Abstract
Recent public discussions have suggested that the under-representation of women in science and mathematics careers can be traced back to intrinsic differences in aptitude. However, true gender differences are difficult to assess because sociocultural influences enter at an early point in childhood. If these claims of intrinsic differences are true, then gender differences in quantitative and mathematical abilities should emerge early in human development. We examined cross-sectional gender differences in mathematical cognition from over 500 children aged 6 months to 8 years by compiling data from five published studies with unpublished data from longitudinal records. We targeted three key milestones of numerical development: numerosity perception, culturally trained counting, and formal and informal elementary mathematics concepts. In addition to testing for statistical differences between boys’ and girls’ mean performance and variability, we also tested for statistical equivalence between boys’ and girls’ performance. Across all stages of numerical development, analyses consistently revealed that boys and girls do not differ in early quantitative and mathematical ability. These findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood.
Highlights
Adult gender differences in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career representation sometimes are thought to originate from inborn differences between the sexes in aptitude for STEM fields.[1,2,3,4,5] Gender differences could be biological differences that are present at birth, or they might emerge over time with maturation.[4]
Adult STEM talent is derived from a large suite of cognitive abilities and unlikely to be traceable to a single domain or skill, if intrinsic differences between the sexes are a root cause for the underrepresentation of women in STEM, one expectation is that gender differences in quantitative cognition will emerge early in human development
We examined children’s early mathematical cognition during infancy and early childhood to provide insight into whether gender differences are evident in early childhood
Summary
Adult gender differences in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career representation sometimes are thought to originate from inborn differences between the sexes in aptitude for STEM fields.[1,2,3,4,5] Gender differences could be biological differences that are present at birth, or they might emerge over time with maturation.[4]. Across all three aspects of early mathematical cognition assessed here, we would expect that if boys and girls truly differ in their capacities for numerical processing, we should find evidence of statistical differences in mean performance (independent-samples t tests), and we should see that this effect is consistent across age (main effect of gender in the linear regressions) or driven by one end of the age range (interaction between gender and age in the linear regression).
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