Boys are better than girls at math.

Comparing boys and girls math performance

It has long been believed that boys perform better than girls at math. If we look around at math- related professions like engineering, physicists or mathematicians, we find more men than women in these fields.

However, it is still hot debate topic, as to whether the difference in the performance of boys and girls is due to nature or nurture. Globally, statistics tend show that boys perform better than girls at math, but if the statistics are narrowed down to countries where gender favoritism is prevalent, the gap between the performance of boys and girls becomes insignificant. This could indicate that boys are better than math in the first place, because of gender favoritism.

Nonetheless, among average quality students, boys and girls may be at par in terms of their math abilities. However, the debate still continues as to whether there is a difference, at the higher extremes of the bell curve. This is where the most talented and brilliant mathematicians are classified. Some studies show that at this end of the bell curve, boys do indeed outnumber girls.

Our hypothesis has been proven to be false. Even though the boys did better than the girls by 0.4%, there were a few schools where the girls performed better than the boys. Overall, the difference between the boys and girls, was insignificant.

Girls tend to perform more poorly than boys in countries where gender inequality still exists. In most modern/developed countries like the USA, and in Europe,, where  boys and girls are treated equally, girls perform equally well, or even better, than boys.  It is believed that nurture (and not nature,) causes the difference in performance.

This science fair project may be repeated, this time, with students from different age groups.

Modify the science project experiment, using data on math exam results for the top 10 students only, from various schools and comparing the difference in performance of the boys and girls.