ACCORDING TO RESEARCHERS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF Washington, gender stereotypes about math ("math is for boys, not for girls") are expressed as early as second grade. The UW study showed that girls' lack of interest in math may stem from messaging that they receive from society. Indeed, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Israeli elementary school teachers overestimated the performance of boys in math and science but underestimated that of girls. From a young age, girls are taught that “math is not for us,” and are pushed to develop skills in other areas such as reading and language arts. In studies on the achievement gap, the math learning gap has been found as early as elementary school; a paper from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign noted that girls made up only 20 percent of students above the 99th percentile in math during the fall in kindergarten and the gap is more pronounced in first grade. What begins as bias thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: young women are discouraged from developing the skills that allow them to pursue careers in math, science, and engineering (see Figure 1).
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