New research finds that young girls and boys have 'indistinguishable' math abilities.
) because they are just more inclined to handle math better. When in reality, that misconception is just one more thing to set back young girls and women.
Cantlon and her team got the participating children to perform cognitive tests and watch videos of engaging math lessons while inside an MRI scanner. This marks the first study to use neuroimaging to evaluate biological gender differences in the math abilities in children. “We looked at which areas of the brain respond more strongly to mathematics content in the videos and tasks, compared to non-math content like reading or the alphabet. So you can define the math network that way by looking at regions that respond more strongly,” Cantlon says. “When we do that in little girls, we see a particular network of the brain respond, and when we do that same analysis in boys we see the exact same regions.” She says the networks in both boys and girls are identical.
Cantlon feels that the way we socialize our children leads girls and women to shy away from math and STEM fields.that families spend more time with young boys in play that involves spatial cognition, while teachers also preferentially spend more time with boys during math class, she said. Also, children often pick up on cues from their parent’s expectations for math abilities.
“Typical socialization can exacerbate small differences between boys and girls that can snowball into how we treat them in science and math,” Cantlon said. “We need to be cognizant of these origins to ensure we aren’t the ones causing the gender inequities.”
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