The math gap
When Glenn Ellison’s daughters started middle school in a Boston suburb in 2007, Ellison decided to become a volunteer coach of the school’s math team. While his squad was earning a place in the state finals, Ellison noticed something distinctive about his students. “We would go to math contests, and my team didn’t look like other teams,” says Ellison, who is MIT’s Gregory K. Palm (1970) Professor of Economics. He was coaching an all-girls squad, largely consisting of his daughters and friends they had recruited. But the other schools’ teams were composed almost entirely of boys. “It was striking and made me think there was something interesting going on,” recalls Ellison.Ellison made this basic observation the heart of a recently finished paper showing not only that girls are a small minority of elite high school math students, but also that the prevalence of high-achieving girls in math varies from school...