From Science's Educational Forum Gender Gaps for Math and Reading and a Telling Correlation. (May 30, 2008)

To assess the relative importance of biological and cultural explanations, the authors studied gender differences in test performance across a number of countries.

Math and reading gender gaps. In more gender-equal cultures, the math gender gap disappears and the reading gender gap becomes larger. (Top) Gender gaps in mathematics (yellow) and reading (gray) are calculated as the difference between the average girls' score and the average boys' score. A subset of countries is shown here (see SOM for complete data set and calculations). In many countries, on average, girls perform more poorly than boys in mathematics. In all countries, girls perform better than boys in reading. The gender gap in mathematics and reading correlates with country measures of gender status within the culture, one of which measures is the GGI (bottom). Larger values of GGI point to a better average position of women in society. Besides USA, the countries are abbreviated as their first three letters, except for PRT, Portugal, and ISL, Iceland.