this, we can see if there really is no difference and if women and men both have equal ability in these subjects.

 

Overall, Spelke and Grace debate these three claims in their essay. They also talk about how gender bias can affect infants and toddlers during their childhood. This is exactly what Valian talked about in her essay through gender schemas, yet Spelke and Grace apply this principle to the infants and young children to show that gender bias can affect women even when they are really young. In fact, some people would say that when girls are very young, they are most vulnerable to such bias since they are growing up in a society that has certain views on what women are allowed to do. Yet, as society and people themselves become more open minded, the bias against women will lessen and may even disappear one day.

 

 

National Center for Educational Statistics–  http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2015/2015075.pdf

 

Naeyc for families– http://families.naeyc.org/learning-and-development/music-math-more/math-talk-infants-and-toddlers