Teaching Girls to Tinker

By Lisa Damour

Girls now surpass boys in nearly every measure of academic success. A 2004 report from the National Center for Education Statistics confirmed that girls had higher educational goals than boys, were less likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school, took more Advanced Placement courses, and were more likely to go to and graduate from college.

Even in high school mathematics— a subject where boys have consistently held an edge—the playing field seems, somehow, to have leveled. As a 2008 report in the journal Science calmly declared, “Standardized tests in the U.S. indicate that girls now score just as well as boys in math.”

Yet, even as girls open new gender gaps by outpacing their male peers in most subjects, men still receive roughly 77 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and 85 percent of those in computer science. Why aren’t girls choosing to enter these critical...