Math gender gap in US worst in world-- flipped completely for every other area, though

Article here. Excerpt:

'In order to achieve that balance, we'll have to address the less-talked-about gender gap in education, too. At 15, boys still outperform girls in math in most OECD countries, but girls read better than boys in every single one of them. In the U.S., the percentage gap between boys and girls' reading scores is about equivalent to the math gap, just with the genders flipped. And the stereotyping that marks the STEM field is at work in the humanities, too. The American Association of University Women has found that college students still “view science and math as male fields and humanities and art as female.” Girls have more positive feelings about reading than boys do. Fathers are less likely to read to their children than are mothers. The two most gender-lopsided academic disciplines in the U.S. are engineering and teaching. Men make up 42 percent of secondary school teachers, but just 18 percent of primary and middle school teachers and 2 percent of kindergarten teachers. U.S. schools don’t just need more women teaching math and science—they need more men teaching just about everything else.

Given the high demand for STEM workers in the world economy, it’s unsurprising that we’re not eager to push more boys into MFA programs. But there's plenty to be gained from encouraging all American students to pursue teaching, healthcare, and foreign languages—all subjects currently ruled by women. When we focus on correcting the imbalance in STEM, and ignore the gender divide in female-dominated subjects, we end up reinforcing stereotypes for both boys and girls. As long as reading is known as the girl thing, it will be harder to convince girls that math class is really the place for them.'