Rome - Little girls may be made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but they almost always grow up to trump boys in reading skills and, given equal opportunity, can also match males' ability at maths, a new study suggests. Italian and US researchers based their study on data from a 2003 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) programme, in which more than 276,000 15-year-old students in 40 different countries took the same maths and reading tests.
The findings, published in the May 30 edition of the magazine, "Science," indicate that the so-called "gender gap" in maths scores virtually disappears in countries with a high level of social and gender equality.
Researcher Luigi Guiso, from Florence's European University Institute, and colleagues from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University in Evanston, compared the results, by country, with measures of social gender equality, such as the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index.
Girls' maths scores were, on average, lower than those of boys', but the results varied significantly from country to country while both genders generally scored higher in countries with more gender equality.
In Norway, where sexes enjoy a high degree of parity, there was no gap in maths scores between boys and girls, while in less egalitarian countries such as Turkey, boys scored much higher, the study showed.
In all countries, girls' reading scores were higher than those of boys.
In more gender-equal societies, the girls' advantage in reading increased, suggesting that when equal opportunities for education and employment exist, girls do not simply catch up with boys in maths, but do better overall.
