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Gender disparities in math proficiency emerge only after children start school, according to a June study coauthored by Harvard Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke ’71 and published in the science journal Nature.

Spelke and an international research team analyzed four years worth of data on more than 2.5 million French students to pinpoint when the long-documented gender gap in math achievement begins. They found that students enter school with similar math proficiency levels, and a gap favoring boys emerges after the first year of school.

“The more we know, the better position we will be in to improve education for everyone,” Spelke said.

Though boys and girls scored similarly on math aptitude tests before starting first grade, the researchers found that it only took four months of formal instruction for a gender gap to emerge. Even after teachers began introducing math a year earlier, this result held true, and kindergarten boys started to score higher than their female counterparts.

“What’s causing these differences?” Spelke asked. “We don’t know the answer at all, but I think we now have good reason to believe that whatever is causing them is taking place in the schools.”

Researchers found that the difference between boys and girls’ math scores only narrowed during the pandemic, when in-person instruction at schools stopped and students returned home for online education.

“At this point, we don’t know what the causes are,” Spelke said. “We’re in this cool position where institutions have been put in place in France that should enable the French Education Ministry — working together with its scientific advisors — to find out what the causes are.”

Spelke outlined a range of potential explanations for why a school environment might cause a gender gap in math achievement.

“One possibility that’s only testable in an indirect way is that [Harvard Psychology professor] Steven Pinker is right, and there’s some intrinsic aptitude for formal mathematics that gets triggered during instruction,” she said. “It’s also possible that there are biases by teachers. There’s evidence in the US that this might be the case.”

Even though the factors driving the observed gender gap remain unclear, Spelke said further research into its causes would enable schools to redesign their math curriculums in order to better support all students.

“When you discover that your education system isn’t working perfectly — and I don’t think any education system has ever worked perfectly — that’s not a cause for pessimism,” she said. “It’s a cause for actually getting in there and seeing what’s producing this result, and what we can do to change it in a positive direction.”

—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.