well, i have a feeling we're thinking about different things here. i haven't claimed that women don't preform as well as men in math and science. what i'm saying is that the studies i've read show that statistically, men and women have different strong and weak points in the ways our minds operate. i'm not saying anyone is better or worse; we're different.

as an example, here is an excerpt from a paper in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly: Special Issue on Mathematics and Science (2004)

It is striking that spatial gender differences can be found as early as preschool and kindergarten. Researchers have provided evidence of early gender differences in mental rotation ability as well as in other types of mental transformations (Cronin, 1967; Rosser, Ensing, Gilder & Lane, 1984; McGuinness & Morley, 1991). Levine and colleagues (1999) found evidence of gender differences favoring males on part-whole relations tasks requiring mental transformations (slides) and two-dimensional mental rotations (turns) in children as young as four-and-a-half.



The material below was excerpted from Casey, Pezaris, Anderson, and Bassi (2004), and article in the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Monograph. Challenging young children mathematically.

“Why do these findings have implications for young children in particular?…” [Spatial skills] “are useful for young math learners when constructing with blocks, estimating how many disks are in a jar, estimating the length of a pencil, or figuring out how to put together a tangram puzzle or a pattern block design….We believe that strategies that children choose for solving mathematics problems develop right at the outset of schooling, and that we need to start at this point in time to promote spatial as well as analytical strategies for solving mathematics problems. This is particularly critical for girls, since boys appear to be more likely to acquire these strategies on their own during the early years.”

References for the Excerpted Articles


Casey, B., Kersh, J. E., & Mercer Young, J. (2004). Storytelling sagas: An effective medium for teaching early childhood mathematics. Early Childhood Research Quarterly: Special Issue on Mathematics and Science, 19, 167-172.

Casey, B., Pezaris, B., Anderson, K., Bassi, J. (2004). Gender differences in spatial skills: Implications for the mathematics education of young children. C. Greenes, & J. Tsankova (Eds.) Challenging young children mathematically (pp. 28-39). Golden, Co.: NCSM. Special Monograph on Early Childhood Mathematics. National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics.

www2.bc.edu/~caseyb/spatial.html