Review of Related Literature (Appendix C)
Gender Differences
Gender differences have become on the hotlist of critical issues around the world. Hausmann, Tyson, & Zahidi (2009) reported that there is no country in the world that has yet reached equality between women and men in different critical areas such economic participation or education.
It is well accepted that there are no differences in the general intelligence or basic cognition between males and females, the issue is whether each category is innately better at certain, very specific, skills. The cognitive differences that have been put forward include men being slightly better than women at tasks that involve the mental spatial rotation of an object, spatial perception and visualization, and math problem solving. Women seem to score slightly better on tasks that involve visual memory, word and landmark recall and math calculations (Kimura, Doreen, 2002, Pinker, Spelke, 2005, Newcomb, Nora et. al., 2005). “It is important to remember, when we sees assertions such as these, that these are general trends and that not every individual is held to them. Although both men and women as populations tend to do better at certain tasks, the margin of difference is quite small”(K. Smythe, 2008)
Male
“In mathematics, boys and girls have similar results at the fourth and eighth school years in most countries. Boys' advantage emerges in the later school years and is especially noticeable among students who attend the same teaching programmes and year groups. Yet, both boys and girls are similarly interested in science males tend to have stronger self- concept than girls. On average, girls had lower levels of belief in their science abilities than boys” (Androulla Vassiliou,2009)
According to Crowley and Elster, (2013) while men are friendly towards their colleagues, women often relate to co-workers,