Inspired in part by Larry Summers's comment that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" were behind the gender gap in math performance, Professors Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to review the available evidence and see if boys consistently outperformed girls at the highest levels. Summers's claim — and one accepted by many others — was that while girls might perform as well as boys on average, boys had a greater variability of mathematical aptitude and thus might always dominate in the upper echelons of mathematics. No woman, some note, has ever won the Fields Medal, math's most prestigious honor. But Hyde and Mertz found that the gap between boys and girls at the top levels of achievement did not persist throughout the world, and was smaller in countries with greater gender equality.

In Iceland, Thailand, and the UK, 15-year-old girls outnumbered boys at the top levels of math achievement. In most countries studied, girls' math skills were just as variable as boys', and in the Netherlands they were actually more variable. In general, countries where girls matched or outperformed boys were also countries with high gender equality — like Denmark, Iceland, in the UK. All of these are in the top twelve — the US is 31, right before Kazakhstan. This suggests that culture, not biology, is holding girls back in countries where boys still outperform them.

Hyde and Mertz found that the gender gap in math doesn't even hold across all ethnic groups in the US. For Asian-Americans, more girls than boys scored in the top 1% in one battery of tests. Essentially, Summers's claim of greater variability seemed only to apply to white American kids. Mertz says, "U.S. culture instills in students the belief that math talent is innate; if one is not naturally good at math, there is little one can do to become good at it. In some other countries, people more highly value mathematics and view math performance as being largely related to effort."

It's no surprise that in a country where math skill is assumed to be innate, and where prominent people tell girls they have less innate skill, that girls might not always measure up to boys. We know that negative stereotypes can affect performance, but even in the face of people like Summers, girls in the US are catching up to boys. Girls now take high school calculus at the same rate as boys, and 30% of math doctorates go to women now, as opposed to 5% in the 1950s. American girls may have a ways to go before they reach total equality, but it's going to take more than Larry Summers to keep them down.

Girls Worse At Math? No Way, New Analysis Shows [Reuters]
Culture, Not Biology, Underpins Math Gender Gap [EurekAlert]
Girls Get Math: It's Culture That's Skewed [LiveScience]
Gender Gap In Maths Driven By Social Factors, Not Biological Differences [ScienceBlogs]
Gender Stereotypes Can Affect Men's And Women's Test Performance in Math, Study Shows [NYU]
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007 [World Economic Forum]

It was a strange coincidence that the much-anticipated TV movie of Grey Gardens and former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl's fourth memoir, Not Becoming My Mother, should come out in the same week. While the differences are obvious - one's the story of fallen aristocracy, the other of mid-century malaise - both deal with thwarted female ambition, make one wonder whether fragile psyches can ever triumph over adversity, and, most of all, explore how these questions impact on mother-daughter relationships.

Most everyone - at least, readers of this site - knows the Beales' story: the New York socialites, mother and daughter, whose grandiose showbiz ambitions gave way to a life of delusion and squalor, made all the more dramatic by their family connection to Jackie O. The HBO film, while it broadens the focus, doesn't tell us much we didn't already know about their decline. To anyone who's read one of food writer and editor Reichl's memoirs, this one will not contain shocks, either: her neurotic, frustrated mother is a constant, infuriating presence in her books, her mental instability and scorn for her daughter's career a constant cross for Reichl to bear.

This memoir, title aside, is more sympathetic; Reichl explores the broken dreams that made Miriam Reichl the woman and the mother she was: her wasted education, her thwarted desire to become a doctor, her suffering through what Reichl terms "the worst possible time to have been a middle-class American woman." Reichl's writing is always curiously indifferent to whether the reader likes her, and this is no exception; despite her newfound understanding of her mother's struggles, the ambivalence is the memoir's third character. Miriam's disdain for Ruth's career choice may come from a desire to see Reichl do something more - and from a wish to protect her from crushing disappointment - but it's still cruel, and there were many mothers of the same generation who were able to muster far more support.

Then too, the main question we're left with at the end of the book is, how much was her? It's the same question that dogs Grey Gardens. Could Edith Beale have sung professionally, if not mired in the world of upper-class marriage? Or was it this very life which allowed her to cherish her illusions? Could her daughter have become a musical star without her mother holding her back, or were these women too damaged from the outset? Of Miriam, Reichl writes, "Was she crazy, or was she crazy because she had nothing to do?" As one reviewer puts it, "At times, Mim's mental health seems so fragile that the focus on her thwarted career seems misplaced: You wonder if she could have found satisfaction in any field or had condition, perhaps biological in origin, that would have caught up with her in any job."

Whatever the truth, the one certainty is that the daughters get sucked into the mythology; a daughter has to live her mother's reality, however damaged or damaging that may be. Reichl breaks free, Little Edie (of Miriam's generation) doesn't - but their mothers continue to haunt them, both with the realities and the realities they made. So, how do you break away? If you believe Reichl, the only way is to physically separate yourself from a personality that can dominate you; certainly the Beales show the danger of the alternative. Distance - not just physical, but emotional - is critical. You need to see a parent objectively. In Reichl's case, this meant a lot of anger, a lot of distancing, reducing her mother to a caricature. And then, ultimately, having the maturity to see her as more. In a sense, breaking this hold, as she tells it, is almost like the stages of grieving. And when one considers how domineering these personalities are, that makes a kind of sense. Together, this is an odd Mother's Day roundup, for sure - but certainly a potent one.

Ruth Reichl's Memoir ‘Not Becoming My Mother' – An Apple Falls Far From the Tree [One Minute Book Reviews]
"Not Becoming My Mother [New York Post]
Not Becoming My Mother [Amazon]

1. Peggy: The naive young secretary-turned-copywriter. Perennially underestimated and watchful.

2. Joan: Helen Gurley Brown-style office sex pot, using men for her own ends, rocking glam 60's threads.

3. Betty: The wife. Bryn Mawr grad-turned-perfect-homemaker, Betty is always impeccably groomed and turned out, but neurotic and unhappy.

4. Midge: The mistress. A free-spirited artist, Midge lives in Greenwich Village/"the moment"/wears carelessly tied men's shirts, takes lovers.

5. Rachel: The businesswoman. Heir to her family's department store, Rachel is sophisticated and well-educated, made tough by living in an anti-Semitic man's world.

Okay, it's still a TV show. But each of these women is well-rounded and presented unpatronizingly. Funnily enough, it seems like the constraints of the period setting free up the writers to present far more dimensional women than we normally see — to say nothing of a wider range of body types. It's like, here are the archetypes, now we can flesh them out, instead of the usual well-rounded-woman-who's actually-an-archetype we're used to.

In some ways, perhaps the defined strictures and sexism of the era, which the show puts blatantly on display, make things clear: nothing is hidden or couched or unclear, and the monumental nature of these women's challenges, the definition of their roles, is almost a mental relief for a modern viewer, however appalled we might be. You can turn your radar off for an hour. And from a purely entertaining perspective, these are some well-written dames. Unlike those ubiquitous "Are you a Carrie or a Miranda?" quizzes, you could probably actually find someone here you wouldn't be nauseated to be compared to — not that we're gonna make you do that.

"Some Of Us Have Curves... Should We Be Trying To Hide Them?" [Washington Post]
The Women Of Mad Men [Los Angeles Times]
Square Peggy [New York Magazine]

Related: Mad Men [AMC]