NET RESULTS:LIKE A lot of girls of my era at school, I had a pretty uneasy relationship with mathematics.

At the lower grade school level - the equivalent of infants' classes here in Ireland - I liked maths just as much as anything else we did at school.

But I distinctly remember starting to dislike - okay, let's say hate - the subject by the time I was about 11. Or to be more precise, I didn't think I was very good at it and that led to unhappiness in class.

Bizarrely, though, I seemed to actually do fairly well until high school. By then, maths was the only class in which I could freeze during tests and forget what I'd learned. I dropped out of calculus in my senior year because it seemed so daunting.

And just before college, I dreaded doing the standardised SAT test in maths and English, because I firmly considered myself to be appalling at maths and feared I'd not gain entry to any of my chosen universities. Yet I actually did quite well, and scored in the upper 85 per cent of all US students in maths.

So what was going on? Why, even when my own schoolwork and tests showed I could achieve above average scores in maths, did I feel I was hopeless at it?

In retrospect I think it can only be that the received wisdom was that girls weren't as good at maths as the boys - we all knew it, we all had only men teaching us maths after age 12 or so, and usually, no girls were in the smart group in maths. Somewhere after age 11 or so - unsurprisingly, the age at which girls start to get interested in boys - girls just disappeared off the maths radar in my Californian schools.

A lot of studies started to appear in the 1970s that said this discrepancy was actually due to the different ways the male and female brain are hardwired. Men are better at maths, women are better at linguistic tasks.

A prominent book of the 1970s by two American women academics, The Psychology of Sex Differences, cemented this view, drawing together the numerous studies. At least I felt I had an excuse now for why I was (supposedly) bad at maths.

Well, those studies and theories have just been turned upside down by a new study published in the eminent journal Science that shows that boys and girls these days perform equally well in maths in school.

The researchers looked at seven million test scores and found no differences between how girls and boys do at US schools. The authors say this seems to be due to new ways in which maths is taught and the fact that girls now equally take the advanced maths courses - the ones I dropped out of - in high school.

Going on earlier evidence, the parity between the sexes in maths does seem to have come from a new willingness and confidence among girls to take those classes. In the 1970s, when I was in school, it was rare for any girl to stand out in a maths class and few did higher-level high school courses.

By the 1980s, this had begun to change, say the researchers, but only among younger girls.

The gender gap emerged in maths starting with adolescence. Now, with women enrolling in analysis and calculus in high school, the gap has closed.

Only in the 99th percentile, among the maths whizzes, did boys slightly outnumber the girls (but not among East Asians, where girls outnumbered the boys).

Those new generations of girls view their future differently. Due to wider career options, women now take 48 per cent of advanced maths degrees in university in the US. That is an extraordinary change from my university years, when I never knew any female maths majors and when I shared a house with four girls who comprised almost the entire female component of their year in electrical engineering.

Yet women still are poorly represented in careers that utilise maths skills, like engineering, science and technology. Nor do many women go on to take graduate level maths, say the study's authors.

They think this is because stereotypes are alive and well, with girls still perceived as being weaker in maths.

Thus, little encouragement is given to younger girls to pursue maths-oriented futures while they are in school. And despite the number who take a lower degree, clearly, they do not go on to use it in maths-related fields.

Figuring out why is important - more than ever, the world needs strong mathematicians, scientists and technologists.

The global economy increasingly is built around such intelligence. The skills gap shouldn't care about gender.

klillington@irish-times

Blog: www.techno-culture.com