From the new research that has found that the under-performance of girls in mathematics is related to gender inequality in society, there emerges a simple sum that anyone can work out. Gender-equal societies are so rare as to be hardly visible. After analysing the scores of over 200,000 15-year-olds in reading and mathematics across 40 countries, the researchers from Italy and the United States of America discovered that the girls and boys score equally in mathematics in Sweden and Norway, where the gender gap in society is the smallest. In Iceland, which also has a high gender equality index, girls outscore boys in mathematics. Feminist academics can now cheer. Those repelled three years ago by the suggestion of Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard University, that “innate differences” between men and women might be one of the reasons for fewer women succeeding in science and maths careers can smirk in satisfaction.

But political correctness should not obscure scientific accuracy. In Indonesia and Thailand, both of which have gender-unequal societies, girls outscored the boys in maths. As the researchers point out, while there is a correlation between gender equality and equal performance, improvement in gender-unequal societies will not necessarily crowd maths professors’ chairs with women.

While this is true, the old myth of innate differences can no longer be seriously considered. The researchers have suggested that the same resources and opportunities for both boys and girls will have them performing equally on all fronts. Resources and opportunities cannot be regarded as purely economic, they are the outward manifestation of cultural attitudes. For example, just as boys brilliant in science and mathematics emerge out of rural India, where the quality of education leaves much to be desired, girls from the same areas are either married off early, or constrained to stay at home because the high school is too far. And in the cities, where resources and opportunities appear to be equal, there is a deep belief that women are constitutionally illogical, they have no brain for maths or abstract theory. That all the women mathematicians, philosophers and composers put together make a tiny list seems to support this belief. To pass this off as logic, essential social factors are excluded while serving up a mishmash of history, statistics and age-old gender bias.

The circular reasoning has led to the practice of boys’ schools doing away with the humanities section in the higher classes, because boys, whether they like it or not, should study science. If an unfortunate boy, a victim of the logic his sex calls its own, wants to study literature or history, he would have to join a co-educational school. The girls in the same study have scored consistently over the boys in reading. Does this make all boys naturally illiterate?