A Summary of “The Math Gender Gap: Nurture Trumps Nature”

            In the article “The Math Gender Gap: Nurture Trumps Nature,”http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/30/the-math-gender-gap-nurture-can-trump-nature/ Szalavitz (2011) discusses a study that has shown that culture can be responsible for differences in gender performance. Research was done that showed that there are not enough women professors in big universities, and we need to know why. A new researcher Moshe Hoffman researched about two tribes in India to prove if culture controls different gender performances in math. The tribes are same in almost everything but have different cultures. The Karbi has a culture where men control everything, but the Khasi is different because there is equality between men and women for education and jobs. It is difficult for women to have a good future in the Karbi because men always say that they are not smart enough, and the women do not try to change their positions in the tribe. On the other hand, women are very important in the Khasi because they control the house bills and money issues. When Hoffman tested the tribes with a math test that tested for spatial ability, which shows how smart the person is in math and science, Karbi men were better than women because they had more education, but the scores were the same for men and women in the Khasi tribe because they had equal education. Overall, the study showed that culture does affect math performance between men and women. Rebecca Goldin says that the test is good and it proves that, but the test can be improved by adding testing spatial rotation, too. She also said that we don’t know if biology makes a difference, and we learned from this study that we cannot say that culture is not important

 

            In general, Maia Szalavitz, convinced me that culture differences can affect performance in math and science. She has published a lot of articles in TIME Magazine that all usually are about neuroscience and what can affect it. She has also written books like Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential — and Endangered, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, and Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, which are all related to her skills in neuroscience, so she is definitely experienced in this field of study. In my opinion, the article was very well organized because all of the important information that was needed for us to understand what is going on was included before she discussed the results. Throughout the article the information about the tribes was given for both tribes in the same paragraph. Most of the language that Szalavitz used was formal enough for this kind of article. Everything was clear and described enough to be understood, and it was very smart to have the opinion of another person that also knows about neuroscience to discuss the results that Hoffman got. With all of this good qualities that were in this article, I believe that this was presented so that it can convince the reader.