The ghost of Larry Summers lives in the SAT data:
The graph below (data here) shows that there is a significant male-female SAT math test gap in favor of boys that has persisted since at least the early 1970s. The 35-point gap in math test scores in favor of boys in 2009 (average score of 534 for boys vs. 499 for girls) was basically unchanged from the 36-point test score gaps that existed back in 1973 (525 vs. 489) and 1974 (524 vs. 488). In other words, this huge male-female SAT math score gap in favor of boys has not changed for decades.
The next graph shows the significant “right tail disparity” in favor of boys for the 2009 math SAT test (data here). For all math scores on the high end above 570 (72nd percentile and above) boys are overrepresented compared to girls, and the “right tail disparity” widens as test scores increase, with boys getting greater and greater shares of the high scores as test scores approach 800. At the very high end for perfect scores of 800, boys (6,928) outnumbered girls (3,124) by a ratio of 2.22 to 1 (222 boys for every 100 girls), and represented 69 percent of high school test-takers with perfect math scores.
