A study analyzing data from a French educational initiative involving over 2.5 million students indicated no gender differences in math skills at first grade. After four months of systematic math instruction, gaps favoring boys emerged and expanded through later grades. Elizabeth Spelke highlights that the results reinforce prior findings based on smaller U.S. samples, underscoring that observable gender disparities are a product of instructional practices rather than innate cognitive abilities. The absence of gender differences in infancy suggests that disparities develop not from biology, but likely from educational experiences.
"The headline conclusion is that the gender gap emerges when systematic instruction in mathematics begins," summarized Spelke, the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology.
"My argument was, 'OK, if there really were biological differences, maybe we would see them in the infancy period,'" recalled Spelke, who laid out her evidence in a critical review for the journal American Psychologist that year.
"We were always reporting on the gender composition of our studies, as well as the relative performance of boys and girls, but we were never finding any differences favoring either gender over the other."
"The fact that there are no differences in infants could be because the abilities that show gender effects actually emerge during preschool."
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