Steve Levitt and Roland Fryer write
Indeed, in countries like Bahrain and Iran, which are among the worst in terms of gender equality, girls are actually outperforming boys on math, and this is due to relatively strong performance by girls, not an unusually bad showing among the boys.
And also from the same paper
While of course highly speculative, these cross-country data are consistent with the hypothesis that mixed-gender classrooms are a necessary component for gender inequality to translate into poor female math performance, although it is difficult to distinguish single-sex classrooms from Islamic religion in the data.
Read the whole thing as they find many popular hypotheses without empirical support. The results, as they say, are speculative but very interesting. The gender gap in mathematics may arise from the mixed classrooms that alter the incentives for learning. For some reason, the presence of males in the classroom changes the behavior of females. Does math proficiency signal something negative about females? I think that is absurd but anything is possible. Levitt and Fryer do not offer an explanation but what other plausible explanations are out there?
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