Note 2 – Sources and further comments

The original Benbow-Stanley article is available here (1.1 MB PDF), downloaded from Camilla Benbow's site, August 8, 2008.

This exercise is based on “The Case of the Falling Nightwatchmen” by R. M. Sapolsky, Discover, July, 1987, pp. 42–45. The article does not appear to be available online.

For more on the Benbow-Stanley controversy, see the 2006 statement of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Finally, for research showing (25 years later) that there is no significant difference between boys' and girls' performance on standardized tests at all grade levels, see “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” by Janet S. Hyde, et al., Science, 25 July 2008, Vol. 321, pp. 494-495. (The article is available online only to paid subscribers until July 2009.) The authors note a cultural shift over a generation that has led girls to take as many mathematics courses as boys, and that this alone is enough to explain the disappearance of the test-score gap.