Concern about gender differences in mathematics achievement is a serious issue because maths is a skill one needs to master in order to function in life and an important ‘filter’ to higher paid jobs.
Up to a few decades ago, boys were reported as performing better than girls in maths, especially at the higher levels (Costello, 1991; Hanna et al, 1990). But recent international studies (e.g., TIMSS 2007) have shown no significant differences between the two. Indeed, McCormack (2014) notes that “great gains have been made over the past several decades, and more recent research has documented few and marginal gender differences in mathematics performance”.
To establish whether gender differences exist in mathematics attainment in Malta, I examined a number of recent reports, namely:
• End of primary benchmark reports;
• SEC exam statistical reports;
• Matriculation certificate exams statistical reports; and
• Trends in International Mathematical and Science Study (TIMSS) international mathematics reports.
The following are the main outcomes emerging from these documents:
• At primary level, results appear to be inconsistent. While no differences were found in benchmark results, TIMSS 2011 found that Maltese boys did better than girls.
• At secondary level, SEC results tend to vary over the years, with girls sometimes outperforming boys and vice-versa. These results seem to confirm the outcomes of TIMSS 2007, where no gender differences were reported. However, in line with a number of international reports, there is a tendency that more boys than girls obtain higher grades.
• At advanced level, female students tend to do better than their male counterparts. But the number of male students taking ‘A’ level mathematics is about twice the number of females. At Intermediate level, female students tend to not only outnumber boys, but also perform significantly better.
While up to compulsory education there do not appear to be large gender differences in mathematics achievement, female students appear to shy away from higher level mathematics. This prompts one to ask why this state of affairs exists. This is a more complex issue.
Despite significant advances towards achieving gender equality in various aspects, Maltese society still seems to feature a strong sense of stereotyping as far as maths and related professions are concerned. This is confirmed by the fact that male students registering for courses within the faculties of the built environment, engineering and ICT significantly outnumber females.
References:
- J. Costello (1991). Teaching & Learning Maths 11-16. Routledge.
- G. Hanna, E. Kundiger and C. Larouche (1990). Mathematical Achievement of Grade 12 Girls in Fifteen Countries. In L. Burton (1992). Gender and Mathematics: An International Perspective. Cassell.
- M. McCormack (2014). Mathematics and Gender. In D. Leslie and H. Mendick (2014) (eds.). Debates in Mathematics Education. Routledge.
- V.S. Mullis, M.O. Martin and P. Foy (2007). TIMSS 2007 International Mathematics Report.
Joseph Mamo is a visiting senior lecturer at the University of Malta and ex-head of Department of Mathematics, St Ignatius College.
Did you know?
When E.T. Bell published Men of Mathematics in 1937, as the title suggests, no reference was made to female mathematicians. Nevertheless, despite the fact that mathematics has been traditionally dominated by males, over the centuries a number of women still managed to make a name for themselves:
• Hypatia, the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria (c. AD 335–405), became the head of the Neoplatonist school in Alexandria. Although not much remains of her contributions to mathematics, she was a leading mathematician and astronomer, as well as a popular teacher and lecturer on philosophical topics.
• Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935) was a German mathematician who made landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Albert Einstein, Pavel Alexandrov, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener described her as the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
• On August 13, 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian professor of mathematics at Stanford University, became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, for her outstanding contributions to geometry. She was born in 1977 and regretfully passed away on July 14, 2017, after a long battle with breast cancer.
For more trivia, see: www.um.edu.mt/think
Sound bites
• In 2013, the Peruvian mathematician Harald Helfgott published a paper on the internet (https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7748) that appears to have finally proved Goldbach’s weak conjecture, which states that every odd integer greater than five can be expressed as the sum of three prime numbers. A year earlier, Terence Tao, arguably the most brilliant mathematician in the world at the moment, had proved that at most five prime numbers are needed (https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6656). The conjecture was made by Christian Goldbach in 1742. In a reply to Goldbach in the same year, Leonhard Euler proposed a stronger version (referred to as Goldbach’s strong conjecture), which states that every even number larger than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes. This immediately implies the weak version (can you see why?). It is one of the most popular open problems in mathematics.
• Although ageing is a natural part of life, it has not deterred humans from trying to stop it or to at least slow it down. However, it now seems that it has been mathematically proved that trying to stop ageing is a futile endeavour. According to University of Arizona professor Joanna Masel and postdoctoral researcher Paul Neson, it is mathematically impossible to halt ageing in multicellular organisms like humans. Masel and Nelson outline their findings on math and ageing in a new research paper titled Intercellular Competition and Inevitability of Multicellular Aging and published in the highly prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the second most cited journal across all fields of science. For further reading, see https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171030154430.htm .
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