Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

by Cordelia Fine

Then within girls, interesting patterns emerge. Asian American girls are not underrepresented, relative to their numbers in the population. But that doesn’t mean that it’s even simply a white girl problem. Non-Hispanic white girls born in North America are sorely underrepresented: there are about twenty times fewer of them on IMO teams than you’d expect based on their numbers in the population, and they virtually never attend the highly selective MOSP. But this isn’t the case for non-Hispanic white girls who were born in Europe, immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia and the Ukraine, who manage on the whole to keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programmes. The success of this group of women continues into their careers. These women are a hundred times more likely to make it into the maths faculty of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or University of California–Berkeley than their native-born white counterparts.