Gender Differences In Mathematics Performance: Some Fresh Insights

Abstract

The widespread belief that males outperform females has been of interest not only to the social researcher but to the general public as well. It is in this view that the researchers decided to investigate if there is a significance difference in mathematics performance by gender at least at the tertiary level. Data was obtained from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics (UCC). All level 200 students who took mathematics courses constituting of 384 and 416 students for the 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 academic years respectively were used for the study. The analysis made use of the Hotelling's T test of difference of mean vectors and the chi-squared test of independence.
The results of the study showed that more males offer mathematics courses more than females. However, the grades obtained did not depend on gender. The research also revealed that there is no significant difference in the performance of mathematics by gender. This and many other interesting findings are presented in this paper.


Keywords: Mathematics performance, Hotelling's T² test, Chi-Squared test of independence

Gender and Behaviour Vol. 6 (1) 2008: pp. 1519-1531