Now there’s another kind of prowess achieved by women in their 40s that men peak at earlier in life, wrote the Toronto Star March 10.

Math.

Not only do female math students outperform men at Ontario’s community colleges, but it’s the 40-something female multi-taskers juggling jobs, families and mortgages who edge out their classmates of either sex at any age, new research shows.

Their secret? They simply might have mastered the time-management skills younger students lack, notes Graham Orpwood, professor emeritus in York’s Faculty of Education. He is co-author of the College Mathematics Project, released Tuesday, which examined 31,000 first-year math students across the province’s 24 community colleges.

“Women in their 30s and 40s who go back to school have had to juggle so many roles that they can organize their time and study independently – life skills many young students haven’t mastered,” says Orpwood, who coordinated the joint tracking project by the York/Seneca Institute for Mathematics, Science & Technology Education.

While mature men do better than their younger male classmates – males scored the highest percentage of good grades in their 30s – at any age, they lagged behind women of the same age by 4 to 14 percentage points, wrote the Star.

Despite the old misconception that women don’t have “a head for figures”, nearly 72 per cent of females scored grades of A, B or C in first-year math compared with 64 per cent of males – with a whopping 86.9 per cent of women in their 40s landing the highest percentage of these good grades.

Republished courtesy of YFile – York University’s daily e-bulletin, with files from the Toronto Star.