Girls are more afraid of mathematics than boys: study

London: Girls are more afraid of mathematics than boys even in more developed and gender-equal countries like Germany and Norway, according to a new global study.

Psychologists from the University of Glasgow and the Universities of California (Irvine) and Missouri in the US found girls were more anxious about mathematics in 80 per cent of the countries surveyed.

The researchers analysed the large international assessment of student performances in 15-year-olds from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and related that data to socio-economic indicators from the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

PISA is an OECD-funded survey of school achievement carried out with nearly 500,000 pupils in 68 countries and economic regions, including the US and the UK.

The researchers analysed the 2003 and 2012 PISA data, focusing on mathematics achievement, attitudes and emotions.

The focus of the study was on girls' negative emotions about mathematics, described as?"mathematics anxiety".

In more than 80 per cent of countries which took part in the PISA survey, girls were more anxious about mathematics than boys.

The research was carried against a background of significant under-representation of women in many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.

This gender difference is more than twice the magnitude of the gender difference in mathematics performance.

The gender difference in mathematics anxiety was greater in more gender-equal and developed countries, the study noted.

In more economically developed and gender-equal countries like Norway and Germany, boys' and girls' mathematics performances were higher and their mathematics anxiety was lower, but this pattern was stronger for boys than for girls.

The study also found that parents in developed countries generally placed a stronger emphasis on the mathematical development of their sons than their daughters, despite a larger proportion of mothers working in the STEM sector there.

"Social commentators keep mentioning the importance of female role models in STEM. If such role models were really so important, we would have expected that countries where more mothers work in the STEM sector would value mathematics for boys and girls equally. This is not the case and matches other research that same-sex role models make no difference, said Gijsbert Stoet, Reader in Pyschology in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.

This study also analysed the potential role of parental views on the value and importance of mathematics for their daughters and sons.

The study highlights the complexity of the gender differences in mathematics performance and anxiety.

"Policies to attract more girls and women into subjects such as computer science, physics and engineering have largely failed. Gender equality is a key humanistic value in enlightened and developed societies, but our research shows that policy-makers cannot rely on it as the sole factor in getting more girls into subjects like physics and computer science," Stoet said.