It suggests that the math gender gap diminishes as governments and societies give women more preferable treatment. Apparently, data from 40 countries indicates that, in Iceland, girls actually outperform boys in math. In a dozen other countries, the sexes are “roughly on par.”

It’s not that surprising, and it doesn’t dispel the notion of biological gender differences. Take this little tidbit, which doesn’t seem to find its way into the press coverage:

Having linked social structures to the math gender gap from country to country, Sapienza wonders whether this result rules out biological influences entirely. The answer is no. The biological hypothesis suggests that an average boy would score higher in mathematics than in reading, while for girls the reverse is true. This pattern does not change in more gender equal societies hinting that some aspects of academic performance may be innately different between boys and girls.
Sapienza and colleagues found that boys, regardless of the country and social environment in which they live, typically do better in math than in reading. Similarly, girls are usually better in reading than in math, regardless of the degree of gender equality in their society. As a result, in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys.
Some evidence of the influence of biology can be gained by looking at mathematics sub-scores. Previous research had shown that boys’ advantage over girls in math is most pronounced in geometry (e.g., Pythagorean theorem), while the gap is narrowest in arithmetic (e.g., 1+2=3). But no matter how much girls narrow the gender gaps in geometry and arithmetic in more gender-equal countries, boys always score higher in geometry than arithmetic, while the opposite is observed for girls.

In other words, a society that focuses on providing opportunities to women can educate girls better in general, increasing all their scores relative to men’s. In one country, this took place to the degree that women’s math scores, while lower than women’s reading scores, were actually higher than men’s math scores. One hopes that increasing female scores didn’t come at the cost of ignoring boys.

Then again, who cares about boys? The reading gap is more severe than the math one, and in every single country girls out-read boys.

UPDATE: From the test the researchers used, the 2006 report: “Overall gender differences in mathematics were less than one-third as large as for reading, 11 points on average across OECD countries. This has not changed since PISA 2003.” (The researchers used 2003 data.)