Confidence holding girls back in maths?

The study of 15-year-olds in developed countries revealed 41 percent of British girls believe they are not good at maths.

The study of 15-year-olds in developed countries revealed 41 percent of British girls believe they are not good at maths.

Published Jan 23, 2014

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London - A crisis of confidence among girls studying maths is dragging down their performance at school and stunting their choice of careers, a report has found.

Girls are better than boys in most subjects and outperform them in the vast majority of formal exams.

But they have so little self-belief in maths that they are up to a term behind boys by their mid-teens and are far more likely to drop it for A-levels.

The low expectations are the result of parents and teachers assuming they are better suited to other subjects, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which conducted the research and described its findings as “troubling”.

The study of 15-year-olds in developed countries revealed 41 percent of British girls believe they are not good at maths, compared to just 24 percent of boys.

This translates into just ten per cent being high-fliers in the subject at school, compared to 13 percent of boys. The OECD average is 11 percent and 15 percent respectively.

The worst-performing girls are around three months behind their counterparts in other OECD countries and a staggering six years adrift of top students in world leader Shanghai.

The gender gap in teenagers planning to continue studying maths when they leave school is 14 percent in the UK - 60 percent of boys and 46 percent of girls - compared to an average of 12 percent in developed countries.

And girls rule themselves out of some of the most lucrative jobs because of their dislike for the subject.

Only 40 percent would consider a job that “requires considerable use of mathematics” over one that is science-based, while for boys it is 50 percent.

Even if they choose science-heavy jobs, they tend to opt for those with little maths, such as health and social fields. Boys show a preference to be engineers or computer scientists.

The study suggested there is no genetic reason for the difference between the sexes in the UK.

There is no gender gap in 23 of the 65 countries or major economic regions studied and girls outperform boys in several countries including Iceland and Malaysia.

The data comes from further analysis of the OECD’s 2012 PISA survey (Programme for International Student Assessment), which last month revealed British teenagers have dropped out of the top 20 rankings in maths, science and reading for the first time.

Pupils in Vietnam, Shanghai and Poland now have a better understanding of all three core subjects.

Another report from the organisation in October found the UK was the only country where young people were worse at maths and reading than those approaching retirement, despite years of rising exam grades.

The latest research said there had been no improvement in closing the gap in maths between boys and girls since 2003.

The authors said: “More troubling still is the fact that the gender gap extends to students’ attitudes towards learning mathematics, which has repercussions in life well beyond school.

“Shrinking the gender gap in mathematics performance will require the concerted effort of parents, teachers and society as a whole to change the stereotyped notions of what boys and girls excel at, what they enjoy doing and what they believe they can achieve.”

Recommendations to “change the mindset” include making the subject more interesting to girls and eliminating stereotypes in textbooks.

British education minister Elizabeth Truss said girls had been let down by “outdated assumptions about what they are good at”.

She added: “This government’s reforms are fixing the problem. Thanks to the new Ebacc measure [of core subjects including English, maths and science to check a school’s performance], the number of girls doing GCSE physics is at record levels, while girls’ A-level entries for chemistry and maths are at their highest ever levels.” - Daily Mail

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