What do mathematics, chess and philosophy have in common? Among many other things, they have a glaring gap between men and women. And the reason in all three cases may be cultural, rather than biological.
I've been interested in the biological basis of mathematics for a long time now. There are two research strands in this field: first, psychologists (usually developmental psychologists and comparative psychologists) are interested in finding out the universal - innate - cognitive basis of mathematical capacities. To this end, they study the numerical intuitions of infants, nonhuman animals, western adults, and people from cultures with mathematical ideas that are divergent from those of the west. Broadly speaking, researchers who work in this field are looking for underlying commonalities in our mathematical capacities. A second research field, not completely unrelated to the first, as people sometimes work in both fields (Brian Butterworth and David Geary come to mind) attempts to explain individual differences in mathematical competencies. These psychologists examine, amongst other things, the effects of low birth weight on later mathematical performance, congenital conditions such as Turner's syndrome, or the effects of language on numerical skills (e.g., speakers of Welsh and Chinese have an advantage in mental arithmetic, because their languages have a very transparent, completely regular base-10 counting system). A large part of the variability in mathematics can be explained as a result of these factors. However, an unresolved question is whether or not gender plays a role in mathematical excellence. Given that most mathematicians are male, would men have a biological advantage?
The greater male variability hypothesis, originally proposed in the 19th century, argues that men may have an advantage because there is greater variability in mathematical (and other) intellectual abilities: there are more geniuses and more intellectually under endowed men compared to women. The right hand tail of the distribution of male cognitive capacities would thus be longer than that of women, explaining why men predominate in almost all intellectual fields. However, a new study by Kane and Mertz strongly suggests that cultural, not biological factors, explain the predominance of men in mathematics. Kane and Mertz used the PISA and TIMMS assessment scores of children in different countries to examine gender differences in mathematics. They showed that differences in mathematical aptitude between boys and girls (with boys outperforming girls) was associated with socio-cultural factors, in particular, gender equity. Interestingly, they did not find greater variability in boys' scores, which disconfirms the greater male variability hypothesis. Greater gender equity increased children's performance (both boys and girls) and decreased the gap between both genders. The authors argue that their "findings are consistent with the idea that the gap between boys’ and girls’ mathematics performance is due to differences in opportunities available to males versus females, which we will call here the gap due to inequity hypothesis."
I am reminded of a paper on sex differences in chess by Chabris and Glickman published a few years ago in Psychological Science. Gender differences in chess are even more stark than in mathematics, with only 1% of the grand masters being women. In agreement with the Kane and Mertz study, the authors of the chess study found no greater variability in young male players compared to young girls. In locales where at least 50% of the young players are girls, their rating are initially very similar to those of boys. However, the authors suggest that (possibly because the professional chess world is not very inviting for women and very competitive), girls drop out in greater numbers, and participate less in official tournaments, which is important to establish their rating. The authors say: "External factors like the relative lack of female role models among the world’s top players and the prospect of playing a game dominated by boys may be discouraging to girls (or their parents), either directly reducing their likelihood of learning how to play in the first place or indirectly reducing their initial performance in competitive play via test anxiety or stereotype threat". They conclude that because chess remains an overwhelmingly male environment, girls became discouraged. One finding to support this hypothesis is that, the more male a chess community was, the greater the gap in ratings between boys and girls. Interestingly, the threshold under which this male advantage disappeared was 50%, in other words, only if girls made up 50% or more of a chess community did they not have average lower ratings than the boys.
Now onto philosophy. There is some recent debate on whether or not the paucity of women in our profession could be due to (innate?) differences in philosophical intuitions. Regardless of these findings, I think that if the findings from chess and mathematics can be generalized to philosophy, it is mainly a cultural issue as well. Especially the example of chess, where women needed to obtain a critical mass of 50% to obtain similar rating as the men indicate that the lack of women role models will mean that mentoring and addressing the pipeline early on alone will not suffice to decrease the gender imbalance in our profession.
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