Anything Boys Can Do...; January 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Sharon Begley; 1 Page(s)

When then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested in 2005 that innate differences between men and women may account for the lack of women in top science and engineering positions (and subsequently resigned), he was referring to the greater male variability hypothesis. Women, it holds, are on average as mathematically competent as men, but there is a greater innate spread in math ability among men. In other words, a higher proportion of men stumble mathematically, but an equally high proportion excel because of something in the way male brains develop. This supposedly explained why boys tend to dominate math competitions and why men far outnumber women in elite university math departments. Since then, scientists have put the variability hypothesis to the test, and it comes up short.

In the most ambitious study so far, mathematics professor Jonathan Kane of the University of WisconsinWhitewater and oncology professor Janet Mertz of the University of WisconsinMadison analyzed data on math performance from 52 countries, including scores from elite competitions such as the International Mathematical Olympiad. In particular, they examined varianceroughly, how spread out scores are. Two patterns emerged, they report in a paper in the January issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The first is that males and females variance is essentially equal in some countries. The other is that the ratio of males to females variance differs greatly from one country to another. These ranged from 0.91 to 1.52 (where a ratio of 1 means the two sexes variance is equal, and a number greater than 1 means males scores were more spread out than womens).