Games like chess stimulate the brain and help improve academic performance in subjects like math and computer science. However men are better than women at chess (99 out of the top 100 chess players in the world are men) and these gender differences persist in careers related to science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM). According to a new study by researchers at Duke University, which examined 30 years of test data from 1.6 million smart students, boys still outnumber girls by more than 3-to-1 in math and science.
At these highest levels of math ability, the researchers found, seventh-grade boys outnumbered girls by 4-to-1 on the SAT and 3-to-1 on the ACT. And the ratio of high-scoring boys to girls on the ACT test for scientific reasoning was found to be 3-1. Previous studies have suggested that women are more drawn to people and men are more drawn to things, and that difference also explains the better performance by girls in other subjects. Highly gifted girls performed better than highly gifted boys on SAT tests for writing and verbal reasoning, obtaining scores of 700 or above, but the difference was small, the study found. "It's apparent that there are still differences in ability levels due to gender, even as women have occupied more STEM jobs in the last 30 years," said Jonathan Wai, the lead Duke researcher.
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