So my procrastination tonight started early with this interesting article about the proclivities of infants for racial and cultural bias. It’s a good article but I take a bit of an issue with this paragraph.

Spelke’s studies found baby boys and girls have similar mathematical ability, an incidental finding that was at the forefront of her mind in January 2005 when the former Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that the relative lack of female engineers and scientists was down to innate gender differences. ‘When it comes to the basic modules we are born with, they are pretty much the same,’ says Spelke, who was in the thick of the verbal fisticuffs that followed (Summers was ‘wrong, point for point’). Summers resigned as controversy raged. Spelke does not deny that there are differences in the way men and women think but most of this, she believes, is learnt over time, and down to prejudice and the expectations of society.

Of course it’s always easier to repudiate someone’s remarks when you simply assume they said whatever you are itching to reject. But besides mischaracterizing Summers this paragraph also buys into widespread but fallacious assumption that basic computational skills (adding, subtracting etc..) are the skills needed by scientists and engineers; calculation is easy it is the ability to reason abstractly and construct proofs that is hard. I would normally have simply dismissed this as another instance of sloppy journalism but a few minutes later I found the same errors being made in a respectable summary of an article published in the current edition of science, errors seemingly encouraged by the paper itself and it’s lead author.

Tipping off their hand early the summary begins with it’s own (IMO unethical) misquotation of Summers¹ but quickly moves on to reading the result they want to see into this recent study. The study basically plotted gender differences on math tests in a country versus that country’s level of gender equity and concluded that the more equitable the country the smaller the advantage boys enjoyed on math tests. The message the summary takes from this, with support from the study’s lead author, is that gender differences in mathematics are largely a result of enviornmental effects. Of course latter we are given the following qualification.

Having linked social structures to the math gender gap from country to country, Sapienza wonders whether this result rules out biological influences entirely. The answer is no. The biological hypothesis suggests that an average boy would score higher in mathematics than in reading, while for girls the reverse is true. This pattern does not change in more gender equal societies hinting that some aspects of academic performance may be innately different between boys and girls.
Sapienza and colleagues found that boys, regardless of the country and social environment in which they live, typically do better in math than in reading. Similarly, girls are usually better in reading than in math, regardless of the degree of gender equality in their society. As a result, in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys.

In short an uncritical reading of either the paper in science or the summary would leave the reader with the impression that we now have even stronger evidence that boys don’t have an innate advantage at mathematics but there are still a few issues that need to be worked out about reading ability. Except the study really shows exactly the opposite. Ignoring for a moment the implicit (but false) assumption that these math tests are good measures of the skills needed to enter math and science professions just try and think about what theory would best explain the fact that cross-culturally boys are better at math than they are at reading while girls are better at reading than they are at math? Seems pretty clear to me that this evidence best supports the idea that their is an innate gender based attraction to math or reading and that in societies with greater gender equity women just perform better in school generally.

Now I don’t actually endorse that theory. It overly simplifies the complex interactions of culture and innate traits and it would be silly to just rely on this evidence while ignoring other evidence supporting larger cultural effects. However, the point remains that the evidence provided actually points in the exact opposite direction of the spin that is provided. Ultimately the point that I take from this is that if you want to have any idea about what’s plausible in this area you really can’t trust anyone’s (except mine of course :-) ) interpretation, even that of the scientists doing the study. You really have to go read the actual papers with a skeptical eye to get something other than spin. In short I worry that their is a bias in the spin given to papers and opinions on this stuff because you get a lot more flak for strident support of one side than the other.