A U.S. study found that girls have closed the gender gap in math performance.Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and University of California, Berkeley, studied SAT results and math scores from 7 million students and found that girls are just as good at math as boys. “There just aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance,” study leader Janet Hyde, a psychology professor at UW-Madison, said in a statement. “So parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this.” The findings are published in the journal Science.

Hyde said cultural beliefs that women aren’t as good as men at math can have an impact on classroom performance. “Because if your mom or your teacher thinks you can’t do math, that can have a big impact on your math self concept.” She said there is no difference in innate ability that can explain why women are so under-represented in math and science careers. Currently, women make up only 15 percent of doctoral candidates in engineering programs, for example. Although girls take just as many advanced high school math courses today as boys and women earn nearly half of all undergraduate degrees in math, Hyde said many parents and teachers still believe girls struggle in math.

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