ABSTRACT
In 1994, Mattel created a Barbie™ doll, which said: “Math is hard!,” highlighting gender stereotypes about math ability in American society. Disconcertingly, Barbie’s frustration with math reflects a social reality in which males outperform females on standardized achievement tests such as the SAT-M and the GRE-Q (e.g., Brown & Josephs, 1999), young girls are less likely to participate in math-related activities (Eccles & Jacobs, 1987), female adolescents pursue fewer high-level math courses (Geary, 1996), and mathematically gifted males are about twice as likely as their mathematically gifted female counterparts to attain a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and to gain employment in math-related fields (Benbow, Lubinski, Shea, & Eftekhari-Sanjani, 2000). Why do females who are at the vanguard of their group in mathematics show poorer performance and less success than high-achieving males? To address this question, we examine biological and environmental theories of gender differences in math ability and attempt to demonstrate how the social contextual can largely explain these and other group differences (e.g., Steele, 1997).
