GDST | Are Girls Good or Bad at Maths?

By Will Wareing

If there is any difference in the innate abilities of girls and boys in maths, no one has been able to pin them down – despite much trying (as cited in Laurel School Centre for Research on Girls November eletter, New York Times op-ed, Scientific American). Some researchers point to, at best, differences in various mathematical skills, such as spatial manipulation over number handling or problem solving, but there is no suggestion this stems from an innate disadvantage.

What researchers are more confident about are gender differences in attitudes to the subject and in its choice for further study, with girls often not choosing maths as an A-level – but with one very important proviso, that girls are markedly more likely to choose Maths (and/or Physics) at girls-only schools.

In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, the columnist Mrs Moneypenny bemoaned the lack of girls in STEM classes in her son’s coeducational comprehensive at A-level. She speculated that girls need to be encouraged early in the subject and for confidence and self-belief in such subjects to be nurtured from the outset.

As an example, I could perhaps point Mrs Moneypenny towards this video from a recent GDST Maths conference for 10-years-olds, in which the ability to work collaboratively and solve problems, in this case in the area of probability, were actively encouraged – as was a basic love of the subject.

120 girls from 22 schools across the country took part in the event at Oxford University’s Maths Institute, a place in which the wonder and fascination of Maths is written into the bones of the building. Girls walked over Sir Roger Penrose’s infinity tiling as they entered the Institute and all around them Maths was made real and concrete – from the internal light wells derived from the wave pattern of a drumbeat to a common room in which real, working mathematicians were really working, with every surface, including the windows, available for jottings.

One of the girls indeed wrote ‘I love maths’ on the window. Notably, junior school GDST girls, in a 2016 survey of what they liked best about their teaching, chose Maths above other core subjects, including English. They survey was one of the biggest pupil surveys in the world with just under 12,000 girls taking part.

In free response boxes, girls made comments such as: ‘the lesson that I get excited about is maths because I really want to get my 8x better,’ or ‘I love maths because I like getting challenged.’

Some were career-orientated: ‘I love maths because I want to be in a finance when I grow up’ but others just seemed to respond innately to it: ‘Every time I go to do maths I feel so happy because it is just so much fun.’

In the 2018 GDST A-level cohort, a staggering 41.5% of girls chose to study Maths – and that is a percentage that has increased over a 3-year period; out of interest, 46.1% chose one science. So the lesson is clear – get them young, get them loving maths and people the world with female engineers!

Will Wareing is deputy director of education, Innovation and Learning, at the GDST. He tweets @wjdwareing