So, here’s a report from Israel via NPR demonstrating pretty conclusively that disparities in math achievement in school between girls and boys are an artifact of sexism, not any innate differences between the sexes. Turns out that if teachers who know the students grade sixth-grade math exams, girls do worse than boys. But when those same exams are graded by outside teachers who don’t know the genders of the students, the girls in fact do better than the boys. However, the lower scores seem to discourage girls from pursuing mathematics at higher levels.
It’s always good to have hard data bearing out feminist analysis.
Another thing to note: as an English teacher, I’m often told by students that my grading is “subjective,” not like the “objective” grading of math and science, where an answer is either right or wrong (in English essays, it’s either well-supported and well-written or not). But this data seems to show pretty conclusively that math grading, even on the elementary-school level, is subjective as well.