Description

At a conference held in January 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, hypothesized that a major reason for the paucity of women mathematicians among the tenured faculty of elite research universities in the USA might be sex-based differences in “intrinsic aptitude” for mathematics, especially at the very high end of the distribution [36]. This commonly held belief is largely based upon data from standardized tests such as the quantitative section
of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) I. This test, designed to determine mathematical proficiency of USA eleventh and twelfth graders, identifies students who have mastered grade-level material, but does not distinguish the profoundly gifted, that is, those who are four or more standard deviations
above the mean, from the merely gifted who also score in the ninety-ninth percentile on this exam.