K-12

"It's a major recurring narrative in the news media: Girls are succeeding, boys are failing. Civilization as we know it is coming to an end.  The most recent evidence is a May 31 New York Times story headlined "Gender Gap for the Gifted," reporting that young girls are outnumbering young boys in gifted programs in New York City.

What tends to get less noticed is a gender testing gap, in which more boys than girls at any age are being brought for testing by their parents, an inequity that the Gifted Development Center in Denver says is getting worse. It finds that between 1979 and 1989, 57 percent of the children brought for testing were male and 43 percent were female. In 2008, 68 percent were male and only 32 percent female.

Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, a nationally known expert on children's math and verbal achievement, says it doesn't make sense to test kids as young as 5 or 6 for giftedness. Results of early testing, she has said, are so unstable as to be relatively meaningless for predicting the future."