Perfect SAT Math Scores: Male-Female Ratio of 2:1

In September I had a post about the 2010 Math SAT test results, and reported on the gender differences in favor of males, who scored 34 points higher on average this year than their female counterparts. This follows a persistent 30+ point differential in favor of male high school students that goes back to at least the early 1970s.

This is a follow-up to that post, and the chart above (click to enlarge) displays the results of the 2010 Math SAT test by gender for all scores between 580 and 800 by 10-point intervals. Notice that:

1. For all math SAT scores of 580 and above (70th percentile), male students outnumbered female students.

2. As the scores increased by 10-point intervals from 580 to 800, the male-female ratio increased in almost cases, reaching a peak of 2.08-t0-1 for perfect scores of 800.

3. More women (827,197) than men (720,793) took the SAT test in 2010, and to adjust for those differences in sample sizes, we can calculate that 1.12% of males had perfect 800 scores compared to 0.47% of females, for an adjusted male-female ratio of 2.38:1 (vs. the 2.08 unadjusted ratio). By either calculation, there were more than twice as many male high school students getting a perfect score on the SAT Math test than female students.

As I reported before, these results are especially significant because female high schools students are generally better students overall than males, and equally or better prepared for the SAT Math test than male students:

a. Females outnumbered males in the top 10% of their 2010 classes - there were 127 female students in the top 10% of high schools for every 100 male students (56% female to 44% male).

b. Nationwide, there were 144 female high school students with GPAs of A+ for every 100 males (59% female vs. 41% male).

c. Females had a higher average GPA of 3.40 compared to 3.26 on average for male students in 2010.

d. More than half of female high students (51%) took more than 4 years of mathematics, compared to 49% of male students.

e. There were 117 female high school seniors who took AP or Honors Math for every 100 male students.

Bottom Line: Despite now being better prepared academically by many different measures, both overall and for mathematics specifically, female high schools score significantly lower on the SAT math test, and the 30-point differences in test scores favoring males has persisted since Richard Nixon was president.

And yet, we hear statements like this from the gender activists: "There just aren't gender differences anymore in math performance," says University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde, "So parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this. Stereotypes are very, very resistant to change, but as a scientist I have to challenge them with data."

Given the significant and persistent differences in SAT Math tests that have persisted over many generations, and continue to be found for all ethnic groups, the scientific data about gender differences in math performance seem to be challenging Professor Hyde's fact-resistant stereotypes.

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Perfect SAT Math Scores: Male-Female Ratio of 2:1

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