Girls Roxor on the Math

In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in math in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.

Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls, who grew up believing it, wound up avoiding harder math classes.

"It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology," Hyde said.

That's changing, albeit slowly. Women are now earning 48 percent of undergraduate college degrees in math; they still lag far behind in physics and engineering.

Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/24/girls.math.ap/index.html

My high school physics teacher made me and the only other girl in AP Physics partner on everything... then he would make fun of our team. He also told the PTA girls just weren't good at Physics. Yeah, thanks.

The irony being that once I knew the dreaded right-hand rule was just MATH (i/j/k vector circle, to be precise) and stopped jacking around with the thumb-points-this-way thing, I found physics to be really easy....