Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders. Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States - Interactive Graphic. Girls outperformed boys in more countries in a science test given to 15-year-old students in 65 countries — but in the United States, boys led the girls. Countries in Asia and Northern Europe had high scores, and 15-year-old girls consistently outscored boys. But the opposite was true in the United States, where boys scored 2.7 percent better than girls. The trend in Western European countries and the Americas was similar; boys performed better than girls. Students in Eastern and Southern Europe, and the Middle East, had slightly lower overall scores, but girls consistently did better than boys. The exam, which is given every three years, was taken in 2009 by 470,000 students in 65 developed nations. Researchers say cultural forces keeping girls away from scientific careers are strong in the United States, Britain and Canada but far less pervasive in Russia, Asia and the Middle East.
For years — and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. What explains the gap? The motherhood penalty: It’s not children that slow mothers down. There are fewer women at the top because they have a different work/life balance than men, it is claimed. Mothers’ careers progress slowly because they are mothers — because they have to spend more time on their children. There’s some appeal in this explanation; it seems intuitively correct.
Mothers have greater childcare responsibilities than fathers. And while we may hope for a different division of labor some day, we speculate that these work/life realities explain why women who are mothers are on slower career tracks than men. It’s the realities of daily life behind the statistics that in fact explain the statistics. New evidence on womens’ careers is presented in the White Paper on the Position of Women in Science in Spain. But instead of invoking the intuitive explanation mentioned above, the white paper emphasizes that women who have children are discriminated against simply because they are mothers and not because their job performance is actually different. Sheryl Sandberg Presents: Deeply Troubling Stats About Women.