The gender gap in math and science flies in the face of what Tom Bloch has seen in his classroom.

Tom Bloch: This is something I don’t understand at all, this gender gap. Consistently, I have so many girls in my classes who excel and love math, and so I don’t understand it. I think it is just a great fallacy to think that males do better than females in math and science, but my personal experiences suggest otherwise.

Early on in our school, we used to put girls and boys in separate classes in the middle school thinking that they would do better if they were in single-sex classes. And I think there is maybe some merit to that concept. We don’t do that today more for operational reasons than anything else. But as I said, I just… I don’t get it, because I suspect in my classes this year, the girls in my classes are doing every bit as well, if not better, than the boys.

Recorded on: October 13, 2008