Women at Work Follow

Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week. Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of skills on a yearly basis. The paper looked at math performance across grade-level broken down by gender for 10 states from these tests. Here is the key graph: The data includes a measure of effect size called Cohen's d (I discussed it here) and a measure called the variance ratio (VR -- which is just the ratio of the variances). You can see from the data that the difference between boys and girls for math performance is statistically insignificant across grade-level. (A Cohen's d less than about .2-.3 is considered basically insignificant.) Hyde's work has always been important in the debate to explain the relative dearth of women in the math and the sciences. Some people -- notably former Harvard President Larry Summers -- attributed that dearth to differences in innate ability in mathematics between men and women. This data would argue against that assertion, and that interpretation of these findings in a variety of publications. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...