Males and females are often compared on aspects of intelligence in popular culture: are men better than women at math? Are women better at writing? Is the acknowledgement and study of these patterns perpetuating stereotypes?
Matthew Makel—director of research at the Duke Talent Identification Program, a program geared towards gifted students—was the lead author in a study published this month on sex differences in cognitive abilities. The study had two goals—to investigate whether such differences have changed since the 1980s and to compare these findings to a different culture, in this case India.
“If we are not taking advantage of fully developing the talents of all individuals, then that’s a huge loss to society, as well as being unfair to those individuals if they have a talent and a passion but were limited by some barrier that society has put up to restrict their talent development,” Makel said.
The researchers found that the rates at which males score in the the top 0.01 percent of math achievement scores compared to females in the United States has decreased since 1980, though males still perform better than females overall. Girls in the U.S. have gradually surpassed boys on language tests since the 1980s and now make up 60 percent of top SAT language scores.
The gender gaps among gifted youth in India are larger than in the U.S., with boys having an advantage in math performance and girls similarly surpassing boys in language, according to the study. Academically-talented boys in both the U.S. and India surpassed girls in science.
The study involved 320,554 gifted seventh graders in the U.S. and 7,119 in India who participated in the Duke TIP talent search between 2011 and 2015.
“One of the examples that we cite in the beginning of our paper is that women hold only about 16 to 17 percent of tenured faculty positions, and less than 30 percent of doctorates in math-intensive fields," Makel said. “If we as a society aren’t developing talent, then we are throwing away the potential to solve some of the world’s most difficult struggles, and we aren’t doing all that we can to help individuals reach their own peak performance and develop their own personal talents."
However, Daniel Voyer, professor of psychology at the University of New Brunswick and an expert in sex differences in cognitive ability, noted potential problems with the study.
“I’m scared about that kind of research. I think it perpetuates stereotypes,” Voyer said. “Emphasizing the sex differences in that way is in the end not helping anybody, because in the end you still have boys that are not doing well, and you still have girls who are doing well.”
Makel said he believes that researching sex differences in cognitive ability at the highest extremes is important because it provides information that could help achieve equity in STEM careers.
There could also be problems with the study’s focus on the extremes of cognitive ability, Voyer noted.
“I think their research was well done for the question they were asking," Voyer said. "I’m just not sure exactly what the implications are. I don’t know that the implications are as profound as we might think at first glance.”
Duke TIP decided to study gifted children because studying only average performance “would ignore important and meaningful information that could help us understand how talent is developed in modern society," Makel explained.
Voyer noted that he thinks it it important to create a positive atmosphere for both genders to learn. He co-authored a study with his wife Susan Voyer on gender differences in scholastic achievement, which reported that females achieve consistently higher school grades than males.
“It doesn’t mean we should overemphasize boys and disregard girls. It just means that we should provide a better learning environment for everybody,” Voyer said. “We have to find ways to get everybody to engage in their own learning. It doesn’t mean putting boys and girls in different classrooms.”
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