Girls Get Higher Math Grades If Teacher Doesn’t Know Their Gender

For a girl, just writing her name can be a limitation. That's according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which revealed that girls scored higher than boys on a math exam when graded by outsiders who did not know the students' names, but the boys made higher grades when scored by teachers who knew their names.  (Rage stroke, brb.) Researchers looked at three groups of Israeli students over a period of several years, and determined teachers' unconscious bias, and resulting grades, has an effect on what subjects female students are interested in later.

“It goes a long way to showing it’s not the students or the home, but
the classroom teacher’s behavior that explains part of the differences
over time between boys and girls,” the report's co-author Victor Lavy told The New York Times.

And, that could be yet another barrier preventing more women from not only becoming high school mathletes like Lindsey Weir and Cady Heron, but also entering into math and science fields as adults. The study took place in Israel, but Lavy told the Times he suspects the same is true across the world, including in the U.S.  Of course, it's important to note that the teachers in the study didn't realize they were discriminating against girls. But that's what makes it all the more sad, that our internalized gender discrimination is so deep-seated, we often don't even realize it exists.